Scott Webb (Host): Most of us have heard of IQ, but EQ or emotional intelligence is a somewhat newer science that can help us at work, home, you name it. I'm joined today by Penelope Gorsuch. She's a Senior VP and Chief Nurse Executive for Summa Health, and she's going to explain EQ and the many benefits of having an EQ action plan. This is Healthy Vitals, a podcast from Summa Health. I'm Scott Webb.

Penelope, it's so nice to have your time today. I mentioned to you that I'm excited to learn what emotional intelligence is, what is EQ and everything involved. So let's just start there. What is emotional intelligence? What does that mean?

Penelope Gorsuch, DNP, RN, EBP-C, NEA-BC, FACHE: Oh, well, thank you very much for having me on today, and I am excited to talk about Emotional Intelligence, which you stated is sometimes referred to as EQ and has been defined by Travis Bradbury as your ability to recognize emotions and your skill at using this awareness to manage yourself and your relationships with others. And the best thing about emotional intelligence is it y you can improve it. You can enhance your personal and social competence.

So there's two components to your emotional intelligence, and that is your personal growth, and then also socially, your social competence with interacting with others. So your personal competence begins by just becoming self-aware of your own emotions and learning how to manage those emotions. So when you increase your self-awareness, this will help you understand the emotions that you may see and experience of those around you, like your coworkers, your friends, your family, and you then become more aware of them as you become more aware of yourself.

And so that allows you to really then take both of those and start managing relationships better. So there is actually a science behind emotional intelligence. The pathway actually starts, you know, in your spinal cord. Sometimes you can just feel if something is a trigger, something, maybe you see, like, for example, I always like to say, maybe you've seen that highway patrolman and you're like, Oh no, how fast was I driving?

You know, you start to feel that in the tip of your toes. That's where it starts. It starts in your spinal cord and it goes up to your limbic system, which is a part of your brain and your limbic system is where all your emotions are experienced. So all of our emotions that we feel and we can sometimes feel hundreds to thousands of emotions a day. These are all experienced in our limbic system. And it takes our frontal lobe of our brain, the very front part of our brain, where we have our rational thinking and processing. Those two areas have to work together, and those two areas need to communicate with each other. And, you know, when I said, you learn about yourself, you learn about your emotions and how to manage them.

Well, when we experience an emotional state, it really takes work to think about, wait a minute, how do I react? How can I react better? How do I not come across as angry or sad? And if I do feel this way, how do I manage those? So this is very scientific based where you can actually improve your emotional intelligence by working on those two key components, the personal and social competence that comes with emotional intelligence.

Host: So personal and social. And I think we've all shared that emotion you were saying when we see the police officer, we have that feeling right? Wherever it starts, wherever it ends up, we all can identify with that of course. So how would you say that EQ has impacted your career?

Penelope Gorsuch, DNP, RN, EBP-C, NEA-BC, FACHE: Well, as a leader, I've been a nurse leader and a leader in healthcare for about the past 26 years. And emotional intelligence is one of the most significant personal skill sets that I have learned. And the key thing about emotional intelligence is you continue to refine it each and every day.

I work on my personal awareness and my social awareness still every day. And in our healthcare environment today, it's very complex. And so it does require healthcare professionals to work together as teams and to build relationships among ourselves. But also it is very important that we are also building these relationships with our patients, their families, or their significant others.

So this is a very important skill set in the healthcare arena, or actually in any profession, because building relationships and we all know communication and success in the workplace; building relationships is a very important thing to have. So one of the most important skills that we need to do every day is to recognize how to manage the emotions we're feeling and also to be aware of those emotional states of our coworkers.

And so I use these every day to manage not only my personal, my professional environment, but also I use these to help me manage my own personal feelings and then all of the relationships that I'm managing each and every day.

Host: Yeah. You can see how at work or at the grocery store or just about any place; it would be good, as you were saying, a personal social, to have just sort of an understanding of our emotions and our feelings and how we're processing everything. So with that in mind, how do we identify our EQ score?

Penelope Gorsuch, DNP, RN, EBP-C, NEA-BC, FACHE: Well, one of the best ways to assess your emotional intelligence score is through a self-assessment evaluation. These can be obtained in numerous sources, but one source that I know of is from a book that is written by Bradbury and Graves, and it's called Emotional Intelligence 2.0. It's a really quick, easy read.

You can pick this up on Amazon. And what is provided in this book is a code that allows you to access a website. And when you access that website, it brings up a self-assessment form so that you can answer questions about yourself. And those results can get sent directly back to you.

Host: Yeah, that's great. You know, and just thinking about, like, I was familiar with IQ before we had this conversation and now we're talking about EQ today. And you know, IQ is one of those things it's pretty well established early on, but it's good to know that emotional intelligence is something that we can grow. We can grow that score. We can get better with this. So let's talk about that. What is an EQ action plan? How can it help us to grow our emotional intelligence score?

Penelope Gorsuch, DNP, RN, EBP-C, NEA-BC, FACHE: So it is really exciting that you can actually improve your emotional intelligence and there are many resources out there that can help you. There's a lot of self-help books to allow you to learn more about yourself and how to control your emotions. So any of those are just wonderful to obtain.

There's also books that you can purchase that actually provide specific strategies. So in the book that I referenced Emotional Intelligence 2.0; that book actually contains strategies and activities that you can do, which allows you to work on improving your emotional intelligence. And as you improve your emotional intelligence, you learn to recognize within yourself, you know I'm feeling really sad today, but I still have to go to work.

So how do I manage this in my work setting? And especially for those of us in healthcare, if we're feeling really sad, or maybe we don't feel good today either ourselves, how do we now go take care of other people? So it's very important to be able to recognize, you know, sometimes just recognizing that emotion is the start, right?

We recognize that and we say, okay, I'm going to manage my sadness today. I always just like to tell people, you know, I'm kind of sad today. And, in fact, a couple of months ago, my dog died and I did at the beginning of a meeting, I, I let people know, I'm kind of off today. I am really sad today. My dog died last night. And so I think, building those relationships is being honest about your feelings and then addressing them. And strategies can help you work on your emotional state, but also how do you be able to recognize when your co-workers or maybe your family members are struggling and how do you help them deal with their emotions and by doing so, it helps you both build those personal and professional relationships, which are so important in life.

Host: Yeah, helping ourselves, helping others. I just love it. So I'm sure folks that are listening to this and maybe they want to get their hands on books that you've mentioned here. But in the meantime, do you have any tips on how someone just could sort of quickly increase their emotional intelligence?

Penelope Gorsuch, DNP, RN, EBP-C, NEA-BC, FACHE: Yes. One of the biggest strategies that is recognized is self-talk. You know, you've always heard, it's kind of a sports kind of thing. It's like get your head in the game. But there's a lot to be said about that. And part of my history, I'm actually a retired Air Force nurse. So I spent 28 years in the Air Force and very stressful physical fitness tests we would always have to take once a year. And I tell you, I started about three months knowing, really training for my physical fitness test and knowing, like 24 hours before my test, you know, I had my self-talk going on.

I would tell myself, you can do this. You can do this. So really managing my emotions, so I wouldn't get so anxious when I went in to test. I knew I had prepared, I was ready, and I could do it. So that self-talk is something that's very important to do for yourself. And there's three other things that anyone can work on starting today.

You know, try to reduce your stress. Control stress. Because we all know when our stress levels go up, it's really hard to manage ourselves. And then in stressful situations, the anxiety starts to really climb. So, really try to learn strategies to manage your stress. Deep breathing, is a great way. Just taking a pause before, sometimes before you say something. So, take time to try to reduce stress. Another key strategy is to get plenty of sleep. Your brain does have restorative sessions at night. So, getting really good sleep does help restore our brain. And you know, at the beginning we said that there is science behind emotional intelligence where your limbic system, that emotional part of your brain, has to communicate with that frontal part of your brain to really allow it to process this and to communicate well, and it does better. That functions better if you've had good sleep.

And the final recommendation I would have for people and that does help you get good sleep if you could reduce or eliminate your caffeine intake. Especially caffeine later in the afternoon. Because that caffeine is going to alter your sleep state. And then we all know if our sleep state is altered, our day is pretty stressful the next day. So three quick tips. Reduce or eliminate that caffeine, get good sleep and try to control your stress and get some good self-talk going to get your head in the game.

Host: Yeah, well, first of all, appreciate your service. That's amazing. And as somebody who's staring at my second cup of coffee of the day, the caffeine's going to be a tough one, but I certainly understand the, the, the science behind that, that caffeine later in the day, in the evening keeps us up, then we don't sleep, then we're more stressed and you see how it all kind of snowballs, right?

Penelope Gorsuch, DNP, RN, EBP-C, NEA-BC, FACHE: Correct.

Host: Absolutely. Well, I really appreciate this. This was fun today. Great to learn more about what emotional intelligence is and how we can measure it and get better at it and all that good stuff. So thank you so much.

Penelope Gorsuch, DNP, RN, EBP-C, NEA-BC, FACHE: Oh, thank you very much. It was my pleasure.

Host: And if you enjoyed this episode and are looking for additional healthy tips and information for professionals, subscribe to Summa Health's LinkedIn newsletter, Vital for Leaders.

And if you enjoyed this episode of Healthy Vitals, we'd love it if you'd leave us a review. Your review helps others find our educational content. I'm Scott Webb. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk again next time.