Stop Letting Your Emotions Hijack Your Success | Travis Bradberry

Michael Gervais (0:00)

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Travis Bradberry (1:28)

We have more than 400 emotional experiences every single day. We find that just 36% of people are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen.

Michael Gervais (1:36)

That is wild.

Travis Bradberry (1:37)

Our brains are structured so that emotions are the primary driver of our behavior. So if you understand what you're feeling, you can then channel that feeling into producing the behavior that you want.

Michael Gervais (1:48)

What if the single biggest predictor of your success as a partner, a leader or even a parent isn't your IQ, it's not your technical skills, but it's your ability to work with emotions.

Travis Bradberry (1:57)

Emotional intelligence in its simplest form is understanding what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, and using that to produce the kind of outcomes that you want in life. If you think you can stuff your feelings and ignore them, they control your actions.

Michael Gervais (2:09)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and trading, a high-performance psychologist. The idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinaries, to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's guest is Dr. Travis Bradberry. He sold over five million books about emotional intelligence, and he's got a new one coming out, The New Emotional Intelligence, and it's awesome. Now, in this week's conversation, we explore why emotional intelligence, EQ as it's named, is the foundation for almost everything that matters.

Travis Bradberry (2:43)

It doesn't matter if you throw a football for a living, conducting surgery, manage a team, doing sales. Your behavior is driven by your emotions. People with higher EQs make about $37,000 more on average. Every point you increase your EQ leads to about another $1,700 in annual salary, so there is a linear connection between EQ and performance and EQ and earnings.

Michael Gervais (3:02)

We dig into what emotional intelligence really looks like in practice, and why it's part of the foundation for living a great life in the modern world.

Travis Bradberry (3:09)

Just about the only thing you need to keep in mind as a parent is that that gives us hope. If you can master that, you've won 90% of the battle.

Michael Gervais (3:17)

I'm excited to share this one with you. So let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. Travis Bradberry. Okay, Travis, here we go. Emotional intelligence. You've got a rich and deep understanding, based on research, and it seems like it's your body of work, your life work right now.

Travis Bradberry (3:38)

Absolutely, yeah.

Michael Gervais (3:39)

Okay, so first and foremost, what's important for me to know about you, to really understand you?

Travis Bradberry (3:48)

That's a great question.

I suppose my background is probably somewhat relevant. I was an undergrad studying psychology when I got exposed to emotional intelligence. There was a study that came out of Yale that Peter Salovey, who's now the Dean of Yale, conducted, showing that this is a separate psychological construct of how we think that's really important to how we do in life and how we perform. And for me, growing up in a home where I wouldn't say emotions were ignored, but maybe they weren't quite valued and talked about as much as they could. You know, my mom grew up on a farm in a small town in South Dakota, and her parents, my grandparents, you know, lived through the Great Depression, and it's this whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. So I was a young guy learning about this thinking, I need this. I need to know more about my emotions and how I can use them more effectively. So when I started, I did a dual PhD in clinical and industrial psychology. So clinical psychology, the psychology of the individual, and industrial psychology, business psychology. And I just found that emotional intelligence melded those two fields really well. So I focused all my research on that. And by the time I was a couple of years into my program, my colleagues were calling me the emotional intelligence guy. And I ended up going into business with one of my professors. We developed, started with an emotional intelligence test, and ultimately a training program. And then I started writing books and speaking. And I've been doing this for almost 25 years now.