The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Christine Heckart

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:17)
Stephen, ever since that time we clicked go live and then blew up the Internet, I always get worried when it clocks a little longer. We actually had a time, Christine, where it just-

**Stephen Sakach** (0:28)
We had that major Google adage and everything just went wonky. We're like, what's going on? Well, welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast, the show where we explore empathy, connection, and purpose, and how they transform business from the inside out. I'm Stephen, joined by my co-host Tullio and our special guest. The first stat, according to TalentSmart, 90 percent of top performers score high in emotional intelligence, yet only 36 percent of people can accurately identify their emotions as they happen. At the same time, we have AI right now reshaping industries, amplifying the importance of human-centered skills like empathy, judgment, and ethics. Today, we're exploring how emotional intelligence and AI intersect, and how this dynamic will shape the future of leadership, culture, and work itself. Tullio, please introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:24)
Absolutely. Very excited to have Christine Heckart today, who's the CEO and founder of Xapa. It's a company helping people live and work in alignment with who they truly are. Love that, by the way, Christine. Christine's a seasoned Silicon Valley executive, having led roles at Microsoft, Juniper Network, NetApp, and Cisco. She's also an investor board member and an advocate for emotional intelligence as a critical business driver. Christine, welcome to the show.

**Christine Heckart** (1:54)
Thank you both very much.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:56)
So to start us off, tell us a little bit about Xapa and how your work blends emotional intelligence and preparing organizations for the AI era. I know this is a topic of interest for you. Please tell us a little bit more about that.

**Christine Heckart** (2:12)
Thank you for the opportunity to do that. Xapa means joy in Greek. Now, you told me in Sicilian it means something else like working the land or a tool. So I love that. I'm going to like consider that because Xapa is about building skills.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:29)
It's actually the verb zapare, which means to work the land.

**Christine Heckart** (2:32)
Interesting. Okay. So we do, you know, we make you work in Xapa, but you're not working the land. You're working yourself and you're building up your own skill. But like with Bliss, the Bliss Network is about love at scale. And Xapa is about joy at scale. And by joy, we don't mean like superficial happiness. We mean the deep, intrinsic, long-lasting joy that comes when we are self-aware. And we have self-esteem.
And we have enough of our own innate confidence and skill that we're able to then help others and make the world better. And Xapa is about trying to figure out how to do that at scale and how to help people really build those human skills.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:24)
I love it. So you've led in some of the most performance-driven environments in tech. Where did your understanding of emotional intelligence begin? And how does that intersect with your perspective on AI?

**Christine Heckart** (3:42)
I don't know exactly when I became aware of what emotional intelligence even is. It's not like it was a word when I was growing up in the Eastern Plains of Colorado. Like we weren't, you know, working the farm and talking about emotional intelligence. When I hit the workforce, I feel like in some ways I had a lot very naturally. And in other ways, I was really lacking.
But when I became aware of its importance from a leadership point of view, was in leading transformational change. And when you're at tech companies, or really any company, as a leader, you're constantly being asked to lead change. And any transformational change, you know, AI is probably the mother of all transformational changes. So we're in a moment. But, you know, I was there in the Internet years. Like that was a moment. The financial crisis was a moment. COVID was a moment. Like as leaders, you're always introducing new innovations, or you're having these black swan events. And very rarely is change that you're trying to drive really about the technology. Even AI, I will absolutely argue, the hard part about moving into an AI-driven world or organization is not the technology. It's the people transformation. It's getting people to think differently and use a different mindset and lean into different skills. Now, hopefully, lean into more purposeful work as well. But when you're trying to drive transformational change, it's ultimately about the people. It's not about the tools and technology and the people. It's all about them. We can use the word EQ, fine, but it's really a very broad definition of EQ, which is how do we build the resilience and the human skills necessary to be successful through change? And on the other side of change?