The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Zechariah Thomas

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
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.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast. Emotional intelligence is increasingly recognized as a key driver of leadership effectiveness. According to research from TalentSmart, 90% of top performers demonstrate high emotional intelligence, and it is considered one of the strongest predictors of professional success. For entrepreneurs and founders especially, emotional intelligence plays a critical role in resilience, decision-making, and the ability to build meaningful relationship with customers, partners, and teams. Today, we explore how emotional intelligence helps leaders navigate challenges, challenge traditional industries, and build brands that connect authentically with people. I'm very excited today to have our guest. Today is Zechariah Thomas. He's the founder and CEO of Swift Hockey.
At just 23 years old, Zechariah is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, a retired minor professional hockey player, and an entrepreneur who launched a performance hockey equipment brand without venture capital. Inspired by growing up in a small town where many young athletes could not afford premium equipment, he founded Swift Hockey with a mission to make high performance hockey gear more accessible to players and families. Drawing on his experience as a competitive player, Zechariah built a brand around innovation, affordability and authenticity within the hockey community. His entrepreneurial journey has also been featured on the television show Dragon's Den, where he secured three investments offers from continuing to grow Swift Hockey into a competitive consumer brand driven by player insight and deep connection to the game. For those who may not be away with that show is, that's the equivalent of the shark tank in Canada. Zechariah, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast. I'd like to start off by asking, why is this topic so important to you? Curious as to why you picked the power of emotional intelligence in business. Why is that meaningful to you personally to talk about today?

**Zechariah Thomas** (2:38)
Yeah. It's a topic that extends for what would I do in business ultimately, especially throughout sport and hockey, especially the things I've gone through. I think it's a very meaningful topic to me on just how I operate as an individual and as a business as well.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:00)
Nice. Let's kick this off. Launching a company in a highly traditional industry like hockey takes a lot of confidence. And there are, say, a lot of resilience too. How has Emotional Intelligence helped you navigate the challenges of building Swift Hockey?

**Zechariah Thomas** (3:21)
You know, I would say, you know, having a business, as you understand, is extremely glorifying.
It's like online. It's portrayed to be such an easy thing. And everybody kind of glorifies the entrepreneurs that do win, but they don't see what you have to deal with every single day. Waking up, burning, taking out fires, everything we're dealing with as entrepreneurs every single day, that's just, it's not said, it's not vocalized as much. And having that emotional intelligence between being an entrepreneur is everything to make sure you're able to like stay level and stay at a good mindset every single day while putting out fires and dealing with people attacking you at every single second.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:12)
Absolutely. And sometimes I dare say coming from, depending on the environment you come from, it could even be further challenging. Much like yourself, I grew up in a small town, small farmer's town. So in fact, you've shared that growing up in a small town, you saw a lot of young people along player, young players struggle to afford top level equipment. So even getting into a game, a game you love might have been difficult for some. So how did that experience shape your decision to build Swift Hockey and make performance gear more accessible? Tell us a little bit about that journey.

**Zechariah Thomas** (4:48)
Yeah, I guess my journey into hockey has, I wouldn't be in the positions I'm in right now without having that journey into hockey, I would say. Dealing with, I guess, seeing a lot of my teammates not being able to afford sticks, afford products, and growing up in a small area where it was a really split town, where a lot of it was like 50-50. There was a new side and there was an old side, and the demographic of financials was completely split. Everything I did was right in the middle of those scenarios and seeing those throughout. Like I was on the better side of that half, but seeing everything in the middle was eye-opening every single day. And seeing how fortunate I was and my parents, I was so fortunate throughout my life and I was super grateful for those things as well.