The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with David Greer

**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.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Well, come back, everybody. We've got our first guest broadcasting from a boat today, which is nice. So hopefully, everything, connection stays well. It's been good so far. So welcome to the show where we explore how empathy, connection, and purpose transform business from the inside out. I'm Stephen. With my co-host, Mike, according to Harvard Business Review, emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 90 percent of what sets high performers apart from their peers. It's not just a soft skill, it's a strategic advantage. Our guest today is a seasoned entrepreneur, coach, author, and helps high-performing leaders harness EQ to unlock clarity, connection, and results. Mike, please introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:03)
Yes, Stephen. It's going to be my great pleasure. Today on the show, we're joined by none other than David Greer, the leadership coach. David has spent decades now helping founders, executives, and leadership teams as well, which we know our audience has a great interest in to navigate not just growth per se, but cultural challenges that take place, and as well personal transformation for a lot of these individuals. As well, David is the author of Wind In Your Sails, Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth, very apropos that he's on a sailboat today. And then as well, he's a serial entrepreneur himself. David combines his business expertise with deep emotional intelligence coaching to really help leaders overcome things like fear and how to align their teams, and lead with really with intention that we know is critical for a leader. So David, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here today.

**David Greer** (2:12)
Thank you for the invitation, and thank you for letting me part of the change you, YouTube and your company are bringing to the world. Thank you.

**Mike Liwski** (2:20)
Yeah, we appreciate it. We're glad to have you as part of our community and helping us with our movement. Maybe David, we can just start off with a little bit of a perspective question. Why does emotional intelligence tell us matter now more than ever, would you say, in business?

**David Greer** (2:40)
One of the takeaways I had from the intro when you talked about your company and your work is change from the inside out. This has been my personal experience is that growth actually, like it's the kind of big secret in the coaching industry. Like it's really about changing from the inside out. Like you hire a coach, but then I really just reflect back to you. And you're responsible for your change and usually you are getting in your own way. And I just help point that out and help you to grow in whatever way that looks like. And I think in a lot of the ways we need to grow is in improving our emotional intelligence.
I work a lot with owner founders and I'm going to call myself out on this as well, where we're hard driving, we founded a business, we took a lot of risk and it's kind of my way or the highway. And that gets you to a certain point until it doesn't. My belief is that the single biggest limiting factor to growth is the entrepreneur herself or himself, or in bigger companies, it's really where's the next generation of leadership coming from? And that's the limiting factor on how fast you can grow. So some of the entrepreneurs and people that hire me, we end up working on what seems simple, but like listening skills, like actually listening, not busy brain with what you're going to respond and defend.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:24)
Which is hard if you're a leader too, you've got things going on and you got to stop and listen, right?

**David Greer** (4:30)
Yeah. That is an amazing, amazing skill to truly, truly be able to listen to someone and hold space for them and not have your brain running around in like busy brain.
And then I think one of the most powerful things we have in life that is very underexploited is curiosity. Like if we can be curious, like if we gave a task to someone and they didn't do it, before you start yelling at them, can you be curious about why they didn't do it? Like maybe you weren't clear on what it was they were supposed to do. Maybe you didn't set the expectation correctly. Maybe they don't have the resources to do what they do. Maybe they don't have the skills. But if you don't stay curi- Like and maybe there's other things going on. Maybe they're just procrastinating. Maybe they're afraid. Like you, you know, all of those things though, you have to have high emotional intelligence if you're willing to hold space for someone and be curious and try and discover that stuff. Right? And that's not kind of the norm, I think, in a lot of our business environment.