The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Dr. Ron Stotts

**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)
Welcome back to the Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore how empathy, connection and purpose transform business from the inside out. I'm Tullio and joined by Mike today. A Harvard Business Review study revealed that leaders with higher emotional intelligence outperform peers in key areas such as decision making, collaboration and resilience. Yet many executives continue to undervalue emotional intelligence, treating it as a secondary to technical skills. Today we're exploring how emotional intelligence not only shapes leadership, but drives organizational success. We're very excited for our guest today. Mike, would you please introduce our guest?

**Mike Liwski** (1:02)
Oh, I'm delighted to Tullio. So happy to have a chiropractor, too, on the show today, because I had a chiropractor change my life for the better. But yeah, that's a story for another time. Yes, our guest today is none other than Dr. Ron Stotts.
He's a three-time best-selling author with a Ph.D. in psychology and a doctor of chiropractic. And with over five decades of exploration into both ancient wisdom and modern psychology, Ron has guided thousands of entrepreneurs and executives into higher levels of conscious leadership, which we know is one of the critical pillars of conscious capitalism. So I know our audience will be quite interested in your thoughts today. Now, through his books and workshops and even the one-on-one meetings and mentoring that he does, he helps leaders move really through those challenges, embrace self-awareness, which is sometimes one of the hardest things for a leader, and of course, unlock their greatest potential. So Ron, we are so delighted to have you on the show with us today. Welcome to the show.

**Dr. Ron Stotts** (2:11)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:13)
So Ron, you've spent decades blending psychology, neuroscience, and ancient wisdom to help leaders grow. How do you define emotional intelligence, and why do you see it as so critical in business today? Maybe give us a little history of how you got here, too, for your personal journey.

**Dr. Ron Stotts** (2:35)
Well, my personal journey was one of being kind of a rowing champion and jock kind of guy who was in the Marine Corps, and thinking, okay, I got it all figured out. I had a beautiful little girlfriend, and everything was cool. And in the Marine Corps, I ran into a big reality check and realized that it was not just another athletic event. I was actually learning to kill people. And in that moment, at the rifle range at Camp Pendleton, they threw up a human silhouette in front of me, and my little 19-year-old mind went, oh.
And I literally, the only time it happened in my life, at least at that point, where I just stood up and threw my rifle into the mud and knew I was absolutely in the wrong place, and I was not the right guy to be doing this. So that was my life-changing moment, and I had to go on that research or figure out kind of taking everything that I had learned and throwing it away and looking for what my values are. Who am I? What do I want? What is important to me? And that's really been my journey, and it's been a great journey. I've certainly met amazing mentors along the way. And I think it was really just getting to the point, I helped AT&T through their divestiture back in the 80s, and I had been executive VP of Intergame Corporation at the time, and we had designed all these workshops to help them really shift from a monopoly to four profit organizations. And, you know, at the end of that, they just watered those attempts down so fully, that I just got fed up with it and left. I literally went into private practice as a psychologist at that time. But as my desire to really create a more conscious and caring world developed, I really saw that leaders, especially leaders of large organizations, could really not only have a huge impact and lasting impact on the organizations, but they could also on a societal level really change the world that we're living in. And I happened to have a skill, an ability, a developed ability to transform, help people transform their lives, become more conscious, to become more conscious leaders. And so I thought, okay, that's what it's about. That's what we're going to do, is see how many conscious leaders, like conscious organizations we can create, to create a more conscious and caring world. Yeah.