Focus on Talents: Emotional Intelligence and Techniques that will help you today

This episode is packed full of tips for you to consider, for your New Year.

In this episode, we Focus on Talents with Jovita who defines the topics of what Emotional Intelligence is and how being aware of your EQ can benefit your life.

Within this episode she defines the topic and shares her PQR technique: 

1) Pause 
2) Question
3) Reframe

To learn more about how to add this to your personal toolbox of resources, please check out the episode or our show notes.

To learn more about Jovita's Pause Question Reframe technique and how to manage negative emotions check out her free workshop: https://growwithjovita.com/eq-webinar/  The workshop includes digital downloads to help you track your emotions, identify your emotional triggers, and reframe your responses to help reduce your emotional stress. 

Listeners also receive a 15% discount off Jovita's emotional intelligence coaching packages. Visit https://growwithjovita.com/product-shop/coaching-products/ and enter code Amber15.

Transcript

Unknown 0:05
Hello, and welcome to the amber Stitt show. I am your host Amber Stitt, and today we welcome my friend and colleague Jovita Robertson here to the show today. Welcome Jovita

Unknown 0:16
thank you so much Amber for having me. Excited to be here.

Unknown 0:20
For the pathways audience that hasn't seen her blog or YouTube channel yet. I wanted to give a little background on how I have met Jovita and she and I were a part of the hope blooms fundraising committee for living learning organization. There's a luncheon next February and so we're a part of the planning committee. And I'm sitting in these zoom meetings as we're preparing for all the organizational details of the event. And Jovita is running the show and these zoom meetings and then she's sending the recaps and the minutes and I'm thinking this girl's really got it dialed in. I have to meet her and talk to her more outside of the one of the meetings. And so, I think about two months ago, we hung out for almost an hour, eight o'clock, nine o'clock at night or something like that, where we were just hanging out talking about our business models. What we'd like to do for personal development and it felt like it was a natural transition of a friendship because we are very similar with a lot of the things that we find important with individual growth and personal development, but then carrying that into the business world. So that's where I learned about growth with Jovita. But then there's more to the story. So I think it would be great for the pathways audience to learn a little bit about you Jovita before we dive into the episode, so I'm gonna let you take the mic from here and share a little bit about what you do, but I feel like there's more to the story. So I'm, I can't wait to hear more.

Unknown 1:44
Yes, thank you so much. And it was definitely a great evening. I remember what you're talking about. We just chatted and we do have so many similarities in what we feel about helping people and that's why I started grow with Jovita. During my career, I always wanted to advance into like executive level position. I'm currently the Vice President of Operations at a company called Covington rich financial. And it was always my dream to kind of get up into upper level management but throughout my career, I just saw that there was just not a lot of leadership development, especially for women in business. There's not a lot of examples. And so that has been the focus of GRE with Jovita is really helping women see that there is a path to leadership. There are ways that you can find your own voice and be confident in who you are and get ahead. You know, everybody has different personality types. That's why you know, the assessments and everything are so important because you can't find success being who you are. You don't have to be like somebody else. And so that's just what is so important to me. I involved in other organizations as well where I help with mentorship leadership development like Toastmasters International, live and learn spoke to me just because they help women on a career path added generational poverty. So that's how you and I came together. So yeah, I definitely feel like anything I can do to help support women or empower women. That is my jam.

Unknown 3:11
Yeah. So I think what's neat about kind of the trajectory of our our own personal business pathways that we've been employees, we've also had business opportunities, and more the entrepreneurial route as well. There's a place for everybody. You don't need to fix what you're not but really, if you understand who you are, and what you love to do, you can really build out a number of things for yourself, whatever it might be, and I think you're a perfect example of that because you've gone through multiple I guess paths I can keep using that word but because you you were under So you moved up the you moved up at the in the financial firm, but then now you have another business model too. So I think it's really neat to see that unfold.

Unknown 4:00
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that the key for me in my career was once I realized what my blind spot was the thing that was holding me back or keeping me stuck from advancing and I've always been a person in general that's like your career is just a tool to like build the type of life you want. So you can do that in different ways. You could be an entrepreneur, but the corporate ladder, you can be an individual contributor or you can be a manager, so there's different ways to do it. And that's the beauty is like figuring out which way works for you know, I knew that I wanted to pursue, you know, executive leadership positions, but my blind spot was emotional intelligence. So for people who have never heard of emotional intelligence, don't feel bad. I've never heard of it before back in 2012. And the reason why I say it was a blind spot is because I didn't realize that by not improving in this area. It was really changing people's perception of me, which was limiting the opportunities I was going to get in my career. It was limiting people's wanting to work for me. So let me just really quick break down what emotional intelligence is. So emotional intelligence is about really managing those negative emotions you have and reducing your emotional stress. We all want our perception of us like we want people to look at us a certain way or feel a certain way and when we have a lot of negative emotions or stress, we don't always come across the way that we want to so with emotional intelligence, the key is four different areas. So self awareness where you're correctly identifying the emotions you have and this is the key is that correctly part because we tend to identify our emotions incorrectly, which I'll talk about as we get going. The second thing is managing our emotions outwardly. So that's our attitude and behaviors and our reactions to other people and things that are happening to us. The third piece is about social awareness. So how are you picking up on the cues, behaviors, attitudes of others, and actually using that to help you build relationships with people? And then that final piece is just a big collaboration piece, putting it all together in terms of how you're going to really build rapport very quickly on the fly, and kind of be able to handle any situation that's thrown at Jack. So yeah, intelligence pieces.

Unknown 6:26
With pathos of peak performance. The first step is focusing on talents and so everything you're seeing in your listing out if you can, I mean, this is something you mentioned 2012 I really started looking at a lot of these assessments and personal growth and even I think it was the Travis Bradbury book with emotional intelligence 2.0 back around that time was almost, you know, about 10 years where there's, there's these these things that are happening around you, but if you can understand yourself, and then see how maybe people could be receiving you are perceiving you. It is so powerful. It's almost like I feel that the EQ part is almost could be more important than IQ because it's all about how you're working with people and communicating with people may have you found that to be like, almost like a superpower if you can really dial in and go, This is how I'll probably react I'm sure gonna go into it, but like, emotions could be something situational or could be kind of like a different learning style how you're receiving information. So I know for me understand what makes you great, but understand some of those blind spots too. It's almost like a little ninja Jedi mind tricks where you can like use those superpowers to just be better in the moment. So I think you're going to talk about that more, but for me, I mean, it's been so powerful and it's been a lot of fun when you kind of just have a little bit of fun with yourself, know how you tick, give yourself some grace. And then just like let's let's just try to have a better experience, you know, and, you know, working through that starts with yourself, I think so I let you kind of break down those those steps again.

Unknown 8:05
Yeah. Absolutely. So the the thing you said is correct that the emotional intelligence enhances all of your other skills. So your communication skills, conflict management, negotiation, motivation, it's going to enhance all your other skills because exactly what you're talking about. You're, you're really getting in tune with yourself. So one thing I did like when I did the Gallup assessment, right, so anytime you're doing these like a self assessments and self awareness, it can be really nerve wracking or anxious, right to like, see what the results are? Mentioned the emotional intelligence 2.0 There's definitely a lot of different personality assessments. The reason I like to gallop is because one it's 100% identified things about me but then I can use the emotional intelligence to help interpret that. So let me think so one of my top five in the Gallup assessment is coming in. So it's about my directness and how I talk to people. So when I first learned about emotional intelligence, the thing that I that I, that brought to light, you know, is that the way that I talk to people and my nonverbals and the emotions that I'm putting out there affects how people perceive me. So that even though I'm direct, you can be a direct in a way that's not aggressive. You can eat direct in a way that's not off putting you can be direct where it's not causing you to have to increase conflict or increase escalation. So I think sometimes people think direct is only one way and it's very aggressive and it's very like this, but you can be direct and still be soft spoken, you could be direct and be compassionate. So I think that was how I use my emotional intelligence to look at okay, what are the social issues other people are giving me but I'm having a conversation, and I noticed somebody's kind of retracting, or their facial expressions changing, that's a sign that maybe I need to change what I'm doing, right so I need to be more in control of my emotions and how I'm coming across so that I'm not creating these negative emotions in my relationship with somebody else. Now the other thing you mentioned that is super key in knowing yourself is identifying these emotional triggers. So we all have these emotional triggers and when you know yourself so like, again, the Gallup gives you five key areas to record it using the five areas to like stay away from like the dangers of what is going to trigger you. This is all super emotional, in that you're going to have it like human beings are very routine. We have the same emotions every time. So maybe it's a conversation with your boss and you get anxious every time you have a conversation. Maybe you have trouble giving feedback to your co workers. And so that makes you nervous every time. Maybe you really are not competent, going into interviews, right. So like think about the different events in the workplace. And obviously you can do this in your personal life as well that focus on things in your career. There are definitely reoccurring situations that come up and you have these emotions every single time. And maybe it's not an event. It could be a situation like you're saying maybe, you know an escalated client that you have to deal with or somebody makes a mistake and you have to fix it. Those can be emotionally triggering. The big one that everybody gets emotionally triggered about is your is your schedule your To Do lists we all get triggered about. I'm overwhelmed. I have too many competing priorities. I need to set boundaries. That is an emotional trigger. And then my one that I always try to remind people is other people, there might be certain people at your job, that trigger you for certain clients that are really tough clients or certain types of people like personality types that trigger you. So you just really know yourself. Like Gallup assessment through doing self awareness with emotional intelligence. You're going to know those things up front and then you can proactively manage it. You can write,

Unknown 12:01
don't, don't be upset with yourself, knowing that, hey, this could happen, but like the proactive nature, like I know that I'm prepared, this is probably going to happen. What am I going to do about it? And then some of these things are temporary. They're very exhausting. Yeah, at times, but if you just almost have that self talk of thing, okay, that's what we're gonna do to manage this and make it work for you and the person that you're working with, it can just, there's always potential anxiety that might be there, even like when people do public speaking, there's a little you could prepare all you want but there's still that little bit of real life happening right then and there. Right? But really going back to the basics and just knowing that it's okay that you might be having you might have to deal with some of this. But using some of that, what you've learned about yourself can make it just can have more resilience with these things that we might face.

Unknown 12:53
Yes. And I think the thing that's hard for people when you do personality assessment, when you do emotional intelligence is like, people have this idea in their head, that there's like good and bad personalities or good and bad emotions, or like right and wrong. And that's not the case. Like when you say grace, it's a lot about like, being comfortable with who you are. And again, like I know that that's not an easy thing to do. But the more you work and practice on these things, the more confident and comfortable you're going to get and feel that security. So one of the things that I teach all of my anybody who follows me and I'll make sure to give you guys you know all my links to follow me all my all my resources, but I teach a technique called P QR and it's called I pause, question reframe. So this is a simple thing that you can start doing today. You can anytime you're in a sense of like, okay, I'm feeling myself get worked up, I'm feeling my anxiety or my stress levels get increased and it could be based on whatever's, you know, maybe you're having a difficult conversation. Maybe you're like overwhelmed by your schedule, whatever it is. The first thing I need you to do is pause because I really want you to just take a step back and and this pause is kind of I always refer to this to people as like your Get Out of Jail Free card when you're in a tough situation right? So when you're at work stuff is happening like on the fly all the time, and you might be in the middle of a difficult conversation and you know, what is it easy excuse if you need a couple of minutes. It's like, hey, I need to go to the bathroom. I'm always like, even off the phone or if you need to like take a quick break to like compose yourself. Nobody's going to tell you you can't go to the bathroom, right splashing water on your face, like take a minute to regroup. Or you can just say hey, you know what, I've got this information. Let me give you a call back. I do that a lot with like escalated clients, because they're like getting heightened and heightened and heightened in their emotions and then it's causing me to get heightened in my emotions. I'm like, You know what, I have the information I really want to help you look into this and I'll call you back just to get them off the phone, right like just to give myself

Unknown 14:58
that they need to they need to pause. Yeah, so you got

Unknown 15:01
to have the pod and then the question part is really about this is where that self awareness, really understanding yourself is going to come into play. Why is this affecting you? Why is this causing you to feel whatever emotion you're feeling and you really need to dig deep right so let me give you an example. I live example. So let's say you're in a meeting, and somebody calls you out. In a meeting like for a mistake that you made like in front of all of your co workers your boss might be there. So I reaction based on my personality might be angry, I might even like start a disagreement with the person in the vicinity and get really upset and so then what does that do now? I've come up with perception of I'm the angry person and I'm, you know, now I have a negative perception out there where people are like, Oh, she can't take the video down. She made this mistake and you know, all this stuff that comes with that that breeds more negative emotion. So instead, what I do is pause right and then I question why I'm really upset that this person called me out. And when I do that, I can really identify the true emotion and usually when we do that, so So let's walk through the example somebody calls me out of the meeting. Well, that would probably upset me because I already talked to that person about my mistake. You know, like I already owned up to my state, we had a conversation before the meeting. So I guess I don't really understand why they felt the need to bring it up again. So then I'm like, okay, so why does that bother me? Well, it's because I thought that we had a good enough relationship of trust. Where they could have just talked to me about that privately and didn't need to bring it up. But obviously, they they don't feel that way about me. So now I'm like, oh, no, I don't I am

Unknown 16:39
guessing the situation or like we had a mutual respect. Or you could even see that within spouses and partnerships. I thought we had a deal. Yeah.

Unknown 16:47
And then that's kind of where you get to the real emotion of like, my feelings are kind of hurt because I thought we had a good relationship and we don't, as opposed to, if I address that and manage that my feelings are hurt. Instead of doing the angry response in the meeting, like look how different that is, right? That's a completely different situation. And a different perception and I can I can build on that to enhance my relationship with this person, right. So so you pause your question to really dig deep at what's really bothering you. And then the reframe is the key because we tend to have trouble taking the negative pieces and reframing it in different ways. Especially when we're feeling anxious or nervous or insecure or like not as competent. We feel bad about ourselves, like you said, and we like beat ourselves up about it instead of giving ourselves that grace. So it's time for us to reframe things. And again, I'll go back to the boundaries example because we all struggle with our schedules, right? So if I'm gonna reframe something where, okay, I have to set a boundary, and I have to say no to somebody instead of me feeling like oh my gosh, I'm saying no to somebody. Why don't I reframe that as like, okay? If I don't do this, that gives another person the opportunity to step by like that, right? So doesn't that feel so much more positive to say that instead of being like, oh my gosh, I'm not going to do this? Well, now I'm allowing somebody else to do this that feels so much different. And I still feel, you know, that little tinge of guilt of not doing it but I don't react to it because I've reframed my mindset about that emotion.

Unknown 18:24
Well, that could be where people need to delegate. Sometimes, people like you and I, we've talked about some of these things where sometimes it's hard to give something away that we know that we would love to work on but sometimes maybe it's a chance for the brings to the table to have a chance. Yeah, that's that's something that you know, I always think back to the schedule and the boundaries. We all need to obviously work on some delegation to depending upon what it might be, but you know, going back with a Gallup assessment when I do have these out for people we work together, it you're right, everyone gets so nervous. I created a video to say, Hey, this is a talent assessment like I'm trying to change the word assessment sounds like a test and we don't like taking tests at all right? We're gonna think badly about me. My colleagues will say, I'll take it but you can, I can sense it and I can see him I just watched the video. I'm not going to think badly about you. But now I'll have some information and I can work with you and understand you more. It's so much fun when we can do that. So, but for some reason, I think we had you mentioned the word all a few times. I think if we all know we're in this together, we have similar things that are happening up in the head. We all need to do some work and you know, look within and work on ourselves. We're all in it together. But I think sometimes we feel alone and that you know, it's just us but no, you know, everyone's got some similarities have different, like different triggers. It's just different people at different times.

Unknown 19:56
And I love that you have this community where you all can talk about that because that is the truth is that we all are experiencing these things. Maybe our reaction isn't the same, right? Because again, we have different personalities, and we have different things that trigger us. But we all have things that cause us stress or anxiety. We all have certain, you know, doubts about ourselves at different times. Right? And we have ways that we can overcome that. So you're absolutely right by knowing yourself more, it's gonna really help you figure out what steps to take so that you can feel confident that you're making progress. There is no good personality or bad personality. There's no like top five results that are better than somebody else's top. Right. Like there's nothing like that. There's no good I grew up in a house where it was like certain emotions were considered weakness, and certain motions were considered strange. So that was something where like, I had to unpack that, you know, myself back when I first learned about emotional intelligence 10 years ago, it's like, there aren't good or bad emotions. There's nobody out in the world that's happy 100% of the time, like that doesn't exist. You know, they're everybody has doubts and insecurities and anxiety and fears. People might come across more competent because they know how to manage it. And that's the difference. I might still be feeling nervous and scared inside. But I'm not letting that come across in my perception. And once you start managing it and seeing that you can handle it, it builds your confidence, and it makes those emotions like reduce overtime of like, oh my gosh, I saw that you know what this situation happened? And I handled it and now this happens. I'm going to be able to handle it because I already did I know that I can do it because I already did. So one of the things I want to give to you to give to your audience is like my free digital downloads about like your like identifying your emotional triggers. At work, I want to give you a couple trackers about like how they can track their emotions if they're not really sure what their triggers are. And really it's about like what happens most frequently at work or what emotion is most intensified because you might feel you might feel nervous before meeting but like you said, it might just be like a tiny sense of nervousness but if you have a meeting with your boss, that might be like a higher level of nervousness, right? So it's like you're gonna have to think about what maybe your top three or top five are and just start there. You know, don't try to overwhelm yourself by anytime you're working on these types of growth or development. You never want to try to go in and like I need to change all of these things at one time. That's going to add to your overwhelming stress levels, right? So you got to just focus on little baby steps, making progress. It's not about like the end, it's about the progress and steps along the way. And if you use the pause, question and reframe, that's something that you can do every day, all the time. One of the things that I do is journal a lot. So at the end of my work day, I might go then and like okay, what were the emotions that I felt, what were the things that I had to try to like reframe, and I'll write that down and like write through how I felt and what my, you know, interpretation was so that if it happens again, now I've kind of already like process that are similar. Do it. Yeah, absolutely. So again, like I'm gonna give the digital downloads just because I think that is a helpful tool for some people who like to, you know, write things or do some computer. I really want you guys to have that resource to use.

Unknown 23:38
I think that's awesome. I think emotions are important. I think sometimes we're working so hard to suppress them, but they're actually good indication of like your sometimes your intuition is telling you something is going on. Maybe you need to be aware of something or maybe there's a trigger and then you can manage that. So I think that was some of the the workbooks and different resources you have. I think this is coming from you working day to day on this. That's where you've developed these things. So when when you're looking at the triggers and some of the the items within your resources, this is this is coming from legit this is happening. Out there in the real world. So you're not alone. But you individually need to work on how you might handle things. And so I think we're always needing to keep polishing and evolving that and I think even with some of the pause how do you how do you pronounce it NCP?

Unknown 24:37
hos question. Reframe PQ R. You could even practice

Unknown 24:40
that in the home with your relationships and see how that how that works. And then you could bring it into the workplace and so you can kind of really test that out. I think that's a great idea. So I think that's a great place to kind of pause for today. Jovita What do you think? Is there anything else that you want them to know about? I mean, really, you can start with a PPR today. And just implement and so I love that. Is there anything else we should talk about before we wrap up today?

Unknown 25:07
No, I definitely feel like we've covered a lot just for people to get started with understanding emotional intelligence. I have a couple packages that I'll give you, you know, for discount code if they want to learn some more about different topics. I do want to just say that thing that you just said about suppressing our emotions, we can't do it right like it never works. it backfires on us 100% of the time. So we do want to do this work, you know, just take a couple of minutes to do this work to pause question and reframe and it's going to make a huge difference.

Unknown 25:40
Well, thank you so much. It's so powerful, and I love learning more and I'm going to practice that today. Well hopefully nothing too. Crazy happens, but you never know. So

Unknown 25:49
it's gonna happen. I think that's the one thing we know about emotions is going to happen, no matter. You just got to be ready for it. Right.

Unknown 25:57
I really appreciate you being here today. Jovita and I know that you'll be back on the show soon. So looking forward to it. Seeing you again. Often. Thank you so much.

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