Navigating Your Emotions in the Age of AI

The number one skill for every leader across the world is the ability to navigate your emotions in a healthy way. For far too long, emotional intelligence has been seen as the warm and fuzzy soft skill that would be nice to have, but doesn't actually bring in the money, so to speak. Well, let me tell you, from my own experience and from experience of working with thousands of people all around the world in this particular subject for almost two decades now, I can testify that when you're not able to navigate your emotions in a healthy way, it is the cause of all the roadblocks, all the challenges that stops you from doing what it is that you know you need to do to get the results that you want to have.

So, no longer is it being seen as warm and fuzzy soft skills that would be nice to have. It has been recognised finally as the number one skill that every leader needs to develop. Now when I say every leader, if you've been following me for a little while, you'll know that I mean everybody because everyone is a leader.

Yes, including you. Whether it's just your personal leadership, which is leading yourself well, whether it's your professional leadership, which is getting results from your own efforts, or the traditional people leadership, which is where most people think that leadership starts, you are a leader. And being able to work with your emotions, rather than fighting against them and trying to push them away, manage them, and all the things that we're told to do, will help you to be able to go on this journey called professional services, have a lot more fun and get the results that you need faster.

Over the years too, emotional intelligence has evolved and I have shifted my thinking around it and I've learnt some things as we've, continued this journey that have had to shift because the world has shifted. We're not in the industrial age, we're way past the information age, not even the imagination age.

Now we are in the intelligence age, the age of artificial intelligence, working with human intelligence.

So therefore, more than any other time in history, we need to make sure that human trait of emotions is navigated in a way that's going to help us to use AI and continue to do the things that we need to do, to have the relationships that we need to have so that we can move forward in our career, in our profession around the world.

I've just recently looked at the model of emotional intelligence and social intelligence that I was using, and I've updated some things because I need it to be relevant for the challenges that you're having right now. And I'm about to launch that and use that in the work that I'm doing. If we continue to use the same models and same understanding that we had, even though the situation is different, the context has changed, we're not going to get the results.

There are many things that have been taught with emotional intelligence and many other leadership capabilities that are not relevant today. So I'm going to do what I can to help you to shift that. I just want to introduce it to you today. I've kept a very simple four quadrant model because for me, it's about taking people on a journey.

When you take people on a journey that helps them understand why they need to go on that journey, what it is that they need to do, how you actually can do that and what to do first, now, the next step, then we are able to incrementally grow skills that are going to help us long-term. Before we get into that model though, I want us to understand if we don't, what an emotion actually is.

An emotion is a physiological cue, a sensation in the body that tells you that there's something going on in your world in the moment. As I said, that's physiological. Then what you make that mean, how you interpret that sensation, the thought patterns that go along with it that are, founded in the belief structures that you have, that will determine how you choose to feel.

Where you continue with that rumination and thought process and internal dialogue will determine where that feeling changes and where it leads to, and it will either lead to a positive outcome or a negative one. So we've got the physiological followed by the psychological. And we've been told for years, manage your emotions.

And whilst I understand the sentiment, I've learnt that is the worst thing that we can do. Managing something is taking control of it and what we do as humans is we suppress the emotion, or we ignore it all together, and we say things like, "I leave my emotions at home. I leave them outside the door. They're not something to bring to work." We have other people telling us to "stop being emotional." Friends, that's physically impossible for human beings. So instead of managing the emotion, we want to manage the response to the emotion, and that is dealing with that psychological area, which is in the gap between that initial emotional sensation to the behaviour.

So I've created this four quadrant model to help you to understand it, and indeed to help me to teach it relevant to today. And the old four quadrant model talked about self-awareness and self-management. It talked about social awareness and relationship management, and those are still pertinent today.

We still need to work in those four areas. What I've done is I've taken the competencies that are within that, and I've reduced them, and I've amalgamated some of them, and I've made sure that I've tested them to see if the competencies are actually going to solve some challenges and help us to work through things that we're going through right now in this current age.

So if we start at emotional intelligence, which is your ability to be aware of what's going on for you, and then to navigate in a way that's going to get you the results that you want. So the two elements that I'm working with there is firstly, clarity, getting clarity around what is this sensation and what does it actually mean?

And then going to control and having competencies to help to interpret in a way, and then act in a way that's going to get positive results. You see, there's no such thing as a positive or negative emotion. They're all positive. The positive or negative comes into the interpretation, therefore, the behaviour that comes out of it.

Then we move to social intelligence, and the two quadrants there are connection and collaboration. So connection is all about interpreting and understanding what could be going on in the other person. It's all about having empathy and wanting to look through their lens, not just through our own. And collaboration is being able to build and utilise skills that helps us to get on with other people, to build strong relationships, to navigate conflict in a healthy way through great communication and more.

So if we look at those first two, in emotional intelligence, that's all about personal agency, that's about taking responsibility for myself and looking after how I interpret and how I behave. And then if we look at social intelligence, that's all about shared agency. That's working together as a collective and having an environment that fosters understanding that allows people to have differing opinions and bring those together, to bring together ideas and experience and all the things that we need to make sure that we have workplaces that attract and retain great people and have way less conflict.

So emotional intelligence and social intelligence are critical skillsets for you and I as leaders, as we navigate this new age of intelligence with agentic and conversational AI and all the other models and the challenges and opportunities that's bringing us so that we can still maintain that human to human connection, which is where all business is done.

So, what I'll do this month is I will take us deeper into those areas, and whether it's in further postings and our 20 minute transformations, I'll make sure that we get a greater understanding of that, so that we can incrementally learn, implement, and grow in these competencies of emotional intelligence.

So connect with me. Let me know down below, or wherever you're watching this, what you are looking forward to. What has this made you think about and how can I help? And by the way, if you need someone to come into your firm and talk to collectively more people, then reach out. I'm happy to see if I'm a good fit for that for you as well. But enjoy the journey of this month and everything that it brings for you, and I look forward to the opportunity to work with you more.

I'll see you then.