Episode 147- How To Improve Emotional Intelligence In Your Life and Marriage
My very special guest and I had the juiciest conversation about emotional intelligence, how it affects your relationships, and how it affects you in life, at work, and at home in many (sometimes unexpected) ways.
Christina Langdon (you can visit her website here) joined me for today’s amazing discussion.
Christina is an entrepreneur, mentor, and coach certified in emotional intelligence training. She spent 30 years running sales and marketing teams at huge brands, including Martha Stewart Living and Fast Company (I mean, seriously!).
Now, she helps leaders and businesses achieve more than they thought possible using emotional intelligence as her primary tool.
If you’ve ever wondered –
- Why you feel disconnected in your relationships
- How to reconnect and deepen your personal connections
- What characteristics make you an effective leader at work and at home
- How to create psychological safety so any relationship can thrive
- The FIRST step to take to get more of what you want at work and in life
then this conversation is exactly what you need.
The first step to improve emotional intelligence at work and at home
“You could find me on any given lunch hour in Barnes and Noble, four blocks up from my office, in the self help and leadership aisle. My love of development, my love of leading ourselves first, started years ago on the floor of Barnes and Noble, trying to figure out how to lead myself first so I could lead my teams through crisis.”
Talk about starting off with a bang! I love how Christina illustrates emotional leadership for us so clearly.
As a relationship coach, I talk a lot in my work about becoming the emotional leader in your relationship and what that looks like.
But a lot of people think they’re emotional leaders when they’re actually emotional reactors.
“The first consideration when you’re leading yourself first is simply becoming aware of your thoughts, your feelings, and realizing that circumstances are what they are. If people aren’t showing up for you in the way you want them to show up, it’s on you to figure out why.”
Christina guided Martha Stewart Living through a time of “constriction and crisis,” which only deepened her belief that leadership has to start with ourselves first. Only then can we take that skill and apply it to our work lives, at home, and in our relationships, too.
Using emotional intelligence to create more connection
Whether it’s at home or at work, clients tell me they want to feel more connected.
What I see is that people are frustrated for years, feeling disconnected, but never fully defining what connection is… so they never fully have it, either. In my work with clients, I invite them to define connection – what it looks like, what it is, and what it isn’t.
I want to help you get more of what you want, but that requires knowing what you want.
(And it’s okay if it takes you a minute to figure out what you want.)
When people feel disconnected at work, Christina reminded me that most often what they’re really craving is emotional intelligence from those in leadership positions.
“There’s this study that’s been given hundreds of thousands of times: when somebody is asked for five characteristics of someone they admire, of the most effective leader in their life, 9 times out of 10, all five characteristics are based on emotional intelligence.
Skills get us in the door, and maybe they get us promoted once. But it’s the emotional intelligence that keeps us there and rising in any organization.
Psychological safety at work is a very, very important concept for any leader who wants to assess employee engagement on any given day. If we want them to feel engaged, we have to understand how they think and feel at work.
If we want our teams to be more engaged, if we want to be more engaged in our marriages, it’s on us to decide how we want to connect.”
How deliberate loving actions can act as a form of leadership
“If we want to lead with more empathy, if we want to lead with vision, if we want to lead with understanding, we need to be doing that every single day. It needs to be intentional, consistent, and deliberate every single day.”
Christina and I were completely on the same page about this, so much so that there’s actually a concept I teach called deliberate loving actions.
It’s based on the idea that deliberate loving actions need to happen every day, not just once in a while. It’s not necessarily about the big Oscar moments, but more about the 5 a.m. rehearsals that get you to the Oscars – all the little life moments along the way.
How often are we just reacting to what’s in front of us instead of deliberately creating the relationships we want to have at home, at work, with our family, and with our colleagues?
How can we think not only about what it might be like to work for us, but to be married to us? If your partner took the relationship equivalent of an employee survey, how would they fill out their answers?
Learn to develop emotional intelligence in relationships
If you want to stop being frustrated with your partner’s behavior and how you respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to enroll in The Marriage MBA.
The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school. And helps you reimagine marriage so you can have a relationship that works for you.
What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.
You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for the years to come.
If there is a foundation of love in your marriage and you are ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: