If you have followed me for a while, you have heard me say emotional intelligence is one of the cornerstones of diversity, equity, and inclusion work. 

So what is emotional intelligence, or EQ?

The Institute for Health and Human Potential defines emotional intelligence as ‘the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions and recognize, understand and influence the emotions of others.’

When I decided to start with this topic, I knew no one else I wanted to talk to about EQ other than Farah Harris, founder of Working Well Daily and the author of the upcoming book – The Color of Emotional Intelligence. Farah is a Workplace and Belonging Specialist and speaks about emotional intelligence’s importance in DEI. When we met a few years ago, we connected out of mutual respect for each other’s work and became fast friends.  So, when I started to think about who I wanted to be a part of DEI After 5, she was one of the first people I called because she would set the foundation for what practitioners need to know as they begin to connect EQ with DEI.

According to Farah, emotional intelligence consists of 4 core elements:

      • Self-awareness–  Having the ability to tune in with yourself and how you are feeling in the moment. 

      • Self-management/Self-control – Being able to control and manage your feelings

      • Social awareness – Being able to read the room. This is also where we can lean into being empathetic to others’ feelings.

      • Relationship Management – enables you to be an effective communicator, motivator, and manage conflict

Once we can identify our emotions, we also need to be able to regulate them. Farah uses the analogy of Cesar Millan and walking the dog to discuss self-awareness and self-management. When we think about our emotions, we need to ask ourselves – are we in control?  Are our emotions in front of us, leading us and guiding our decisions like a dog pulling us all over the place, or are they behind us, where we have no insight into what is happening or if the dog is still even there? When we are in tune with our emotions, we learn to walk with and engage them for what they are in the moment. 

Well, how can you start engaging with your emotions? 

Farah offers this advice – Begin a self-audit of your feelings and emotions. 

Take inventory of your emotions first thing in the morning and right before you go to bed.  Think about how you are feeling with no judgment. Write down the emotion and ask yourself: What brought on this feeling? Where did it come from? Once you’ve done this for a few weeks, add another checkpoint in your day to the journal.  Over time you will begin to notice the number of emotions you experience throughout the day and determine if there are certain emotions tied to specific interactions. I recommend downloading the Equity Equation Emotional Intelligence Journal sheet as a great starting point.  

Where can you find Farah?

Website: www.workingwelldaily.com
IG:@workingwelldaily
Twitter: @farahharrisLCPC

TRANSCRIPT

Farah Harris- The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in DEI-lV9zARmtKMg-192k-1644342869295.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

Sacha Thompson is a highly respected DEI expert and certified coach. She and her network of friends in the after-hours DEI profession often talk shop after work. They're bringing those after hours conversations to you right here on DEI After Five with Sacha. Let's get this conversation started.

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of DEI After Five. I am so excited about today because my first guest is really someone that when the stars aligned and you just happen to meet and you just connect, we have that type of connection. And I thought it was so important to start to show off with this particular topic because it is the foundation of this work, particularly for DEI practitioners. And so my guest today is Farah Harris, who is a therapist that focuses on emotional intelligence. And so I just want to welcome you Farah to today's show.

I am so excited to be here. And yes, the stars did a line and they danced. And we're now here together. Yes.

Thank you so much for joining. As we started to kind of get to know each other and I don't remember how we connected somewhere on LinkedIn somewhere, somewhere we started to just see each other's work and just started to like. Yes.

Okay.

Yes. And I think one of the pieces that you wrote that really resonated with me was about emotional intelligence and the importance of it for practitioners. And I think it spoke to me because at that time, I was dealing with some people in DEI that were not very emotionally intelligent, and I was seeing the challenges that come along with that. So if you could just talk to us a little bit about what is emotional intelligence before we even dive into the conversation, because I think people hear EQ, but they don't necessarily know what it means.

Yes. And the more I do this work, the limiting views I'm recognizing that people have if you want to have high EQ, that allows you to be a great person at work in terms of performance. But it's a strength skill, not a soft skill. I don't like calling it a soft skill that we all need because it usually highlights four domains depending on, you know, what school of EQ experts you follow. Sometimes it's five, sometimes it's six. But it's really these core four of being self aware, which is being able to be in tune with yourself, how you're feeling, being aware of your emotions, self management or self control or self regulation. That's just as I call it with the Ice Cube. You better check yourself before you wreck yourself. It's able to know, like, oh, these are the feelings that I'm having right now, and how can I make sure that I'm controlling them and managing them well? And then the social awareness is just being able to read the room. This is where it's important as practitioners, as leaders to have EQ, because that social awareness is where that action of empathy comes in. And this is when you're able to kind of see the other person's point of view and then relationship management. This is how you inspire people. This is how you motivate people. This is how you effectively communicate and manage conflicts. So those are the typical domains and competencies that make EQ. But when you really think about it, it is something that's more than just professional development skill. It's a personal development. I'm teaching my kids how to be emotionally intelligent because, as you said, we're in the workplace and we talked to a lot of people who, let's just say their EQ is not that high and it creates lots of stress and toxicity and unhealthy relationships within and out of the workplace.

As you were talking, a couple of things just started popping in my head because that's how usually what happen when you and I talk. And it just clicked for me that one of the challenges that I'm noticing with some of my coaching clients, particularly that are practitioners, is they're in environments where they're expected to do this work. Right. Do exceptional in this work, move mountains in situations where systems aren't going to be shifted, to be honest. And they're dealing with leadership with low EQ. Right. So it's just basically almost impossible situation. How do you even survive or how do you even start to operate in an environment like that? Because that's emotionally taxing. I know enough to know that that will pull out, like frustration, anger, all of those things. And so how do you manage that?

It's a mix of I think about when Michelle Obama did the one, they go low, we go high. And so I've kind of adopted it. When you get low EQ, you go high EQ. So it's about increasing your own emotional intelligence. But with that, healthy boundaries are so important, you can't continue to try to will somebody to elevate and to move up on the emotional intelligence quotient without being, I guess you said, angry, frustrated, disappointed. So there are sometimes you have to just learn how to walk away, minimize some conversations that you recognize is not going to be fruitful. There's a saying when you argue with the fool from the outside, nobody can tell the difference. Like, there's no you need to just know, OK, this is going to be beneficial. However, when I said earlier that I'm teaching my kids how to elevate their own emotional intelligence, I can't teach it to them without modeling it. And so the thing is that if you are wanting to kind of change the environment, I believe we change an environment one person at a time. If you are a practitioner, if you are a leader, if you are a parent, whatever it is, how are you making sure you're checking yourself before you wreck yourself? How are you regulating your own emotions? How are you adapting emotional intelligence helps us to be agile right now, within the last two years, we've dealt with a lot of constant adjustment. Right. The ebbs and flows due to the pandemic. How do you manage through that? Your children, your peers, your teammates, your leaders are watching how you are emotionally adapting to whatever is going around you, and they take note of that. And so the more you're able to elevate your own emotional intelligence, I do believe it's a ripple effect. But then there are just some people who there's so much work they have left to do. Many people need to be on several therapists' couches to process how they deal with feelings and deal with change. And that's usually what we're having conversations about is we're trying to instill change in these places. Right. And so we're trying to create a new and healthier culture. But change scares a lot of people because uncertainty brings fear. And if you haven't worked on your emotions and processing how you usually interact when fear comes to your doorstep, then, yeah, you're going to get resistance and you're going to get pushback. And so when we're able to have emotional intelligence and be emotionally intelligent practitioners and emotionally intelligent leaders, we're also, in a way, trauma-informed leaders. Right. Where we're able to understand that people come with their own stuff. It really does not get left at the door. They come with their own stuff, and it is presented in our interpersonal relationships. And so the more you're able to go like you seem to always deal with uncertainty, with anger. That seems to be the first emotion that pops up. How can I lower that threshold? So that's not your immediate response when we're in this space.

You hit on something earlier, hit on a couple of things. But the one that's really sitting with me is EQ is almost the opposite of American corporate culture.

Oh, yes.

Right. It's the opposite because you're not supposed to show emotion. You're supposed to think, be logical. Right. And not with your heart. Right. Head versus the heart. And what you're doing or what EQ is asking people to do is to shift that paradigm is to connect the head in the heart. It's to be able to name and identify what those emotions are. But if you're in corporate spaces or if you're in space, I'm not going to even just put it on corporate. If you're in spaces where emotion is seen as a negative thing. Right. How do you start to shift that? And so that's I think a difficult place to be, because again, I'm just thinking through some of the facilitations that I do, and I would say connect the head and the heart. What are you feeling like? Name the emotion. And it's like pulling teeth with some people because it is just so counter to how they have grown up. Or you don't show those things in the workplace, but yet they go through these experiences where they see EQ is like inclusive leaders have high EQ.

Yeah, supposedly, right. That's what is marketed, because there is an understanding that this is an important skill. But the question that I ask whenever I do trainings around emotional intelligence, it's a question that I think one because of my background in psychotherapy, is understanding the root of the cause, the action, the behavior, the thinking, whatever. So the question is that I ask is, what is your emotional narrative? How did you learn about feelings? Because we can't talk about emotional intelligence if we don't talk about emotions. And when people slow down and think, wait, how did I learn about feelings? Because we have our family of origin that maybe your background was you heard in your family, boys don't cry. And we hear that in society too, right. Or quit all that crying. Or maybe you watched people put things under the rug and put on appearances, but you could cut the tension with a knife. Or maybe your family did perhaps express emotions, but it was violent or aggressive. And so when you are able to actually go, oh, this is actually how I learned about feelings. This is how I learned either to be comfortable or have discomfort with certain feelings. Maybe there's emotions I'm comfortable with within myself, but I'm not comfortable watching someone grieve or I'm not comfortable watching someone be anxious. That causes discomfort in me. Where did that come from? So if we can get back to that narrative, understanding the stories behind feelings we talk about, research shows over and over again that women make great leaders because we have high EQ, because we're very socially aware, typically not all of us, but in general, because the maternal instinct is to be able to read the non verbal cues of an infant. Right. And so we're constantly seeing like, well, they made this noise, they squirmed this way or whatever. And we especially in crises, as women who are leaders, we're able to kind of pick up those nonverbal cues inherently just because of the way that we're wired. But we also have society that told men, the best emotion that you can have that shows power and strength is anger. So there's not this freedom to be tender, to show sadness or to show fear. And so, again, these last two years where there's all this uncertainty, there are men who are frightened right now and not in a negative way, but they are frightened because they don't know. And they are not given the freedom because as children, they weren't given the vocabulary or the space to process fear or to process sadness and grief. So they show up angry or aloof.

All the time. Yeah.

That's not going to work. As we're watching the workplaces change. And like you're saying, connecting that head and heart, we're dealing with people. And maybe back in the day when it was like we're just all about widgets and becoming the machines to just put things together. No, we're not doing that anymore. And so the whole people aspect of having us relook at how do we really engage? What is that interpersonal relationship really looking like? How is it healthy? How is it beneficial? How does it impact the workplace? But before we can talk about EQ as your motivator, you inspire, let's first talk about how do you deal with feelings, period.

Right.

Because if you're not comfortable with them, then how are you going to be able to address the myriad of emotions that your team members may bring? How are you going to anticipate their anxiety? How are you going to, like I said earlier, lower that threat threshold? How are you going to be able to communicate with them effectively if you can't even process your own emotions? Well, and then therefore are trying to manage the emotions of others just it's not going to work.

The word that keeps coming to mind as you're talking is empathy. Like, we keep hearing, especially for practitioners and folks that facilitate and do a lot of work in this space. Empathy is the word of the day. I'm just going to put it out there like that. But now that now I'm listening to you and I'm taking a step back. The practitioners themselves, beyond throwing out the word of empathy, has to have this EQ, right. Have to be able to know how to identify their own emotions, that they have, the feelings that they have before that they can see that or read the room in a facilitation. I was thinking I did a facilitation. My days are starting to blend together. I don't know. A couple of weeks ago, and as we were doing it, I noticed that the women of color left the room. And when we stopped that part of the facilitation and folks came back, one of them said, I don't think anybody even noticed that we left the room. And a couple of people said, like, oh, yeah, we didn't notice or we thought you had to go to the bathroom. I picked up on, okay, someone's emotional, right? I couldn't read what the emotion was, but I saw that there was an emotion and somebody left and another woman of color followed her. Right. So I circled back with them later to have a conversation. And I think it was probably helpful to them that I noticed it, but it was also frustrating to them that it was only another woman of color that recognized it.

Can I speak to that?

Go for it. Because it was one of those like, I saw it, you didn't see it?Yeah.

Okay. So when we're talking about empathy and there's different levels of empathy, there's cognitive empathy. If I think about what this could be like, okay, I guess they would feel this, and then there's empathy that's like rooted in compassion. So that's in your heart because you should be empathetic and you can have high EQ and actually be very manipulative. So the thin line between having high emotional intelligence and being ethical and being humane and being kind and being compassionate, and then you can have high EQ to be able to manipulate and be deceptive. Sociopaths can be empathetic. We have to be very careful on what is it rooted in that empathy? Is it our values? Is it connected to our heart? But I often say that it's hard for you to read the room if you are part of the majority, because in a way, the room was created for you. So I give this example. When I do my trainings and I like, how many people are right handed? And the majority of people raised their hand, I said, okay, I'm a Gen Xer. So I don't know how the school looks like now, but back in the day, the desks and the chair were connected and they were set up for a right handed person. The pencil sharpener was for the righthanded person. And it wasn't until my sister, my younger sister, who happens to be a lefty, I started to realize how she navigates the world as a left handed person in a right handed world notebooks. The spirals are on the side so that you don't get your wrist Mark if you're a right handed person. And so once I bring that connection, I said, I walked into those classrooms not wondering if I belonged there, because I knew subconsciously that it was designed with me in mind. But when you have rooms that weren't designed with you in mind, you are always looking to see where you fit in. If your person that's a paraplegic, is it accessible? All of these things, when we're practitioners, we're trying to think of, right? We're trying to help others be more curious about other people's lived experiences. That's how we empathy. That's how we grow and become kinder and more inclusive with the people who don't have the same lived experience as us. I did one training, and then the conversation as we were prepping, one of the attendees had a hearing impairment, and she was like, oh, the closed captioning are gone. And I actually like for you to be on the screen because I read lips. This is stuff that we don't think about. Even with technology. How many of us wants to turn our screen off? We got Zoom fatigue, but we're not aware that there's somebody else that may need us when we're speaking to see our faces so that they can actually feel like they're included in the conversation. They're looking for the closed captions because as able bodied people as those of us who don't have disabilities or take that back, not ablebodied. But those that don't have disabilities, right. We don't think about the other experiences. We're not empathizing. I have a phrase, things don't become dear to us until they become near to dear, until we actually brush up against somebody else's lived experience. We just won't see it. And so those poor black women who walked out and already felt like you didn't see me while I was in there. So I doubt you'll notice that I'm gone.

Yeah.

And then I'm going to come back. And how does that feel? Well, our brain registers that as rejection, and our brain registers rejection as pain. So they were physically feeling pain in that moment because it's like, okay, I'm invisible. I'm not fully welcomed here. I don't belong. And that is going to obviously impact somebody's well- being.

Yeah, I think there's just so much in that. And the reason why I did that site was because I think there's so many practitioners that talk a good game. They know all the words, they know all the vocabulary, but it's the actions and how it manifests outside of the words. Right. And I use the example, like, one of the challenges that I had when I was in corporate, we did this Inclusion 101 workshop, and we use the example of what happened at Starbucks. Right. These men mining their business, doing their work, and somebody came in and didn't like what was happening. And so rather than saying something to them, called the police. And our head of DNI, who was a white woman who had never done this work before. So very low EQ, didn't like something that I did. A social media post, didn't say anything to me, went to VPof HR. I'm like, you talk about this every single day. You use the Starbucks examples. Let me break down how what you did is exactly what happened at Starbucks. And when I did that, the look on her face was like, oh, I did she couldn't say it. But it was that connection point of awareness. Right. It's like, okay, I'm not just regurgitating words like, this is what it looks like in real life, in real time. And the impact because I ended talking about the impact, like, you got your feelings hurt right. Over a post that had nothing to do with you, but you got to walk away. Now I have to sit here and talk to the BP of HR. Right. The VP of Sales, the VP of all of these leaders, because you didn't feel like I was doing my job, but I was doing my job. That connection piece, it's hard.

And that is where it's so important to be self aware. And self awareness is not just what am I feeling, but it's also what am I doing and what am I saying? And how is it landing on the other? Like, how do I show up and how does it affect others, which requires feedback. And I know folks don't like feedback. You hear that word and it's like, no, that makes me uncomfortable. But how do you really know who you are to others? You may have an idea of what you do and how you say things, but until you hear it, until you kind of get that echo back to you, that mirror being held up for you by another person you don't really know, you have a good idea, but there's blinders. And so when you have somebody that you can trust that you have respect for because it's not always a family member or friend, sometimes some really good feedback can come from someone that you don't like, but they got nothing to lose. So they're going to be straight up honest with you.

Honest. Yeah.

And how can you use your self management to take something that stings and to process it and to go, okay, I don't like the way it came out, but is there some truth in this? Is there something that I can learn from this? Ouch. That hurts. But thank you for your feedback. It's going to have me reflect on things because it goes back to that question of like, what is your emotional narrative? Where did you learn about feelings? Where did you learn that this behavior was okay? Many times people continue to do certain things because there were never any real consequences in their behavior. They just stopped getting enabled, enabled after enabled relationships. And it's like, okay, I'm not going to do the enabling anymore. I'm going to tell you straight up, when you do this or when you say things like this, this is how it makes other people feel. And a person that has a high EQ. Let me make a note here. EQ is a constant practice. So you can't just say, I have high emotional intelligence. You had high emotional intelligence in this instance.

Right.

Because you could have had an excellent conversation, a great 360 review with someone, and then you went home when you cussed out your husband.

Right.

So when we talk about EQ, it's like, no, we're constantly working on elevating it. We're constantly working on building that muscle and recognizing that every time we communicate with others, we engage with others. It's an opportunity to elevate our emotional intelligence. It's not necessarily that it will happen that we will respond with high emotional intelligence. We may be tired and because we're tired and we haven't slowed ourselves down to question, is this a good time to have this conversation, or should I wait until later and you dive into the conversation and you're hurt and you're short and you're rude and you're dismissive. Okay, well, then you weren't using your emotional intelligence in that moment. You were just responding emotionally but not being able to slow yourself down. I have a saying that you have to walk the dog. So for those of you all who are dog owners, there's that show The Dog Whisperer. And Steve was teaching his clients, like, how to walk their dog. And he said, you don't want the dog to be in front of you because that means it's in control and it's dominant. You don't want it to be behind you. You want the dog to be walking right next to you. And I'm like, that's the perfect picture of what emotional intelligence is, specifically self awareness and self management. You don't want your emotions to be guiding you because that's when you're going from zero to 100 or people who quote, unquote, wear their emotions on their sleeves, you don't want it to be behind you because you can't see what's coming. You could be walking Clifford, the big red dog.

No clue.

I didn't know that was back there. And so that's very passive or passive aggressive behavior. So when you're able to walk with your feelings, you can see your feelings. You can engage with them. You can manage and control them. That is when you're practicing high emotional intelligence. And practitioners, as you say, can talk a good game, but they're not always actually walking it out because they may never have been challenged to.

So what are some things that people can do to increase their EQ, like starting today? Because I think they're going to be folks that are watching this that are like, yeah, I got to walk this dog.

Pull back on that leash. Yeah, you can do immediately. We often don't self audit ourselves enough, slow ourselves down and really go, how's far going? How's Sasha doing? So what you can do to start elevating your emotional intelligence, which is really being in tune with how you feel in real time. Walking the dog, so to speak, is twice a day. First thing in the morning, take 60 seconds, ask yourself or state, how am I feeling? And call it out. I am excited. Maybe something's happening during the day. I'm not sure, or I'm anxious or I'm frustrated. And when you name the emotion, maybe you want to write it down. For those who like to Journal, maybe you write it down. Don't judge it, because as a clinician aware that there are so many times that we will add an emotion to an emotion, and that ends up being so fruitless because it's like, okay, now you're so focused on the secondary emotion, we're not even getting to the root of why you felt that first emotion to begin with. So just name it. Just say, I'm writing it down. I woke up excited. Before you go to bed, name the emotion. Relieved, satisfied, content, angry. Maybe it's still anxious. I'm not sure. But what you want to do is practice that first thing in the morning, right before you go to bed and do that for a few days, and then start increasing the frequency during lunchtime. Ask yourself, how am I feeling at dinnertime? How am I feeling on your way home? So the more you increase the feeling, the more you're actually becoming self aware, because we sometimes have our emotions show up, but the way that we understand how we actually felt comes way after the moment. Right now, I think about it. I actually felt this. So when we start practicing walking the dog. By doing that twice a day, check in, then making it three times a day to four times a day, you will find yourself realizing how many emotions you have throughout the day and how you actually respond to it, how you can assess what brought this feeling. Because that's the next step. After you're aware of your emotion, the next step is to ask, where did it come from?

Okay.

Some people are not the ones you need to talk to first thing in the morning because they haven't had any coffee, they haven't had something to eat, whatever it is. So ask yourself, okay, I'm anxious. Why am I anxious? What is bringing that emotion up for me? My kids know I'm a person that needs to take a shower and eat breakfast. And when they start asking, Mommy, mommy, and I go, Mommy is still tired and has not fully woken. If you want to have a conversation, it's not going to be a good conversation. If you don't let mommy have like 15 minutes of quiet so she can eat and then I'll be able to communicate better with you. They get it. They immediately know I'm one of those people that gets hangry. Like, if I'm hungry, don't talk to me. But I'm aware of that. And because I'm aware of that. And this is another thing that EQ does, the more you are aware of yourself and how emotions play, you can more effectively communicate that to others. So I can tell my kids, I don't want to be dismissive to you. Let Mommy have five minutes. Then we can have a conversation. As a leader, you can do the same thing when you recognize that you have a certain emotion. Is this really the best time to have a conversation with a peer? Is this really the best time to hold a meeting? You might have to go. You know what? This is not the best time right now. Can we reconvene in 30 minutes? That is how we effectively communicate. That's how we minimize causing hurt to others because we're walking the dog.

Well, I love it. So how can people connect to you? I know how to use texture.

If you want to learn more about the work that I do in the workplace, not as a therapist. I do not see clients right now, but around workplace well being and creating places of belonging. You can visit my website@workingwelldaily.com and you can follow me on the interwebs@workingwelldaily.com. I mean, working well daily on Instagram. And if you want to also follow Twitter, I do share a lot of my thoughts there and on LinkedIn and that's at Faraharris LCPC. And I am also currently writing a book.

I was just going to mention that.

Yeah. And so if you want to learn more about not just what emotional intelligence is, but how it's been impacted by inequity and that those of us who have been historically marginalized use our emotional intelligence in a different way. Check out my book, hopefully to be published next year. It's called The Color of Emotional Intelligence. But there is a training and a keynote of the same title that I love sharing with workplaces and different audiences wanting to learn how to raise their EQ so that they can create psychologically safe spaces for those who are historically marginalized.

I love it. Farah thank you so much for joining me today. I just knew this conversation was just going to hit it out the park because I think it's critical, right? It's critical in this work. I think it's critical in life. Like you said, you do this at home. I probably need to do more of this at home. But thank you so much for joining us today and I just want to thank our audience for joining us today for this first episode of the EI after five. And if you want to follow more of what we're doing, you can just go to my website, which is www.theequityequationllc.com or just follow me on LinkedIn or on Instagram at the Equity equation. So thank you all and hopefully you will join us at our next episode. Bye.