Episode Highlights

• Defining emotional intelligence and how it goes beyond IQ to use your emotions wisely for better decisions, authentic relationships, and meaningful action.
• The five core components of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, social skills, and motivation
• How focusing on emotional intelligence can transform you into a completely different person than you were 20 years ago.
• Why awareness is the most essential part of emotional intelligence, and how simple exercises can help you build self-awareness.
• Rethinking emotions as pleasant or unpleasant rather than positive or negative, changes how we use emotions to decide, relate, and move forward.
• How transferring emotion from your own experience to an audience in creative work ensures your relevance in ways machines can’t replicate.
• Exploring the four uniquely human components of emotional intelligence: creativity, empathy, ethics, and spirituality.
• The emotional side of flow and deep work, and how feelings shape creative focus.
• Understanding intrinsic motivation from within and extrinsic motivation from our environment, and how to harness both to stay driven across changing contexts and situations.

Useful Links

• Daniel Goleman Books

About Guest

Dr. Robin Hills brings over 40 years of business and commercial experience helping executives and leaders enhance performance through greater self-awareness and understanding of others. He focuses on supporting personality and behaviour in business through the practical application of emotional intelligence and is Director of Ei4Change (Emotional Intelligence 4 Change), a company specialising in training, coaching, and personal development grounded in emotional intelligence, positive psychology, and neuroscience. His educational programmes on resilience and emotional intelligence are used in schools in South Africa and India, reaching over 500,000 students across 200+ countries.

Robin’s LinkedIn
Robin’s Books
Robin’s Emotional Intelligence Course with Free Resources
Ei4Change Website, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So Robin, first of all, I wanted to thank you very much for taking the time to chat with me all the way over on what they say is the other side of the pond on your Friday evening, no less, to share your expertise with us today. So really appreciate it. Thank you.

Robin Hills: Oh, Zack, thank you for having me on your show. It's a great honor. Thank you.

Zack Arnold: And here's where I want to start. I get a lot of cold submissions in my inbox from a lot of people that want to be on podcasts. Once you get on these mailing lists, man, you cannot get off these mailing lists. So I would say, give or take, 97% of those are either instant deletes or I scan the first paragraph and I say, you clearly know nothing about me. You know nothing about my audience, and you either will then get deleted, or I even collect bad outreach, like baseball cards and I tag it and I teach the bad outreach. But every once in a while, somebody drops into my inbox where I say, Huh, this is interesting. And the fact that you dropped into my inbox both wanting to talk about emotional intelligence, but specifically as somebody that was a former makeup and cosmetic salesman made me think this is somebody I might want to have a conversation with. So before we actually get into the science of emotional intelligence versus cognitive intelligence and all the cool stuff we're going to talk about, I think your origin story is a great plus place for us to start knowing how it is you've transitioned into this field. Oh,

Robin Hills: Zack, thank you for reminding me. You know, I completely forgot those humble origins from Oh, 50 odd years ago, I was trying to get a job in the pharmaceutical industry as a medical representative, and I liked the idea of it, because I just graduated with a degree of biology, and I wanted to utilize my about my qualification, but do something completely different. And the idea of becoming a pharmaceutical medical sales representative was very appealing because one of my skill sets was being able to take very, very complex ideas, simplify them, and communicate with two people with clarity and influence and persuade them. Now I didn't know that at the time. I mean, that's come through years of experience and putting these skills to use, but I kept getting the feedback and the knock backs that I hadn't got any sales experience, so I needed to go out there and sell now, at the time, some of the cosmetics were being sold door to door, and what it meant is that I had A patch, a territory, and I would have a bag of cosmetics, and I would go around, knock on the door, speak to, usually, the lady in the house, and talk to her about the products that I'd got, and we would talk about makeup and cosmetics. Oh, what did I know about makeup and cosmetics? I wasn't an avid user myself, but I obviously had something, and I don't know what it was. Was a young man arriving on the doorstep looking desperate, but within the first period of sales, I actually came out with a fair amount of sales, and I just didn't know whether it was good, bad or indifferent. I got nothing to measure myself again, so I went along to a sales meeting of all the local representatives, and I stuck out like a sore thumb, because most of the people there were women in their middle age, and they'd been doing it for years, and when they put the sales figures up on the board, I got quite embarrassed, because I'd outsold most of them, not by a little bit, by a lot, and it earned me the grand prize of a nice porcelain bowl box to keep my cotton wool balls in a little vase, and they and a little trinket box, a little porcelain trinket box. And that was my extra special prize for getting those sales which, which was phenomenal. Everybody said, I'll give it to your mom or give it to your girlfriend. No, I keeping it. I earned that, and I still got it to this day.

Zack Arnold: Good for you, I love that.

Robin Hills: I'm still very proud of that little set, because that takes me back to my sales roots.

Zack Arnold: I love, love that entire story. And we're going to get a little bit more into where you had kind of framed it as I'm somebody that's really good at taking complex ideas, simplifying them, and having a conversation with two people. That's something that I, too, specialize in. I talk a lot and in. Podcast, and also in my academy with my students, about how we've been witnessing, and I've been writing about this for years now, the transition in our society from being specialists to now being generalists, which is basically the way that we were wired for all of human existence until the Industrial Revolution. And we've always been told, Well, if you're a jack of all trades. You're a master of none. But I always say that you can be a jack of all trades and a Master of one by identifying what you're uniquely good at and diversifying it in different ways. And you've already said like your specialty is not sales, it's not emotional intelligence, it's not being a public speaker, all of what you you excel at, but really the one specialty that sets you apart your ability to take complex ideas, simplify them, and communicate them. So we're going to get, I want to get to that later, and how you were able to identify that for yourself, and how others can use your tools to identify that. But where I want to start, and I'm going to say this pun intended, because it's a very emotional phrase, but I would say it's sad that over 30 plus years after the idea of emotional intelligence was really popularized and talked about in the literature and with psychologists and psychiatrists and otherwise, most people still have no idea what emotional intelligence is. So I want to kind of start with a relative baseline for those. Basically everybody here, I'm sure has heard about IQ intelligence quotient. We've all taken IQ tests, but I feel so few people even today understand what EQ is, or emotional intelligence. So we're going to dive into a lot of nuances, but let's just build a basic foundation. What in the world is emotional intelligence and what are some of its key components?

Robin Hills: Sure, yeah, I'll go along with you that it's very sad that people still don't recognize it as a core competency, but through that sadness that gives me great opportunities to go out there and to communicate with the world and say, Hey, there's a different way of looking at things. Now, a lot of people don't like the idea of emotional intelligence, because you've got two words that seem to be fighting against each other, emotional and intelligence. But Put very simply, it's being smart with your feelings. It's utilizing the data and emotions to make good quality decisions and build up authentic relationships, and then to take action. It's nothing more complex than that, however, however, that's incredibly deep, and what we need to do is to explore it in a lot more different layers, a lot of more different layers, and really kind of unpick each layer. And that's where I've built my business from. Now, you're right. Daniel Goldman brought emotional intelligence into the public domain in the mid 90s. He wrote some great books on emotional intelligence. But whilst Daniel Goldman is a journalist and a writer. His writing style is incredibly clunky, and his books are not easy reads, which, again, gives me a great opportunity, because I can actually say, Yes, I have read his books from cover to cover, and I understood them, but I thought this needs simplify, and this needs to be bought into the public consciousness and applied so again, great opportunity to take something very complex and simplify it.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I love the way that you frame this. This is not something I really thought about going into, and I definitely want to go back into kind of the basic components of emotional intelligence. But what, what you just helped me stumble upon in my own mind, is one of the barriers that I think highly creative people have, and I know it's a barrier for me, is I must be creating something unique. I must have new ideas. I must be sharing new perspectives. Otherwise, what's the point somebody else has done it? And I'm the kind of person that would say, Well, I can't talk about emotional intelligence because Daniel Goldman has already done it, or I can't talk about deep work and flow because Mika Chik mencihai has already done it. And then you swoop in and you say, this is an important concept, but we need somebody to explain it more simply. That's such an interesting way that you approach this, because I know this is a huge barrier for creative people emotionally This is a barrier which, again, I think that we're going to dig a little bit deeper into. So I want to talk a little bit more about what some of these key components are of emotional intelligence. And I'm sure we're not going to have the time to really zoom into each one, one piece at a time, but just what are kind of the basic five or so components of emotional intelligence.

Robin Hills: Well, if we look at the inner world, that's the inner world of self, that's the inner world of our thoughts, our feelings, our physiology and our psychology, that's very private, that's known to us, and through that, we can have an understanding and awareness of ourselves. Is, what is it that I'm good at? What is it that limits me? How do my emotions get in the way? How do I manage them, and how do I control them, which leads us into the action and component part of the inner world? How do I regulate my impulses? How do I utilize my emotions to make the decisions I need to make and to take action. Then we've got the outer world, the outer world of things, people, events, situations, and the awareness is around how other people interact with that environment, and how do we empathize with other people? So how do we actually then understand things from other people's perspectives? We don't necessarily have to agree with them, but we have to understand how they feel. We have to understand how they think, and we have to work with that in a way which treats them like another human being, like another adult, and in order to do that, we have to take action, and we have to behave. So we use our social skills to communicate with them and to build up relationships. And throughout all of this, none of this would work unless we had the motivation, the intrinsic motivation to do something differently, and the extrinsic motivation to go out and to work with other people. So the five components, self awareness, self regulation, empathy, social skills and motivation,

Zack Arnold: You've already proven you're very good at taking a very complex idea and boiling it down very simply. So even somebody that doesn't even know what the heck emotional intelligence is, now we've got something to work with. So very much. Appreciate that. Before we start to zoom into each one of these, I want to ask what I think could be, what I consider like a soapbox conversation. Me getting in my soapbox about something. And here's what I want to know, from your perspective, just your own personal feelings, all of those things that you just mentioned to me, it sounds like a no brainer. These are absolutely core essential things for me to be successful, both in a professional world, in a business setting, in a personal setting, with my relationships. Why don't we value these things? Why do we value cognitive tests and IQ, but we don't even have awareness of EQ, much less value it in our society? Why do you think that is.

Robin Hills: Well, a lot of people say to me, oh, Robin, this is just common sense, but sense is not all that common, and you're absolutely right. Zack, what people do value are cognitive tests, because they're easy measures. And at school, college, universities, what do they do? They pump us with facts. They pump us with with information. They ask us to regurgitate it in tests to make sure that we've actually understood it and remembered it. It's a way of actually showing that we've been through the course we understood it and we've got a capability of working with it at a certain level, what is not taught within schools are things like emotional intelligence. What is not taught within schools, the things like relationship development and the social skills that we need to communicate some of these ideas, these are the things that are fundamentally missing. Why? Because they're not that easy to measure, and it's only this century, in the last 25 years, that emotional intelligence tests have been developed that will measure EQ, emotional quotient. These are very good, very powerful assessments, but they're not that easy to interpret and understand. And also people have got to make a decision, hey, I'm not perfect. I've got to go away and change and other people don't like that idea.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I'm going to go even a layer deeper, and this is where I know just barely enough to be dangerous, but not enough to actually be useful, which is why I bring an expert like you, but one of my kind of, my core hypotheses about why I think this is so undervalued is going to be an extension of what you just said. But number one, it's easy to quantify IQ, and frankly, a lot of it is outdated and it's not accurate. Anyways, it doesn't take into account neuroplasticity and otherwise, but it's easy enough to quantify. Oh my IQ is this number? This defines my intelligence as this number, and whatever it is, either Wow, I'm really smart, or Ooh, I'm deficient in this so insert this knowledge, and now I can overcome this gap. But when we're talking about emotional intelligence, nobody wants to have the awareness of like, Wow. I really struggle with anxiety. Anxiety, or I'm not a very empathetic person, so I think it's not just it's harder to quantify. It's like you had said, it's our awareness of this is something that maybe I don't like about myself, and this is going to be much harder to work on, and it just makes people feel really, really uncomfortable, whereas I would guess that IQ, because it's quantifiable and logical, doesn't create nearly as much emotional discomfort, which is ironic, given what EQ is all about.

Robin Hills: No, you're absolutely right. This comes back to the self awareness component of emotional intelligence. So really, what I do is work with a lot of people to give them that self awareness and do it from a positive, appreciative perspective, but also point out some of their limitations. I don't like using the word weaknesses, because we've all got weaknesses, and usually with weaknesses, people will work on them and take something that is bad and make it not bad. What I'm interested in is helping people to understand what their strengths are, so they can work on them, build on them, and actually really flourish with them. And interestingly enough, when they actually do that, some of their weaknesses just fall away. Some of their limitations become less of a problem for them. So I think the the interesting thing here with emotional intelligence, twofold, one of the things I always ask when I'm being when I'm talking about emotional intelligence is, am I emotionally intelligent? That's an interesting question, because if I answer yes, is rather arrogant and self conceited, and suggests that there's no room for improvement. Yet, if I answered no, what on earth am I doing working in the field of emotional intelligence? It's work in progress. It depends. There are going to be times when I go into a social situation and things go incredibly well. I say the right things. I build up a relationship. Everybody feels good about themselves. I feel good about myself, and I walk away from it and I think, yeah, I've got this emotional intelligence sus and there are other times when I'll go into a situation and completely screw up. Why? Because I'm human like you. Zack, so looking at it as work in progress, the second part of what I wanted to say is that IQ is fixed in early teens, around the age of 17, but emotional intelligence can be developed, and it's thought all the way up to 70. We have an infinite number of opportunities to develop and grow our emotional intelligence. So unfortunately, I haven't got many years left. You've got a few more years than I have, but at that point, it seems that cognitive decline starts to set in. But if we then look back over our social groups over eons, who is it that the younger people turn to when they've got a problem, they turn to their elders? Why? Because they've got wisdom, and that wisdom comes from experience, and that wisdom comes from an application and an understanding of emotional intelligence, even if they didn't know anything about it at all.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, well, I would argue that, unfortunately, I would say nowadays, many of the the younger people that are looking to get that advice, it now goes to their Tiktok influencers, and they're not looking to their elders, their parents, their, you know, Sage members of their community or otherwise. But that's a conversation for another day. But I very I'm very much understand where you're coming from, and I'm glad you brought this up, because I think where you and I have a very similar lens through which we see the world, where everybody sees the kind of the negative we have, this negativity bias, all the things that are going wrong. I always want to ask, where are the opportunities? And you had brought up the opportunity that I was going to go to next, which is, we still have the opportunity to work on this and improve upon it when it comes to, like you said, intelligence by about, give or take, 1820, years old, intelligence is fixed, and there's a lot of lot of research around neuroplasticity, which is that you can't continue to learn things, but you're not going to become twice as smart between 20 and 40. But with your emotional intelligence, I in myself, I've gone through this journey for over 20 years of emotionally I'm a completely different person than when I first started my career, 20 plus years ago, completely different person. My intelligence, not that different, but my emotional relationship to the world. My emotional relationship to you know, my wife, to my kids, to my co workers, to my friends, is very, very different than the kind of person I was in my 20s. And. Because I've learned this is something that's absolutely crucial that I constantly will prioritize as a skill, rather than I guess I'm just an anxious person, or I guess I'm just a shy introvert. It is what it is. It's not I love that you bring up this idea of not using the word weakness. I don't know if you're familiar with Dr Scott Barry Kaufman, one of the world's experts on creativity. I'd done a conversation with him recently on the podcast talking about how creative people have a much higher level of emotional sensitivity and empathy. And we talked about how people use the word quote, unquote, disabilities and disabilities or weaknesses, in your case, they're all within a certain context. So me being, you know, highly sensitive, highly empathetic human being, that's one of my superpowers as a storyteller. It's not so much one of my superpowers when I read the news. So it can, it can go both directions depending on context. So where I wanted to take all of that to go next is I want to start going deeper into one of these five components, which I think is the most essential, because without it, the rest don't matter. Which is awareness. I tell my students over and over, whatever it is that you're working towards, whether it's you just want to build better habits, or whatever it is you want to improve upon, you can't improve upon anything without awareness. So let's just assume that somebody has a very low level of awareness of their emotional intelligence. Where do we start by getting a better sense of our baseline for our emotional intelligence?

Robin Hills: Well, often that person will be in denial, and a lot of people I see within the corporate world will actually say, Oh, I'm incredibly emotionally intelligent. Well, if anybody ever says that to me,

Zack Arnold: I was just gonna say, if somebody answers that, then that means you're probably not.

Robin Hills: But how am I going to convince that person that becomes so ingrained in the way in which they're thinking that they are a super powered, emotionally intelligent person. Well, the thing to do is to actually empathize with them. Say to them, okay, right? So you feel you've got emotional intelligence. What evidence is there to suggest that? And what feedback have you had around that? And what is it that gets in the way for you using that kind of superpower in the way which you want it to that tends to open up a discussion? Now, ideally, ideally, which is often not possible, I'll get them to sit down and to take a psychometric, a personality assessment, something like the Myers, Briggs Type Indicator or disc or a questionnaire based on the Big Five, or even better, the EQI 2.0 which I'm qualified in, because that then gives us a discussion point around what they're telling me through the psychometric what their strengths are, and then we can highlight some of the areas for improvement. And as I've said to you, more often than not, we're not looking at the lowest points. We're looking at some of the midpoints, and we're looking at some of the strengths over blade that then flipped to become a weakness. So a lot of it is based around self awareness, giving that person much more of an insight around themselves, holding up a mirror, and the majority of people really don't like what they see, but it's a case of holding their hand and saying, look, let's unpick this. Let's look at the good bits, and let's build on these good bits and get them to really work better for you. And then the other component there is the awareness of other people and the empathy piece. And so it really is about them working as a team player? What is it that they do as a team player? Are they prepared to roll their sleeves up and get mucky and get dirty and to serve the customer and to serve the members of the team? Or are they so far, I was going to say something quite crude, they'd so far up their own that they so so far removed from reality, that they think they are the most wonderful person within the organization or on the planet. So how do we work with that? Because that, to a certain extent, is a reality. It's their reality, but it's not a correct reality, and what we've got to do is to help them to understand that there are billions of other people on the planet that could benefit from their wisdom and their knowledge.

Zack Arnold: First of all, I want to let you know you have the permission to be as crude as necessary. I always talk about I like to talk about the quality. Parts out loud. So just to paraphrase, you know, people that have their heads so far up their asses that they have no awareness whatsoever, there no I said it now I put it out there. Now You're safe. You're more than welcome, please. You've said it. Yes, exactly so given that you said that most often, this can be an uncomfortable or kind of a negative experience for somebody when they had this self awareness. Are there any specific stories that come to mind where working with somebody that thought, I feel like I'm very emotionally intelligent, and then all of a sudden they go through this assessment? Can you think of one or two very specific stories where people realize, whoa, I was not aware of any of these things?

Robin Hills: Yeah, I've got a wonderful story. I won't mention any names, I won't give you any inspiration as to who the person is, but somebody had taken one of my courses on emotional intelligence and one of my online courses, and they then contacted me, having taken the course, and said, Oh, I'm very interested in finding out more about my emotional intelligence. Would it be possible for you to coach me and work with me? And I'm very interested in taking one of the tools that you mentioned, particularly the emotional intelligence quotient, to ventri, the EQI 2.0 that you mentioned within the course. So I said, Yeah, that will be fine. He then told me that he thought he was incredibly emotionally intelligent, so there probably wasn't a lot from him to learn through this assessment. Okay, right? Well, let's see what the results of this assessment tell us. Well, when the results came in, he was so low on every single facet. I'd never seen anything like it at all. I then had to go back to the the organization and the managing director of the organization that I got trained with, one of one of the psychologists I built up a wonderful relationship over the years with, and say to him, Can you have a look at this, and can you give me some indication as to what we're seeing here? Because I'd never seen anything like this at all. And he had a look at it, and he said to me, Robin, I've never seen anything like this. So he said, What I suggest you do is just to go through the process that you would normally go through in terms of giving me feedback and see what the reaction is, which was fairly good, sound advice. So what I did is I sat down with the young man, and I said to him, right, well, what we're going to do is we're going to look at each of these facets of emotional intelligence, and I'll get you to assess yourself based upon what you think your capability is on a scale of one to 10. Well, interestingly enough, when we started to look at that, he thought he was all 910 with virtually everything. So I then said, Well, it's very interesting, because when we look at your results, they're in complete contrast to what it is that you've said. So what it is suggesting is that there's a lot of room for improvement around most of the components of emotional intelligence. So it's going to go back to what you were talking about prior to that question. Zack it. It's a case of giving you this awareness and getting you to go away and think about it, and getting you to come back to me once you really thought through these results, his first reaction was exactly what I expected. He was incredibly angry, angry with the test. He said it was absolutely useless.

Zack Arnold: I was just gonna say it's got to be the tests fault, right? Can't be me. Yeah, it's that test, and it's you

Robin Hills: Exactly Zack, because once he'd had a good go at the test, it was then my fault. And I said, Well, hang on a minute. I didn't answer the questions. All I'm doing is, is feeding back to you what the results were, and the results are what, not what you wanted, and to be honest with you, the results are not what I wanted, but the results are the results. So what I'd like you to do is to go away and think about how you answer the questions, what frame of mind you were in at the time, and whether we can actually learn something through that. So he stomped off in an absolute rage. And I know, okay, right? I'll never hear from him again. So I then fed back to the supplier of the test and said, Well, this is what happened. Then I said, If I ever hear from the young man again, it'll be one. To follow, and I'll let you know. Two months later, I got an email from him, Robin, I'd like to have another conversation with you. Okay, right? So we had another conversation. He said, I've got a way of thoughts about these things, and I think, yeah, most of those results were exactly as you had described in the test that described. It's given me some insights. It's given me to some things to work on. I have to admit, I'm not as good emotionally and intelligently as I thought I was. I thought wonderful, but that's a breakthrough. But Zack, he had to come to that realization himself. I couldn't do anything other than just reflect back to him, hold up the mirror, get him to look at it, get him to go away and think about it. And he had to come to that realization himself. The great thing there, the wonderful thing there, is that he had the maturity to be able to accept that, and he had the humility to come back to me and say I was wrong.

Zack Arnold: Well, there you go. There's some maturity and some humility, which shows maybe there's a little bit more emotional intelligence than they thought. What you one of the things that you said in there, and I love this story. You're, you're a really good storyteller. So I'm just, I'm really excited to have your energy here today, because you're, you're taking something that, again, can be very dry, it can be, you know, very academic, and turning it into something that's emotional and fun to learn about. But this idea of reflection, of holding up a mirror, I've experienced this for years, both myself working with therapists, working with psychologists as the patient, but also with me as a coach that I can usually in a 30 minute call or less. It's usually about 10 minutes into the call. I'm like, this is the thing we need to work on. This is the challenge. But sometimes it'll take a year for this person to say, wow. Like, I'm I'm trying to do way too much with my life, and I need to focus my goals, or I'm really struggling with building relationships. I'm like, I could have told you that in minute 17 of our first conversation, but until somebody discovers it for themselves, they don't hear it. They don't internalize it. So that's where I think having both these assessments, but having somebody that can reflect that, if you're in a position to work with, somebody that can reflect that, are absolutely crucial to develop this awareness. So having said that, I want to over index on the awareness because there are these other five components. But I really believe that until the awareness component is there, or you're at least working on it, it's hard to dig into the other four. Let's assume somebody is listening to this today, and they're thinking, actually, I'm really good at emotional intelligence, which means maybe I'm not so good at emotional intelligence, or I'm aware that this is an area that I need work on already. What are some self assessment methods in addition to you can go online and take a test, but what are some other simple ways that people can just start to develop assessments of themselves and develop more awareness?

Robin Hills: Well, it's a really interesting question, because people can go and take some online tests, and they're fun, they are good fun, but they're not scientifically validated, and they're not very reliable. And really, you do need somebody who's a qualified practitioner or a coach to help you to really understand what the results are and what they need and to work with you, so I will add that as a caveat, but one, when I'm running a live workshop with people looking at self awareness, if the organization has not got the budget to run the psychometric assessments, I have a wonderful little exercise that works incredibly well, and it gives people a lot of great insights that they've never, ever been aware of. And anybody can do it. And what I do is I actually say to them, which goes in the face of modern thinking around training and mobile devices, right? Get your phone out, because what I would like you to do is to text three people, family, friends, your boss, your work colleagues, your clients, anybody, and I give them what to say. You can text whatever you like, but here's a template for you. I'm learning about my emotional intelligence. I'm in a training workshop at the moment. Can you give me some indication of some of the things that you like and value about me? And I just leave it usually I will get them to run that exercise before the coffee break, so that they've got 1015 minutes to get their text coming in. Now most people sit there looking at their mobile phone thinking, I don't want to do this, but in the end, I just say to them, Look, it doesn't matter who you tell. Text. Just get three texts back. Well, the first text comes back, and it gives people some real insights around what they're good at, what people value. And once they've had a text in, they get a bit of a buzz from that, and they think, Oh, I'll text a few more people. So what I'm willing not to do is to say to them, okay, you've got three or four texts. Let's go on to the next part of the exercise, which is absolutely vital. What I then do is get them to write down on a bit of flip chart paper the feedback that they've had, and I've said, All I want are the affirmative skill sets that people value and like within you. I'm not interested in anything that comes after a but now, whilst they're doing that, they're getting more and more text coming in, and they're writing out screeds on this flip chart paper. It doesn't matter, it's just giving them some insights. And I've had a couple of people on a couple of occasions that I've actually had to take out of the room and sit them down quietly because they've been in floods of tears. Nobody has ever said this to me. I'm really, really pleased, and I'm really proud. Nobody's ever been this kind to me before. And more often than not, people will tell other people what they don't like, what they're not good at, but they don't tell people the things that they do like. So once they've got their flip chart paper, I make them own it, they have to present back to the group, and they have to utilize the appropriate language to say, this is what I'm good at, not I think I'm good at this, or I don't necessarily agree with this, but no, nothing like that. They've actually got to stand up there and say, This is what I'm good at. A lot of people struggle with that, and I make sure that they do it, and I can be quite assertive in terms of getting them to do it, but I think it's vitally, vitally important, because it's giving them that awareness that they need to actually understand that they're actually quite good at doing things despite the fact everybody tells them that they're not.

Zack Arnold: Number one, I absolutely love this exercise. Number two, I'm just going to put it out there now, on the recording, on the record, I'm probably going to blatantly steal this from you. I love this idea so much. I'm probably going to do it with my students going forwards, because I've been through a similar exercise. And it never really occurred to me that this is something that can really It never occurred to me to do this live with people. One of the the exercises that I take my students through in a workshop called Design your dream career is better understanding what skills, abilities, knowledge, what can I leverage in the world that I've already been been in to pivot to another world, but I've never thought to actually make this a live component, to reach out to somebody and do this in the middle of a workshop. It's always been here's a list of questions that afterwards you can ask your colleagues, ask your friends, your family, what do you come to me for, for guidance, what am I good at? Why are you friends with me? Whatever it is. So I've given them kind of the list of prompts, but I've never seen the process live. So I'm totally going to steal this from you, if you're okay with that, because I love the idea of this exercise.

Robin Hills: Look, I cannot claim it to be an original idea. I got it from a coach that I was working with, and we were talking about working around self awareness over a coffee break, and she gave me this idea, and I thought that is absolutely wonderful. Now I've contacted her for a few times afterwards to say, look, I've used this. Can I take you out and buy you lunch or everything, but she's always too busy, which I'm a little bit disappointed with, because she's not too busy, but I really do want to thank her for that. It's a wonderful little exercise. Obviously, I've added a Robin flavor to Sure, you'll add a Zack flavor to it, but that's what makes it really special as an exercise. That's what will make it work.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I love that. So I want to go a little bit deeper into helping people have more awareness of the skills, the abilities, but even more importantly, the character traits and the emotional character traits that they don't see that can make them valuable in other areas, because so many people right now, especially those working in creative industries, the world, has just fallen apart, both figuratively and literally, on fire. And we're going to get into how artificial intelligence factors into this in a little bit. But I think so many, so many people, have been trained, and I would dare say, conditioned by society. By the Industrial Revolution, by productivity, by capitalism, to be defined by their job titles and be defined by their hard skills. So whether it's in this exercise in the live workshop or other exercises, what do you find, in general, are some of the most common realizations that people have about their emotional skills and their emotional traits, where they realize, Wow, this is actually something that could be really valuable to other people in other areas. What are some of a few of those character traits?

Robin Hills: Well, look, let's, let's take it right down to absolute basics here. What is an emotion? An emotion is a physiological and or a psychological reaction to our environment as it changes. Emotions contain data, so what we can do is to use our intelligence to interpret that data in order that we can behave in a constructive way. Now, some of these emotions do not feel pleasant. They're quite unpleasant in terms of the way in which they make us feel. But our skill and our capability is to take those unpleasant emotions, to recognize the data in that emotion as to why we are feeling that way, and to utilize it in a way to build up relationships and make the decisions that we need to make. So one of the things I would encourage you and your listeners to do is to forget this idea of positive and negative emotions and just look at emotions as being pleasant or unpleasant, and am I using my emotions in a constructive or destructive way? So if we look at something like happiness, everybody says, Oh, it's a wonderful emotion. It's a positive emotion, but it's not an appropriate emotion to show to solemn occasion such as a funeral. And have you ever tried to communicate with somebody who's deliriously happy about some sort of serious issue that needs discussing within a business environment. It is incredibly hard look. We need to talk about the sales figures. They're not at the level that we need to have them at. What is it that you're going to do about it? Don't worry. Be happy. Hello son, hello flowers, hello trees. It's just not going to work. So looking at so called negative emotions, you've mentioned sadness earlier. Sadness is an incredibly positive emotion. It does not feel good, but we do need to understand that sadness is there to help us to come to terms with a loss. I've lost my both my parents in the last couple of years. I was incredibly sad to lose them, and I needed to go through that sadness as part of the grieving process, to recognize and value them for what they were, and then to put that and compartmentalize it, and then move on from that situation. The relationship that I had with them is still intact, but they're not here anymore, and I've got to make my own way in the world, and they're not there for me anymore, and I've just got to move on from that point, I was just going to mention anger, because everybody talks about anger as being a negative emotion. Anger is not a negative emotion if you use it to write a wrong, if somebody goes against one of your core values, you need to fire yourself up and motivate yourself in order to write that wrong, and to do it through a laser precision application of anger. So that was just another example I wanted to throw into the mix. Over to you, Zack,

Zack Arnold: Sure, and I love the way that you frame those and the idea of positive emotions, negative emotions, to use a slightly different word to what you had said. I like to think of the emotions. Is it a useful emotion, or is it a not useful emotion in a certain context? And like you said, happiness, not a very useful emotion at a funeral, but sadness, even though it can feel bad and it can be very difficult to process it, sadness is a very useful emotion when you're working through grief, and you and I, it sounds like have very similar stories, where over the last two to three years, I too, have lost my parents, one of which, you know, my father literally passed away last summer, and my mother, she's still alive, but she's, excuse me, she's not my mother anymore, and she has, you know, experienced immense cognitive decline and dementia, so she's physically still with us. But, I mean, I haven't had a real conversation with my mom for almost two years now, and one of the things that I learned talking about awareness and lack of emotional intelligence, because I've spent so much time working on awareness, working through these emotions, I hope that I can accurately say I feel I'm a pretty emotionally intelligent person, and those that are. Experts, physicians, therapists, and otherwise, they will often say you have a very high level of emotional intelligence, and you seem to have that high level of awareness. But I found a blind spot, which is I did not know how to experience sadness, and when, all of a sudden, this wave of losing both my parents at the same time hit me, it was just I was washed over with the fact that I don't understand sadness logically. I can explain it. I could write about sadness, but on an emotional level, I had never experienced it at this intense of a level, and I refused to let it be something that I wanted in my life, because I'm just conditioned as I'm a machine you just power through who needs sadness, but then I really learned that it was probably one of the most useful emotions for me at the time. And once I let myself experience the sadness, all of a sudden, I was able to work through and accept the situation. So that's just kind of one microcosmic example of how even I, as somebody who thought they had a high level of emotional intelligence, found a huge blind spot. Once I was aware of that blind spot, I was able to work through something.

Robin Hills: Oh, Zack, look. Let me share with you that I find anger an incredibly difficult emotion to work with. I can feel intense levels of anger, yeah, and I know I can feel these intense levels of anger, and I know why I can feel them, and why I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling, both physiologically and psychologically, and at three o'clock in the morning when I can't do anything about it, theoretically, oh yes, I could put that to one side and forget about it, because It's not an appropriate emotion for me to be experiencing at this time of night? No, I feel it. It's intense. I've got these thoughts going through my head around what I'm going to say and how I'm going to deal with it, and it's not an appropriate utilization of that emotion. But it hurts. I feel it, and I can't do anything about it. I know all the theory, and I run the theory through in my mind, and just does not get any better. So I think we've just got to recognize this part of the awareness that you're talking about, even though we are feeling the intensity of these emotions, and we've got that awareness. It doesn't change anything, because physiologically and psychologically, we will be reacting to that emotion, whether we like it or not.

Zack Arnold: So I want to go into another one of these components, again, knowing that I could probably do a five part series, each of them, three hours going into each of these and I would not be bored. I would probably bore my audience to tears. But I love talking about this kind of stuff and going deep. But I feel that given the present state of creative industries, the present state of just those that do creative work for a living, dealing with their emotions, the second of these components that I want to get into a little bit deeper is empathy, the ability to be aware of where other people are, what they are feeling, and how that can be both a strength and, I don't want to say a weakness, but it can be something that holds us back. And then I want to talk about how this ability to have empathy and awareness and emotional intelligence, I believe, makes us infinitely valuable and irreplaceable, as everybody is starting to get replaced by artificial intelligence. So let's dig a little bit deeper into understanding empathy.

Robin Hills: Sure. Well, firstly, let's go back to what the definition of empathy is. Empathy is understanding things from other people's perspectives. It's understanding why people are thinking and feeling the way in feeling, the way in which they are feeling or thinking at that particular moment in time. You don't have to agree with what they're saying. You don't have to agree with how they're behaving. You just have to understand. And I think one of the most important things around empathy is that empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is treating another person in the same way that I would want to be treated, and not in a sympathetic way, in an adult to adult way. So it's it's listening, it's understanding, it's hearing the other person, and it's listening at a deep level so that the other person feels that they're being heard and that they are being valued. Sympathy is it's an emotional response. I want to make myself feel better, therefore I am going to sympathize with you that is not empathy, that puts me in a higher level of playing than what you or the other person is. So what we need to do is to get everybody on a level playing field with empathy, to have. That level of understanding.

Zack Arnold: I'm very glad that you brought that up, because, and I didn't mean to interrupt, but I was just thinking that, huh? I really want to talk about the difference between sympathy and empathy, but I'm not sure that it would necessarily be applicable to this, so I'm going to keep that one in my back pocket. The fact that you went to it right away tells me that you and I are definitely on the same wavelength, because, at least for me, and this is where you're the expert, and I'm not. I always talk about, especially with creative people, that if you can't empathize with the work that you're doing with the characters that are on the screen, or the characters that are in the book, and the audience that's going to receive that message, if you can't have this transfer of emotion from what you're feeling to what the audience is feeling, then you're easily replaceable at this point. If you're just going through the motions and you're pressing the buttons with all the technology that's coming into play, there's a world where it's not going to be hard to replace you in the near future if you haven't been replaced already, but if you understand and empathize with your audience and what they're feeling when they're experiencing this story or this photo or this painting or whatever it is, and you can transfer that emotion through your content. In my estimation, at least in our lifetimes, I can't imagine there's going to be a world where a machine can do that because it can't feel things. So I'm curious what you think about all that

Robin Hills: I would I would agree with you 100% I'm going to flip it and turn it around 360 degrees, because of great exercise in terms of helping people to build their empathy is to go along and immerse themselves in a very good book that's written from first person perspective. It gets inside that person's head, and it helps the reader to understand and empathize with that character. You may not like the character, but you're actually understanding the character's motives, the character's reactions, the character's way of behaving. And again, that can be transferred into an incredibly good film where a character has got that real empathy, the actor has managed to empathize totally with the character that they are portraying. And if you're then following that character through, you can really and truly understand that person at a very, very deep level. Now, the majority of times when we are not reading and not watching a film, we're actually dealing with people at a kind of cognitive emotional level. But it's very, very superficial, because on a day to day basis, you don't have those great emotional lurches from one point to another. So this is a great opportunity to go away and to experience some real qualities around empathy. Now, the other part of the conversation that you were talking about is the fact that robots, machine technology, artificial intelligence, will never be able to empathize. And it goes back to another point that you alluded to earlier, in terms of neuroplasticity, while you and I are talking together here, Zack, even though it is across the pond, you are changing my brain. I am changing your brain, albeit very subtly, through neuroplasticity, even if it's just reinforcing some of those pathways that we utilize most of the time. Through that neuroplasticity, through that brain change, we're actually creating each other. And it's not that we can't exist without each other, it's the fact that we need each other in order to exist. So empathy is a core component of being human, and we can do it. We can do it incredibly well. The robots can't Why? Because we have a wonderful bit of kit, bit of technology inside our heads, a human brain.

Zack Arnold: I'm going to stop everybody for a second, because if you missed it, this to me, was a mic drop moment. We are creating each other. I don't think I've ever put it so succinctly, but I absolutely love the way that you put that, and I felt that when you said it speaking of emotional intelligence and emotions and feelings versus logic, I really felt that, and that's the reason why I continue to tell people to do creative work. There is a future for us, and that's why, the other reason that I double down on this, and this is where we we don't need to veer into understanding the technology, because I know that you're not an expert on artificial intelligence and how it's programmed, and I'm not either. I actually kind of am allergic to technology as much as I try to avoid it, but I always think to myself that, let's say that a programmer or. Most the like the most brilliant minds on the planet, at some point, they need to write a program that explains to artificial intelligence, this is what emotions are, and this is what emotions feel like. We can't do that because we don't understand. It's like saying we're going to explain what consciousness is to a machine, but we don't know what the hell consciousness is. Explain love, explain anger. In words, you can explain what it looks like, but to really be able to program what it feels like, I personally don't know how that's possible, which is, again, why I'm not worried about us being useful in this new future, as long as we have a high level of emotional intelligence.

Robin Hills: Sure, sure. Look, let's, let's simplify all of this.

Zack Arnold: Thank you. Simplify. You're talking to a simplifier,

Robin Hills: Yeah. And make it a little bit more realistic. You know, everybody seems to be really, really worried about the machines taking over the world. And you they can get politicians actually then creating this worrying future of doom whereby the robots are going to take over from us. And you then get some actors from Hollywood who come out, and they've been on a film with robots on it. And then the media picks up on a sound bite where they say, Oh, the robots are going to take over the world at some point. And you even, we even have the late Pope talking about artificial intelligence taking over the world. Rubbish, absolute nonsense, for all the reasons that you and I have been talking, how do we build consciousness into a machine? How do we actually understand consciousness before we even start programming a machine, we can't even understand the consciousness of, you know, one of our loved family pets. We don't know how our dogs think. We don't know how our dogs feel. We know that they have emotions, but we can't communicate with them beyond a simplistic level. And we don't know what it is like to be consciously aware of being a dog. We don't know we know that cetaceans, whales and dolphins, are very, very good at communicating with each other along across large distances. We know elephants can do the same. We can't communicate with these species. What is it like to be a conscious cetacean or a conscious pachyderm? We do not know. And until we can actually answer those questions. We can't infuse that into machines.

Zack Arnold: I love that approach. I love this take on it, and I want to continue going down this rabbit hole of how we can really leverage our humanity, our human skills, our emotional skills and our emotional intelligence, so we can be useful in the future, which I believe everybody can be. The two areas that I want to go into that we've talked some about. One of them would be empathy. The second one would be how our emotions connect to our ability to get into creative flow. I know that this is something you talk about as well. So if I'm somebody that creates something for a living, whether it's movies, television, books, you know, paintings, photography, something where I'm telling a story in some form, and when I share that story with others, I wanted to create an emotion. I think there are a lot of people, for example, that would say, Well, you know, I'm just, I'm not a really emotional person. I'm really more of a technician. I know how to throw the shots together. I know how to put the words together, and they're not as good as transferring that emotion to others, whereas I am very well aware of and this is coming from a lot of feedback from others, people that I've worked with. I have a longtime collaborator, one of the creators of the television show, Cobra Kai, where he said, What differentiates you is you're the guy who always brings the feels. He literally said that as a quote. He's like, whenever we need somebody to bring the feels, you're the one that we want to ask. But some could say, if we're thinking of fixed mindset versus a growth mindset, I'm not a very empathetic person. I'm not a very emotional person versus, well, I'm a very emotional person. But again, these are learned skills, so let's say that I'm somebody that creates these emotions for others for a living, where can I start to enhance my ability to access these emotions? So again, it makes me more valuable in this new future.

Robin Hills: Well, what I would suggest that these people do is not to look at ways of accessing the emotion, but just to have the capability of to look somebody in the eye and say, Actually, I'm very good at understanding how other people feel, and I'm actually very good at infusing that emotion already into my storytelling. So recognize it as a core quality and of course, strength that the person has, and forget about the fact. That it's all around emotions. It's it's about making other people feel the way in which you want them to feel. So if you want them to feel sad, if you want them to feel angry, if you want them to feel happy, how do you build that into your story? How do you build that into your characters. And a lot of people are extremely good at doing this, yet they're denying themselves the knowledge that they've got this strength. They're denying themselves the awareness that they've already got that capability. So the first thing to do is to say, actually, I'm very good at this, and then build upon it, rather than actually dig deep into emotions and say, oh, I need to get better at this. Yeah, we could all dig deeper. I need to get better at emotions. And I'd be working in this field years, and understanding it and trying to develop it, one of the things I'd like to do and to build upon this, this topic of empathy and creativity, I'd like to build in four components of emotional intelligence that we have as human beings, that artificial intelligence does not have and will never, ever be able to have. The first two components, we've talked in quite depth about what is creativity and innovation, and that then leads into things like storytelling and art, whatever that art may be. The other is empathy. It's building up relationships. It's networking. It's having a deep understanding of other human beings. Artificial Intelligence cannot make judgments. It doesn't know what is right or wrong. It's got no ethics. It's not got any values. It doesn't know how to combine those two components in order to make good quality decisions. And the fourth component, again, something that we can have a whole podcast discussion around spirituality. Why do we do what we do? What is our search for meaning? Why am I here on this planet? What is it that I can do to make whatever small changes need to be made within the world? How can I help and grow other people that is an important component of being a human, that is beyond the capability of artificial intelligence.

Zack Arnold: I love that those are all great areas for people to start digging into. And again, how do I differentiate myself? How do I position myself as valuable in that new future? I want to go a little bit deeper into something that I've been just absolutely obsessed with for, I think, well, over 10 years now, and that is this concept of specifically getting into a state of flow, or state of deep work, of concentration. And many people talk about this and they teach it. You know, anybody that wants to dig deeper into this, one of my favorite conversations that I've ever had is with Cal Newport, who's the author of the book deep work, but it's often talked about and taught at a very cognitive level. You need to separate yourself from distractions. You need to be working on one thing. It takes about 20 minutes to get into a state of flow. Then you're focused on whatever that task is. But few talk about the emotional level of creative flow. And whenever somebody asks the question, just kind of this proverbial question, if you could have dinner with anybody living or dead, I always repurpose it as if I could have a podcast conversation with anybody living or dead. The first two people that I think of are number one on my list will always be Viktor Frankl. Number two is Mihai Chik mencihai, who literally wrote the book flow. So talk to me a little bit more about how our emotions and emotional intelligence factor into our ability to be really focused and creative.

Robin Hills: I think it's incredibly difficult to actually say, Well, you press this button A, you pull this lever B, and you turn this handle C, and suddenly you're in flow. Because what gets me into flow will be completely different to what gets you into flow. And I think it goes back to this fundamental point that we've been discussing throughout this podcast, is having this awareness. And in order to get into flow, you've got to be in the right frame of mind, the right state, the right situation, to play to your strengths. And when you play to your strengths, click, you get into flow. And you don't have to think, I need to get into flow. Suddenly you're in that space and things are going well. Time stands still. You do not have to think, I'm an inflow. It's just happening. You're in. Join yourself. You're making the right decisions. You're capable of doing things that you thought were beyond your capability. Now, how do you how do you do that from a simple, very, very simple perspective around emotions, I talked about unpleasant emotions and pleasant emotions, and you talked about useful and useless emotions, or less useful emotions. Let's look at it as being when you feel pleasant and you're using your emotions usefully in order to work in a constructive way. That's when you get into flow. So nothing more complicated than that. Get yourself into a position where emotionally, you're feeling good, you're feeling everything is going well. It is incredibly easy for me to say, but it's incredibly hard to do.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, yeah. This is one of those where it's a lot easier to write 1000 word blog post about it than to actually sit down and be able to do it. But you're so right in that once you're once you're more aware of where your unique skill sets are, that's where it becomes much, much simpler, not necessarily easier sometimes, but simpler to identify. These are the things that create a state of flow. And I won't go into all the science and the research I've talked about with some other guests, but we literally will raise our happiness index, or our the fact that we feel satisfied with the work that we do, the more that we get into a state of flow. There are few, few easier ways to feel that sense of satisfaction, fulfillment and happiness, than when we're in flow. But I feel like that is an exact opposition, where just about everybody is right now. So I with the with the time we have remaining, I want to go into one more of these key components, where, again, we're not going to be able to cover, cover all five, but we've really dug deep into awareness. And it sounds like we can't have any of these conversations without awareness. We've talked about empathy. Now I want to talk about motivation, because I feel like right now that is an absolutely short dire supply. And I'm going to share a quote from another podcast that I did with the author, Greg McKeown, who's the author of the books essentialism and effortless. And of all the conversations I've had. This is probably one of the top 10 quotes that I quote over and over and over and over again, which also goes back to awareness. He says there are two types of people in this world. There are those that are burned out, and those who know that they are burned out, which basically means all of us, in some way, shape or form, are burned out, especially with the state of the world, with the state of all these creative industries, we lack motivation. We feel like we're languishing. We feel like we're burned out. So let's talk a little bit more about this core component of emotional intelligence, motivation.

Robin Hills: Motivation is a fascinating topic. It's very, very difficult for us to be able to package up box. It's like nailing a jellyfish to a wall. It's incredibly slippery. And look, Zack, let's be honest, because what motivates me on a Monday morning is not going to motivate me on a Saturday morning, and what motivates me on a Tuesday afternoon, it's not going to motivate me on a Friday afternoon. We just got to recognize that our motivators and motivational situations will change. But inherently, there are two parts of motivation that we've already talked about, this intrinsic motivation that we get from it within. What is it that keeps us going? And that is something that we can't define. We just know that it drives us forward. The second component of motivation is the extrinsic motivation. It's the motivation that we have from inside, sorry, from outside, it's the motivation we get from the environment that we're working within, the people that we're working within in certain events. So if I can't be bothered to get up on a Monday morning, my intrinsic motivation is at a very, very low edge and a very low edge, my wife will extrinsically motivate me at some point by kicking me out of bed and saying, Go on, Robin, get to work. So fortunately, my intrinsic motivation is a lot stronger than that, and I get out of bed long before she does. But that's another story. So really, if we look at motivation, we just gotta look at it from these two perspectives. Where do I get my motivation from? Sometimes I'll get it fully from within. Sometimes I'll get it fully from out west. Now, sometimes I get it motivated from other. People, because I want to please them. I want to do the right thing. I want to do the right thing that is expected of me, and that then will drive my motivation. And there are other times when I know I need to do things in a certain way because it is vitally important. And so that will be the drive that motivates me to move forward. Now in order, in order for us to be fully motivated, we need to have some energy. And so there is a little bit of anger dollop to into motivation in order to drive ourselves forward. And then we have to do is to combine it with other emotions in order that we can then utilize the motivation in an appropriate way. Again, another complex topic that we need to talk about at some other point in the future, but if you recognize anger as being a driving force there, whether it's through, I need to do something to right this wrong. I need to do it because this is what's driving me, because of my values. I need to do it because I'm feeling an element of jealousy here or envy, and I need to make sure that I prove to myself that I can do it, whatever, whatever it is, there is a little bit of anger that drives us forward in terms of our motivation,

Zack Arnold: Which again, goes back to anger being useful in this context, rather than not really having any use. Or, you know, like you said, being constructive.

Robin Hills: Yes, I think it's a case of getting all of these emotions in the right level of balance, because too much can be problematical and as problematical as too little. Yeah, that's the hard bit.

Zack Arnold: And when I look back on whether it's podcast interviews, articles that I've written in the past, any kind of content that I put out there. Usually what performs the best is not the things that well, I need to create this every week. This is on the calendar. Here's this week's topic. It's when I was like, Oh, I just, I gotta write about this thing. I gotta get it out of my system. Like, I remember an article I wrote about five years ago. It hit me on a Sunday morning, and I never work on Sundays, but Sunday night, I'm just writing away, right? I just, on a whim, released it just to the students in my community, one of them, and I wasn't even a matter of it had been published. I just said I wanted to get everybody's feedback. Somebody shared it in a Facebook group. Three days later, it had been read by 150,000 people. And I was like, what just happened? But that was me expressing an emotion and anger with a circumstance, realizing that there were literally over 100,000 people that were feeling the exact same thing, and I was helping to express it. I could have taken that anger out on my dog, out on a wall, out on my spouse and my partner, but instead, I took the anger out in the words, and I was able to transfer that emotion to other people that were feeling it, and all of a sudden, boom, it just spread everywhere. So that's that would that's an example of when I've been able to find a way to constructively express something that could be construed as negative, but again, make it constructive.

Robin Hills: Yes, and the other thing is, you can't sit down and plan that out in terms of painting by numbers. Oh, I wish I could too. You know, that would be a wonderful use of that particular emotion, but you can't. You just have to be in the present moment, which brings in a completely different part of of emotional intelligence right at the end of the podcast, and that's mindfulness,

Zack Arnold: Yeah. And mindfulness is, again, an incredibly important component of awareness, and this is where, again, we could, we could easily go down this rabbit hole for more than an hour and a half. I will put resources to a few to the other conversations we've done about mindfulness, but going back to this idea of man, I wish that I could just bottle up that anger every Thursday morning constructively use it to get 100,000 people to read an article every Friday. But in developing the awareness, I've learned how to create the conditions where I can say, Hmm, this is something I'm ruminating on. This is something I'm thinking about. And maybe I'm not the only one that's feeling these emotions, so I'm going to express those emotions, and that's how I've been able to connect with my audience. It's in where I started years ago was here are five quick tips to eliminate distractions and be more productive and get work done, because that's where a lot of people start, because they're learning. But then I realized when it was less here are five quick tips for x, y, z versus I'm struggling with this. I'm frustrated with this thing. I'm feeling this thing. I'm feeling this thing. I'm going to share it with you. That's when people have connected with me more than anything else. I'd written a post years ago about burnout, and at the time, everybody in my industry said, you can't talk about burnout. But everybody started to say, Me too, but I was too afraid to share it. So. Which again, comes back to this core thesis of both awareness and what's going to separate us from the machines. If how you're valuable to people is just putting together some boilerplate social media content, YouTube videos, articles about the five quick tips to do, x, y, z, AI is already replacing all of that. But if you find a way to communicate your own emotions in whatever story form it is, whether it's a feature film, a TV series, a script, a book, a novel, a painting, you learn how to transfer that emotion. That's what's going to draw people to you. But there's, there's one last barrier that I want to talk about, which would be the opposite of motivation. And again, this could be a huge, huge topic, but I feel like there's a lot of procrastination that's stemming from fear, that's stemming from imposter syndrome, that's stemming from what is the point of even doing this anymore? So if we were to leave people today with just some sense of they have so much inertia, there's just so much languishing, there's so much a feeling of hopelessness. What is the point of even doing this anymore? What's just one small, micro step of emotional awareness, emotional intelligence that can just help them just get a little bit of momentum?

Robin Hills: Oh, I can sum that up, really, really, really nicely. Zack, imperfect action is better than perfect inaction. I love that. Just get out there and do it. Just get out there and do it.

Zack Arnold: Like you said, you're very good at simplifying the complex, which I love that one of the key mindsets that I share with all the students in my academy is that you should not pursue perfect at the expense of progress. I'm a recovering perfectionist. I always make the joke in our office hours calls that I am the founder, president, vice president, secretary and treasurer of perfectionist anonymous. But I've learned how to overcome those emotions, of fear, of imposter syndrome, whatever it might be, and say, I'm just going to put this thing out there, even though I get in my head, and I say, I don't know, should I do this interview with Robin? Because it's probably not going to be perfect. It's not going to go the way that I want it to go. And I have this perfect image in my head of the flow of the conversation, of what it should be, but it's not going to do that. So what's the point? Versus let's just see what happens when I talk to a total stranger on the other end of the pond about our emotions and who knows what comes out of it. So I'm always a fan of imperfect action versus say that one more time, just so people have it.

Robin Hills: Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.

Zack Arnold: Perfect inaction. I love that. So as much as I would love to talk about so many of these other components, I know that I get into a deep state of flow when we're almost at 90 minutes in, and I'm like, where did the time go? We just started talking. So this has been fascinating, but this brings us to what I call the shameless self promotion portion of today's program. For those that are thinking to themselves, this is a priority. I want to learn how to increase my emotional intelligence, my awareness, so I can be a better creative, a better partner, a better friend, whatever it might be. Talk to me about some of the resources that you have available and how people can connect with you.

Robin Hills: Yeah, well, one of the reasons why we're talking Zack is I've actually created a number of online courses based around emotional intelligence, and I have the most comprehensive range of courses so that the pinged by emotional intelligence that's available anywhere. I've got half a million students take, or learners really taking my courses in over 200 countries. Now, if I go back to imperfect action, I put these courses up on the internet. Oh, must be well over 1015, years ago, those courses don't exist in their original format anymore because the original format they were rubbish in comparison to what look at them today. But what I've done is I've actually gone on along and I've improved each of them over the years. They will never, ever be perfect in my eyes. Why? Because I'm in them, there's me talking. But I've got over 50 courses. I've made one of the courses free for your learners, insights to emotion intelligence, so that people can actually go along and try one of these courses. So hopefully you'll give them the URL within the show notes there, Zack, but if you want to go and find out more about these courses, HTTPS, Cologne, backslash, backslash, emotional dot intelligence dot courses,

Zack Arnold: All right, so emotional dot intelligence, dot courses, that is the simplest place to send people. We'll also include that additional URL for that one free course that you mentioned. Needless to say, I'm going to share an emotion that I'm very happy and very pleased that you and I connected today. I myself learned a tremendous amount from this conversation. And having spent many years digging into emotional intelligence, but I still learned a lot of cool stuff today, and I have no doubt that my listeners did as well. So having said that, I just want to show a tremendous amount of gratitude for your time and your expertise on this Friday evening for you and sharing it with all of my listeners. So thank you so much Robin.

Robin Hills: Zack, it has been wonderful. I'm feeling great contentment, and I'm also feeling a lot of gratitude as well.

Episode Credits

Edited by: Curtis Fritsch
Produced by: Debby Germino
Published by: Vim Pangantihon
Music by: Thomas Cepeda