The $10 Trillion Trust Economy: Phil Johnson's Emotional Intelligence Insights

Welcome to the social media show, where it's our goal that we learn, grow, and transform in the person want to become. Today, I'm talking with Phil Johnson. Phil is a remarkable individual whose journey from humble beginnings to founding the Master of Business Leadership program has not only transformed his life, but also impacted countless entrepreneurs and executives around the globe. Phil is a founder and CEO of the Master of Business Leadership program. For the past 23 years, MBL has been a catalyst for success, awakening the potential of individuals and generating billions in career revenue. Its alum network spans across the United States, Canada, UK, Europe, Japan, and so on and so on and so on. Phil's story is not one of success despite his origin, but because of them, he faced challenges early on, being born premature with dyslexia, a condition not widely understood in 1950s. Despite failing grades in school and being labeled a slow learner, a pivotal moment during a snowy night in 1968 sparked a decision that changed the trajectory of his life forever.

From that point on, Phil became a a student, overcoming adversities and graduating at the top of his class from the D. Groot School of Business at McMaster University. His career in the semiconductor industry and subsequent corporate executive roles took him across north american and Pacific Rim, accumulating success that left him questioning the fulfillment he sought. 1990, Phil made a life altering decision, stepping away from corporate America to fulfill a promise he made himself over five decades ago. Turning down lucrative roles, he established the Master of Business Leadership program, coming full circle to the commitment he made decades earlier. We really talked in this episode. Phil is just a great resource. He's 70 years old at the time.

It's recording, and he is really, I think from what I learned, I felt like a student here, a lot of it. He has learned so much about the connection between our emotions, what he call, he talks about emotional labor, emotional intelligence, the emotional connection which goes back into leadership and so many things, I think, that stem from a lot of the problems we have, and I do discuss that in an episode. I think this all connects back the way I'm seeing it from our conversation. The connections I made is so much of our emotional, like I said, he calls our emotional intelligence, our emotional labor that we are not doing really seems to have this profound effect, like we talked about, this victim mentality, this victimhood, how they have to stay together as they hate each other. Very interesting, very insightful episode. I really hope you guys take away as much from this. I've got page full of notes here. Without further ado, let's welcome Phil.

Phil, thank you so much for joining us on the social community show. I look forward to our conversation today.

Thanks, Tyson. I've been looking forward to our discussion as well. I'm excited to be on your show.

Yes, thank you. I'm excited to have you. When I was reading through your origin story, one thing that really stood out to me, I'd like to kind of start off with is you talked about in 68, I think you were 14 at the time when you kind of came to that shift in your life. I mean, I remember 14. All I thought about was playing football. So what was your thought process? What was going on through your head, in your head? What was the self talk or whatever that allowed you to make that shift at such a young age?

Yeah. My mother had just died the month before, and I've been born with dyslexia that I didn't actually realize I had until about 20 years later, because back in those days, there was no such thing as dyslexia, ADd or ADHD. But I remember clearly as if it was today and it was 56 years ago, because I just turned 70. I remember standing behind a factory where, close to where we lived, around midnight in a snowstorm. I was taking my dog duke for a walk. He was a blue tick hound, and he was kind of like my buddy. And I realized how short. I realized how short my life or life is because my mother just died and she'd gone through some pretty painful cancer.

And I really wanted my life to have meaning, and I really wanted to be of service, especially to, at that time, the kids that I grew up with, a lot of whom had already given up on life. So it gave me the motivation to eventually start doing what I've been doing for the last 23 years.

It's interesting at such a young age to have such a profound thought and then life plan or something like that.

Yeah, it was a lot of pain, and I was really at a very low point, and it really helped me to take responsibility for my life. And there's a saying I just discussed with my wife earlier today, that action is the antidote to fear and the key to success. So I became very motivated and in a lot of respects, a super overachiever. And it really gave me the grit that I've had for the rest of my life.

Was it something you were reading or watching or listening to or sermon or something? What gave you that courage and that forethought at such a young age, especially in a day? Back then, there wasn't so much maybe social media and YouTube and things like we have now, where you can find this information a little bit more easily.

I just had a strong desire to learn and to grow and to serve, and I really made pretty well every possible mistake you can make. And this is where my dyslexia kicks in. That regardless of the challenges that I faced, I just kept moving forward. And that's really been the key to, that's really what's helped me to get to where I am today. That kind of doggedness, grit, and desire to continue to move forward and be of service to others.

It makes me wonder, when you're talking about dyslexia, I think it's something like a quarter or a third of all billionaires have dyslexia. Do you think there's something there in a good way, like maybe a superpower or a different way of seeing the world? How do you think about that?

That's a great question. In a lot of respects, disability or things that can be perceived as a disability actually turn out to be strengths, because it forces us to do some of us, not all of us, but it forces some of us to do what I refer to as the emotional labor that's necessary to develop leadership and emotional intelligence and higher consciousness and better results. So I think it's fairly safe to say that if I hadn't been born with dyslexia and if my mother hadn't died when she did, there's no way I'd be doing what I'm doing today, because the emotional labor that it requires, that change requires in all of us, is very difficult. Very difficult. We don't like change.

Right?

It doesn't matter whether the change is good change or bad change. We don't like change. So my dyslexia kind of kicked me out of the nest and forced me to do a lot of emotional labor from the very beginning of my life that I very likely wouldn't have done otherwise. But it's turned out to be a huge gift.

That is what I hear from a lot of people with stuff like that, dyslexia and autism and stuff like that. The way I look at it, I don't have anything like that, at least that I've been nice with. But people I know, it seems like to me, when I look at it from the outside, it looks like a superpower in a way. People are like, oh, you can't focus, and you can't do these things. But when I look at that, I'm like, you can focus on such a very narrow thing so intently and with so much passion and desire. I don't think it's a disability, and I think it's mislabeled in a way. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I agree. So during the emotional labor that the development of inspirational leadership and emotional intelligence requires provides other benefits. It helps us to become more conscious of what's going on in us and around us. We're actually only conscious about 3% of the time. The rest of the time, we're relying on our habits to determine the bulk of our behavior and our results. It also helps us to distance ourselves from our ego based fears. It helps us to kind of become the observer of our egos, and that leads to higher levels of trust and engagement, which also leads to career, personal, and corporate success. There was actually a study done, a 40 year study done at UC Berkeley comparing IQ with EQ, that concluded that emotional intelligence was 400% more valuable in determining success than intellectual intelligence.

So in a lot of respects, our educational employment system has failed us because it's focused primarily on our ability to do intellectual labor, which is largely genetic, and has done really nothing to develop our emotional intelligence that we're going to need more than ever because of the accelerating rate of global change we're facing.

Yeah, it's interesting you say that. Over this past weekend, my son's friend was over, and somehow we started talking about school and whatnot, and he's like, oh, I'm dumb. I get bad grades. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. But don't ever say that just because you don't perform well in school doesn't make you dumb. And I kind of had to talk with him about that, and we sort of were on the lines of, like you're saying with this emotional intelligence whatnot. I was like, these are not predictors. I have friends that were, and I've known people that are literally geniuses that really aren't very successful in the world, and vice versa.

People that were. You failed. I graduated high school with, like, a 1.8 gpA. I was telling him, like, hey, listen, don't pigeonhole yourself into something like that. Don't call yourself something like that. I think that's a very important thing. We do need more of that. I think, in the world, yeah.

All of our behavior is triggered from emotion. It's triggered from a part of our brain called the limbic system. So all of our behavior starts out as emotion. And emotional intelligence is really a whole other different type of intelligence than intellectual intelligence. And it's really very valuable in being able to face the fear and anxiety that change triggers in us and be able to recognize it, acknowledge it, and move through it towards what it is we're trying to achieve, as opposed to allowing that fear to keep us trapped in our comfort zones. So, really, the development of emotional intelligence is essential for our being able to turn challenges into opportunities for better results.

What is the definition of emotional intelligence? How would you define that?

It's the ability to feel the fear and anxiety that change and innovation triggers in us and move through it towards what it is we're trying to achieve, as opposed to allowing that fear and anxiety to stop us from moving out of our comfort zone. See, there's a part of our old lizard brain called the amygdala that has been trying to keep us safe and alive for about 500 million years by making sure we never leave the safety of our cave, the perceived safety of our cave or comfort zone. So if we do, whenever we do, it automatically triggers a release of a hormone into our bloodstream called cortisol, and that causes the executive center of our brain, our prefrontal cortex, to shut off. And we go into what psychologists refer to as an amygdala hijack. It causes us to say and do things we often later regret when we're in the midst of one of these hijacks. Some people lash out. Some people run away. Some people freeze like a deer in the headlights.

When that happens in conflict situations, people die. When it happens in business or personal situations, relationships die. We burn trust. So, as an analogy, if you think of your amygdala as a very frightened four year old child, the development of our emotional intelligence acts like a big brother or a big sister to quiet the amygdala response down and better enable us to feel the fear and anxiety that change and innovation always triggers in us and be able to recognize it and move through it rather than being controlled by it.

Is this something we got to train? I'm sure some of it has to do with childhood and different things along those lines and what you're taught in your parents and stuff like that. How do we develop more of this.

Development? You develop emotional intelligence. You're not born with it, okay? And everybody can develop their emotional intelligence, and the ROI is massively greater than intellectual intelligence. So that's what I help people to do in the master of business leadership program. I help them to develop the habits and the awareness. Um, it, quite frankly, blows them away. It. It creates career, personal, and corporate success. I've helped organizations generate billions of dollars in revenue in you and executives advance in their careers, everything gets better, right?

Like you're saying, it's a 400% increase, 400% more valuable than IQ. So, I mean, that's a huge advantage if you can harness even half of that 400%. Right?

Let me give you a numerical example of the difference between intellectual intelligence and emotional intelligence. I think of intellectual intelligence or iq as somebody giving you $10,000 a day for 31 days. So at the end of 31 days, you've got $310,000. I think of emotional intelligence as a penny that doubles in value every day. Day one, you have a penny. Day two, you have two pennies. Day 31, you have $10.7 million. Day 40, you've got over 5 billion.

Day 50, you've got over 5 trillion. So our ability to do intellectual labor, our intellectual intelligence is genetic. It's inherited. If you have a high iq, your parents had a high iq, their parents had a high iq, and you simply inherited those genes. So not everybody can have 160 iq, which are considered genius level iq, but everybody can develop their emotional intelligence. And the ROI is massively greater, massively greater than intellectual intelligence. And two other things to keep in mind. It's estimated that within the next two to three years, AI will have the equivalent iq of over 1000.

Wow.

So, intellectual intelligence as your get out of jail card focus isn't what it was in the 20th century. The real key to career, personal, and corporate success in the 21st century is emotional intelligence. As a matter of fact, I'll give you an example of a company that's currently valued at about $3 trillion, and they're doing about $600 billion a year in revenue, and their primary hiring focus is emotional intelligence. And company is Apple.

Okay.

That's why, when you walk into an apple store, the energy you feel is an example of a more emotionally intelligent environment. They're not trying to sell you anything. They're trying to understand your pain, and, if possible, offer a solution to your pain. Whether you buy anything or not is secondary to their desire to want to serve you. They want you to have a great experience. And maybe you'll tell your friends, and they'll tell their friends. And if you think about it, the way you feel in that environment is very different from the energy coming out of the stores surrounding that environment. So that's one example of, really, the future of individual and organizational change and the importance of emotional intelligence.

We're facing a tsunami of rapidly accelerating global change. Some scientists estimate in this century, we could experience the equivalent of 20,000 years worth of change to put that in perspective. A ten year old today will experience the equivalent of a year's worth of change by the time they're 60 in eleven minutes.

Wow.

And we have a 500 million year old brain that doesn't like change. So the development of our emotional intelligence is as essential as air or water to our survival. We must develop our emotional intelligence to be able to deal with the fear and anxiety that the accelerating rate of global change is triggering in us biologically.

Without giving away the farm, what are something our listeners, viewers could do to help that? Is there one, two maybe tips or strategies or how would you go about helping somebody, just listening right now, to just go ahead and start that process of being more emotionally intelligent?

The key is to you have to stop giving away your energy, okay? And I'll give you an example of how people do that, because when you give away your energy, it creates. First of all, let me say this. I apologize, because what I'm about to say is going to make no sense to most of your listeners, okay? But I can tell you that I've been proving what I'm about to say everywhere in the world for the last 23 years, okay? And it has to do with energy physics. Whenever we give away our energy, it creates an energy deficit in us. And at the same time we're giving away our energy. We need to be trying to replace that energy by stealing it from other people. And that dynamic is going on inside of everybody, everywhere, all over the world, all the time. Unconsciously.

It is the root cause of all drama, chaos and conflict everywhere. So what I do in the MBL program is I show people how they're unconsciously giving away their energy. And I give them better habits to practice, to stop doing that. And when they stop giving away their energy, their need to steal the energy of other people goes away because they don't need it. And it's in that process that they become more inspirational leaders. They develop their emotional intelligence, they become freer from their ego based fears, which leads to higher levels of trust and engagement, which guarantees career, corporate and personal success. Let me give you an example. One of the NBL habits is called authentic listening.

And the key to authentic listening is not to take anything personally. How somebody feels about you has nothing to do with you. It has to do with what's going on inside of them. But if how you feel about yourself is based on how anybody else feels about you, you're unconsciously giving away your energy to them to determine how you should feel about yourself, right? If you like me, I like me. You don't like me. I don't like me. Now, as crazy as that might sound, what I've just described is all of social media.

That's my first thought.

We bend over backwards trying to get people to like us so that we can feel better about ourselves. So that's just one way that we're unconsciously giving away our energy to others. But it also creates the simultaneous effect that we're simultaneously stealing the energy from people around us to make up for the energy we're giving away. And those people can be coworkers, they can be customers, they can be family members, they can be somebody you met at the grocery store. It doesn't matter. So by learning to stop giving away your energy, it really creates all of those other fantastic outcomes that I mentioned. And the ROI never ends. As you get better and better at mastering these habits and developing this awareness, your results keep getting better and better and better and better.

There are some organizations that I've been working with for over 14 years because the ROI never ends.

Wow.

There's one individual that owns a large company, and in nine months, he estimates the ROI for his MBL investment was 25 to one.

Wow.

So he paid me $20,000, and in nine months, it helped him to generate over $550,000 that he estimates that he wouldn't have been able to generate otherwise. And we're just getting started. So it's an ability where the ROI never ends. But I can tell you that it's hard work. It requires emotional labor. So to kind of answer your original question, the starting point is always the same for everybody. You've got to have an emotional connection to something you want to achieve that's stronger than the fear that's going to get generated in you when you step outside of your comfort zone in pursuit of that desired result. Because if you don't have that strong emotional attachment to that desired result, you may want better results than you're currently getting, but you won't be willing to do the emotional labor that getting better results requires.

And quite frankly, most people aren't.

Right.

Lots of people want better results than they're currently getting, but very few people are actually willing to do the emotional labor that getting better results requires. What they try and do instead is they try and change everybody else, often using some type of position based power to control manipulate others. That's why the current level of employee engagement is around 13% worldwide, according to Gallup.

Wow.

Low levels of employee engagement are costing the US economy alone over a trillion dollars a year. So it's a massive problem, and it's going to get worse as the rate of change continues to accelerate. And the solution is really the development of our emotional intelligence. It's not a solution to the tsunami of change we're facing. It is the only solution, and it represents the next stage in our human evolution.

Yeah. I can't even imagine the lost productivity and just trying to have that image in social media crafted. How much time people spend alone just on that one element, not even talking about any other element of your life. I'm sure that alone is huge.

Cost massive. The thing is, people don't know what they don't know.

Right.

They have no idea. They have no idea how much their lack of emotional intelligence is costing them. And I see it every day. It's huge.

Do you think that has also something to do with people not dating, people not getting married, people not staying married, and all these types of things we're seeing now, especially with the younger generations?

Yeah, it's all connected. Like energy attracts like energy. So what I mean by that is, if you have a habit of giving away your energy and stealing the energy of others, those are the type of people you attract into your life. If you have the ability to lower your walls and not give away your energy, those are the type of people you attract into your life.

That's probably not even attraction. That's probably a connection, right?

When you have that, it's a codependent relationship. See, what I call victims can't exist in isolation. Victims travel in packs of other victims. They have a codependent relationship with each other, but they don't like each other, they don't trust each other, and they can never lower their walls around each other, but they need each other. So if you have the habit of giving away your energy, then you must be attracting others that are willing to give away their energy. It's physics. It's energy physics.

Yeah. Which sounds like this is also part of the reason why we have that rise in victim mentality and the victim kind of hood and all these things we see nowadays.

Yes.

Wow. Very insightful. Is also this connected to that introvert, extrovert kind of thing where as an extrovert goes and they feed off that energy, and when they leave that group, then they kind of feel depleted from it.

They both do. Extroverts and introverts both do the same thing. They just do it in different ways.

So it's the same thing. Okay, interesting. I'd like to circle back to a word you said earlier. That I'd like to explore a little bit more emotional labor. Could you define that and kind of talk through that a little bit?

Sure. I said that whenever we move outside of our comfort zone, it automatically triggers fear cortisol on our bloodstream. We lose consciousness. We lose connectedness. We lose the ability to think and be creative. We're simply reacting. Right. We're in survival mode.

So the emotional labor is the work of moving through that fear with our walls down so that we're not becoming resistive, judgmental, and attached outcome. So we're not giving away our energy. See, fear is not the enemy. Lots of times it's good to be afraid to step off the curb in front of a bus.

Right.

That's good fear to have. But a lot of the fear we have is psychological. It's driven by our egos.

Right.

And that's the fear. We have to learn to recognize, acknowledge, and move through it so that it doesn't control us. It's okay to be afraid, but we shouldn't allow our fear to stop us from achieving what we want to achieve. And most of us do. Most of us allow our fear to immobilize us.

Um, it's interesting to think about that.

Okay, let me. Let me go back to something you said earlier about disability, my dyslexia and other quotation, disabilities. Really, having a disability forces people to do a lot of emotional labor. They need to learn to become comfortable with fear and to be able to coexist with their fear and move through it. And that's what I refer to as emotional labor. And that's the kind of labor, that's the kind of work that most of us would avoid at all cost. We didn't have to do it.

Right. And I can see, as you're saying earlier, that your ego gets involved. And sometimes the stories in our heads that we tell ourselves are just craziness.

Yeah, we all have a story. Whatever somebody's doing, whatever their behavior is, they have a story. They're telling themselves to rationalize that behavior. So when I start working with folks, one of the first things I say is, I don't care what you think. I only care what you do, because what you do will change what you think automatically. What you do will change the story you tell yourself automatically. So by changing your actions, the story automatically changes. You have to act your way into thinking differently.

You don't think your way into acting differently.

Right. That body in motion. Right. I feel like that's probably one of the bigger things that stops people from changing your habits and stuff. Like you were saying earlier, is that action step, right? Taking that first step, we can write this stuff. We can read all the books, take all the courses. If we don't take that first action step, we don't have that momentum. Right? That's when you get that motivation needs to turn into discipline.

There's only two sources of motivation that will cause us to be willing to leave our comfort zone in the pursuit of better results and do the emotional labor that requires. One is pain, the other one is passion. And hardly anybody's connected with their passion. So for those individuals that are willing to do the emotional labor of leaving their comfort zone in the pursuit of better results, it's usually driven by pain initially, and urgent desire for better results than they're currently getting. Because you can only connect the dots in hindsight after you've taken the initial leap of faith of going down this path. You can't develop leadership and emotional intelligence by having a conversation or reading a book or watching a video, because those are all intellectual processes and will do nothing to develop leadership and emotional intelligence. The development of leadership and emotional intelligence is an experiential process. It is not an intellectual process, and it requires a lot of emotional labor.

Which is the hard part and the change we don't want. I'm sure our brains will probably trick us into saying, listen, we don't need all this. This is too painful. This is drudging up too many things.

Yes. There's an old saying, if somebody could talk you out of doing something, let them, because it really wasn't that important to you anyhow.

Right? Exactly.

If you don't have an emotional connection to something you want to achieve that motivates you to leave your comfort zone in the pursuit of that desired result, you simply will not be willing to do the work that getting that desired result requires. So the first step is developing that emotional connection to something you want to achieve. That's like putting fuel in your vehicle. If you don't put gas in your vehicle, that you're not going anywhere. If you're not charging your batteries, you're not going anywhere. And that fuel is emotion.

So the first step to emotionally connect, you've got to go back to dealing with your emotions and that emotional intelligence deal with you.

Just say, what the hell? What do I want? What do I want? See, when somebody tells you what they want, they're also telling you what they don't have. And the bigger the gap between where they are versus where they want to be, the more motivated. They are. Look for a solution to close that gap, and without that motivation, change is impossible.

Right. You're comfortable. Why would we disrupt that?

And you won't, right?

Yeah. I've had this conversation with many people, and it's like, I can't help you. Or somebody wants me to help somebody. I'm like, they don't want to change. There's nothing you could possibly do or say that's going to.

It's got to be a hell yes or a hell no. Right? It's kind of like if you have a terminal or if you have, I don't know, something. If you have a problem that's causing you a lot of pain and somebody can offer you a solution to remove that pain. If you're not willing to take that solution and apply it immediately, you're simply not in enough pain.

Right.

There's something called coi. It's like roi. Coi stands for the cost of inaction. And the cost of inaction is you get to keep your pain. If you're not willing to take action immediately to remove the pain, you're simply not yet in enough pain.

Is there a way to artificially create that, or that's just a false.

It's not artificial.

Well, I'm just saying if you're not there yet, yeah.

You could help somebody potentially develop an emotional connection to something they want to achieve that can create that motivation to move outside of their comfort zone. But it's not artificial. You can't fake it because you need to have that burning desire to achieve a result that's stronger than the fear that's going to get triggered in you when you start moving in that direction.

So you'd have to pull it out of there and make them realize where that pain is somewhere. Maybe they're repressing it or something like that. Yes, I see.

That's what happens. Most of the time, people don't recognize.

How much pain they're in, that homeostasis.

Right.

We get comfortable being fat or slow or immobile or whatever it is, and.

Our comfort zone gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, and we accept less and less and less and less. And getting back to your original question, when my mother died, I just said, excuse my language. I said, fuck it. If I'm going down, I'm going down fighting. I want my life to have meaning.

Burning the boats.

Burning the boats.

I see.

And you have to have that motivation to do the work that this kind of success requires. There's just no way around it, right?

Kind of like when you get into a situation, you come up into a jam and you need to pay your bill or you need to fix your car, you suddenly have all these ideas on how to get this done, but then you go right back to where you were because that pain has gone to. Discomfort is gone.

Exactly. So you need to maintain that connection to what it is you want to achieve. That creates the continual motivation. And if you achieve it, when you achieve it, you need to go to the next step. So where do you go from here? What do you want now? And you need to develop that emotional connection all over again.

What sounds like what you're saying earlier is the Roi keeps building because you keep growing. Next step. Next step, next step. Yes, I see.

It's amazing, actually. It's an amazing process. And the most difficult part is in the very beginning, because people don't know what they don't know, and it requires a lot of emotional labor for what they perceive to be little results. But if they stick with it, they start to get better and better results. The motivation changes from trying to get away from something to trying to move towards something. So the motivation changes from fear to love. It changes from fear to passion. And it's fantastic.

It will guarantee that the rest of your life will be the best of your life. But you got to kind of get over the initial hump to be willing to take that leap of faith and start doing the emotional labor that it requires. And if you're not willing to do that, you're just simply not in enough pain. Now, my biggest concern personally is that by the time people are in enough pain, it'll be too late for them, because we're not machines, we're biology, and change takes time. So.

Do you think that also could play into maybe the uptake in suicides and stuff like that we see nowadays?

Yeah, it's related to everything.

Yeah, I can see how this is a lot of connections here.

It's related to literally everything. So this process improves every aspect of your life. Every aspect of your life. Your career, your business, your personal life, family. Everything gets better when we learn to stop giving away our energy.

Yeah. Because there's so many, like you're saying, emotional connections, all these different connections, all these things. Your ego, everything we talked about here, the labor and all these things. Interesting. When I was reading through your things, there's a term I'd like to explore that I really found interesting. Authentic leadership. Could you talk us through that? What is that?

Sure. Because we've evolved over hundreds of millions of years from herds, tribes, we've had to develop the ability to sense whether somebody's trying to help us or eat us. So we have these specialized brain cells in our prefrontal cortex that brain scientists called mirror neurons. I call them bullshit meters. That's why when you walk into a room, you can sense the energy in the room, okay? That's why when you're having a conversation with somebody, you can sense whether they're trying to help you or hurt you. That's why when you walk into an apple store, you can sense the energy in that environment. You can't fake being authentic. Can't fake it, right? And by learning to lower your walls and not give away your energy, by learning to become less resistive, judgmental, attached to outcome, people automatically begin to sense that they can be more of who they truly are around you than they can be around their victim buddies.

They can lower their walls and be more of who they truly are around you than they can be around their victim buddies. That's called authentic, inspirational leadership. You can't fake it. By developing your emotional intelligence, you're literally able to outcar your competition. You're able to develop deeper, more trusted advisor relationships with the people you seek to serve than your competitors. See, if somebody doesn't trust you, they'll find a way not to do business with you. Even if you have the best pricing and the best technology, if they do trust you, if they believe your success and their success are connected, they'll find a way to do business with you, even if you don't have the best pricing or the best technology.

Interesting.

Because of the accelerating rate of global change, people are finding it more and more difficult to keep up. So they're relying more and more on their network of trusted advisors to make decisions. The trust economy is currently valued at over $10 trillion a year.

Wow.

To put that in perspective, if the trust economy were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world, behind the United States and China. So the trust economy is growing much faster than the traditional economy, and it's directly related to our level of emotional intelligence.

It sounds familiar, what you were saying earlier about the level of trust that the employees have now at 13%.

Yeah, exactly the same.

Something you said earlier triggered something. I have this phenomenon that happens to me, and I think you've just nailed on why it happens. Strangers will come up to me, and they'll tell me their life story, and it always has boggled my mind why you would suddenly just start talking to me and tell me your life story. And I think you just answered that earlier here in that question. Wow, that's interesting.

Yeah. People want to know why you do what you do before they know what you do. They want to know your why. As Simon Sinek. They want to know your why before the how and the what. See, the why is emotional. The how and the what is intellectual. And it's the why that drives behavior, not the how and the what.

Right.

So by helping people to understand your why, it helps them to trust you. It helps them to lower their walls.

Yeah. That golden circle, that's a powerful thing to learn.

Yep. That's why you think about it. When Apple brings out a new product, for instance, they don't talk about features and benefits.

Right.

They talk about why they develop the product.

Exactly. Get you emotionally connected.

Correct. So they're seeking to connect emotionally with the people they seek to serve.

Yeah. Which is why we never knew we needed tablets. We never knew we needed iPhones. We never knew we needed the new Apple vision thing to have, like, all these things. Right. But when you start bringing together a why and. Yeah. Connecting to the emotions, which goes back to seemingly, like, through our conversation, everything all circles around that and goes right back to that.

Right back to emotions.

Everything is based on behavior. And so the more emotionally intelligent we can become about our behavior, the better our results.

As we get ready to wrap here, could you talk us to us a little bit about your master of business leadership program?

Sure. It's initially. It's initially a three month program where we get together once a week, about an hour, and I show people how they're giving away their energy, and I give them better habits to practice not doing that. And then we review week to week the results they're getting by using these new habits.

It's kind of like a homework worksheet kind of thing.

Okay. It's a journaling process. Yeah.

Okay. And then you go out in the real world, implement, come back, report, adjust, learn.

Yes, exactly right.

Awesome. I love the sound of that. And then one last thing. Here on the social community show, we like to do a weekly challenge where we challenge the listeners to spend the next week doing something, usually what we talked about or something like that. What I'd like to do is I'd like to issue you that challenge to the listeners to give them something to do for this next week. What would this week's challenge be?

Bet on yourself by developing your emotional intelligence. Bet on yourself by developing your emotional intelligence. Create an emotional connection. Get connected emotionally with something you want to achieve. That causes you to start to move outside of your comfort zone in the pursuit of that desired result. That's where it begins.

If somebody's having a hard time, what's one thing they can do to get that train rolling a little bit?

Focus on your breathing. See, when you focus on your breathing, you're no longer thinking. You're shutting off that voice in the back of your head. We actually spend, interestingly enough, we spend, in various ways, some constructive and some destructive. We spend over $4 trillion a year trying to shut that voice off in the back of our heads so that we could be more present. $4 trillion a year.

Wow.

So a simple way to do that for at least a brief period is simply focus on breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. Slowly you focus on that. It shuts off thinking and allows you to be more present. And that helps you to start to connect with who you really are as opposed to who you think you are and helps you connect what you're here to accomplish.

Is there a certain technique that you like or found good results with, or does it not really matter too much?

All of it? I love going for walks. I typically get up at about 230 or 03:00 in the morning, and I go to bed at 08:00 at night. And one of the first things I do after I publish, I have a daily newsletter I publish on LinkedIn. But after I publish that, I grab a coffee and go for a walk. And I just love it. And I'm always amazed at what kind of bubbles up within me just by being quiet, by just kind of trying to be in the moment.

And that's the key, I think, to walking is quiet. No headphones, none of that walk. Something about, too, I've heard about is when you're walking, your feet is pumping the blood up and up into your brain. You get a little bit more blood and oxygen in your brain from the walking that's stomping and the pushing of the blood up. I don't know. I agree with you, though. If you're stuck on something, just head outside for a bit, take a walk around the block or something like that, and suddenly you have solutions. It's like a shower effect in a way.

That's great when you're 70 years old. Keep things moving.

Yes, absolutely. It's so much good that comes from your lymph node system needs to move, and so many things needs to pump, and walking is the only way to do those things or exercising somehow. Awesome. Well, Phil, thank you so much. I'll link to your newsletter in the show notes as well as your LinkedIn. Is there any other ways you want people to connect with you?

The best way to reach me is through either by phone or through Zoom. And if you have a link to my zoom calendar, I do.

I'll share that.

That's probably the best way for people to reach me.

Okay. Absolutely. I'll link to those for you in the show notes. So if you folks are driving or whatnot or walking, don't worry about it. They'll be in the show notes. Okay, perfect. And also link to your books. You've got some great books.

I think there's three or four of them.

About nine of them.

Nine of them. Okay. Yeah.

I got a book if you want. I have an audiobook version I could give you for free. I have a link to that.

If it's okay with you, I'll share that in the show notes as well.

Yeah.

Okay, awesome.

It's called a servant warrior leader. The first book I wrote in around 2006 or 2007.

Yeah, I was listening to that earlier.

Yeah, I wrote those books. I got to tell you that I really wrote those books for me, and I don't write books anymore. More and more I do more podcasts, videos, that kind of stuff.

Perfect.

Those books are really for my benefit.

Well, if anybody's interested in taking a look at them, they're there for you guys to look into. But I will link to the calendar, the audiobook. You guys can download that and get that going. And if you're interested in getting into the program, we'll link to Phil's calendar for you guys.

Cool.

Thank you so much. It was very enlightening. This is more for me than the listeners. I learned a lot. I think I made some connections within myself, and I really appreciate all your time.

I appreciate what you're doing, too. I really like the conversation. So thank you.

Thank you. Wow. Once again, let's give Phil a great thank you. If you're interested in anything he has said, like I said, head over the show notes, check out his program. If you're interested, jump on his calendar. Get that stuff going. If you folks enjoyed this episode, you got value from this episode. I'd like to share it with these two other people.

And if you'd like, you can connect with us all week long in between episodes on the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or subscribe on your favorite podcast app for past episodes and everything we've talked about here today, visit thesocialChameleon show. And until next time, let's work on our emotional intelligence. Let's spend some emotional labor, and we keep learning and growing into the person you want to become. Connect On Social This podcast is available on… You can listen to all our episodes on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Overcast , Pocket Casts , Castbox , YouTube Music , Amazon Music , Audible , Substack, or your favorite podcast platform .