Life Coach and Success Mentor, Bethany Perry works with heart-centered visionaries who want to live a fully self-expressed life. She supports her clients in their personal development in order to improve their professional success.
Bethany joins me on the podcast to share five steps business owners can take that will lead them to success. This process helps top earners and leaders make decisions and be successful.
What is success?
One of the more tangible ways people measure success is by how much money they are making. But what about things like time, freedom, and having more energy and being happier? One of Bethany’s favourite analogies is that we can want more out of our life and out of our business and if you imagine more coming in the form of time, money, energy, happiness, imagine those things as water. If we're one cup and we want a gallon’s worth of abundance, we actually have to become a gallon container in order to be able to receive that. It’s about becoming a bigger container in our own lives so that we have the room to receive stuff. If you’re only one cup then if you get a gallon’s worth of water, you're still only going to be able to receive one cups worth. So, the tangible things like, “how much money did I make?” is one way to measure what size of a container we are. But for those of us who really value time, freedom, happiness and energy, how can we become more in our lives so that we can have more?
How do top earners make decisions?
What is it that leaders and top earners have created? What do they believe is a success? What have they done to get there? What is it that these people are doing that others are not quite figuring out?
A statistic that often surprises people is that 90% of the difference between star performers versus average performers is attributed to emotional intelligence rather than cognitive skills. So, it's not necessarily about what we know in our heads, but it's how are we are integrating, implementing and living in our daily lives that makes the biggest difference.
Higher emotional intelligence is directly connected to improved career success, entrepreneurial potential, leadership, talent, health, relationship satisfaction, and happiness. It's also one of the best antidotes to stress. So, for those of us that think, “I have these big goals, and I'm feeling overwhelmed by them.” Bethany’s suggestion is to take a deep breath and at least for the time of this podcast or show notes, give yourself permission to slow down in order to speed up.
You can't just learn all the how-to’s and know all the tactical stuff without taking into account that you're a human being who's also running a business. Energy first then strategy. When you get your energy right and when you get your emotional intelligence in a good place, then you can bypass the strategies that won't work for you. Even though they might work for other people, you're going to be able to make better decisions for yourself because you have the energy to do so.
5 Key Components Of Making Emotionally Intelligent Decisions
1) Self Awareness (knowing you’re own feelings, motives & desires)
2) Self Regulation (biological responses driven by our emotions)
3) Motivation (tracking our internal desires vs external goals)
4) Empathy (treating people according to their emotional reactions)
5) Social Skills (build rapport and manage relationships with a specific goal in mind)
Emotional Intelligence defined
Emotional intelligence works like this – if you go to the gym and it's your first day, you're not going to walk over and pick up the 50 pound dumbbells and then wonder why you're in the hospital the next day from working your muscles too hard. We want to approach emotional intelligence the same way. Start with the small things and build those emotional muscles so that when you do make bigger decisions, you're in shape, and you can trust yourself to navigate them.
We also need to remember that like so many things in life, it’s sometimes really hard to remember you're not good at things right away, but like stretching our muscles, getting stronger is so important.
Self-Awareness
Social media is a great example of applying emotional intelligence. One of the things that helped Bethany scale her business to the level she wanted it to be was showing up on social media more often. Step number one is that she knew showing up and giving value on social media was going to be key to her business success. But when she first showed up, she would find herself scrolling through the newsfeed. We should be self-aware that sometimes we are wasting time and that occasionally comparisonitis pops up. And then we don't necessarily take the action that we need to take to hit our goals. This is being self-aware of what we are doing that may be getting in the way of reaching our goals.
Self-Regulation
The next step of this decision making process is self-regulation. This is where you check in with yourself and take responsibility. Because emotions, they're not good or bad. They're simply a biological response that causes an emotion inside of us. And so, as we're self-regulating, whether it's a good feeling or a bad feeling, emotions are always in motion, so you don't have to get too attached to them. But as far as how we self-regulate when they come up, in the example of showing up on social media, find out when you feel your best – that is the best time for most people to show up on social media.
Something to understand about how motivation applies in this emotionally intelligent decision making process is that this is really more effective when it's coming from an internal place rather than being motivated by external results.
Motivation
High achievers and heart-centered people are impact-driven on purpose. They usually have something inside of them that wants to achieve just for the sake of achieving; it's not to get external rewards. There's this intrinsic part of them that is always looking to grow.
The key here is in the decision-making process. Decide what is something you can track that is going to support the awareness that you've had and how you're going to choose to regulate? So, in Bethany’s case of social media, she decided she was going to motivate herself by making the commitment to show up on social media for 365 days in a row of live streams. Part of this was to prove to herself that she can and it's also stretching her out of her comfort zone and that again is something high achievers and top performers find motivating.
When you've done the work of figuring out the emotional part of self-regulating, you understand how to pick the right motivation without trying to make yourself do things that are going to send you off in the wrong direction.
Empathy
Once you have that trackable goal, the next step is empathy. And that is about treating people according to their emotional reactions. What is your emotional reaction? Empathy with another person might require a little curiosity of putting yourself in their shoes and trying to understand that before you move forward in a conversation, whether it's a difficult conversation or setting a boundary, put yourself in their shoes.
So, up until now we have gone through the self-awareness of recognizing that scrolling is not as effective as showing up doing a live stream on social media. We have self-regulated by identifying when we feel most connected to do this and when it feels best for us to do this. We have also established a motivating goal and it's trackable. For example, Bethany’s 365 days live video goal. In step number four, we need to have empathy for ourselves. This means understanding we may be sick sometimes or not at our best sometimes. And so we’re going to practice empathy in that moment by saying, “don't beat yourself up.” Some days, it's going to feel hard, you don't have to be perfect.
Social Skills
Remember, you are going back through those steps to get to this place where you can just be okay with being perfectly imperfect. That makes it very easy to navigate into the fifth step of social skills. And so again, this applies to how you make decisions when you're interacting with other people. But if we practice how we're interacting with ourselves around making decisions, we're building those emotional muscles.
This is about building rapport and managing relationships with a specific goal in mind. It’s not just social etiquette, but it's an actual skill. And so, because we have that self-awareness in step one, this is something directly linked to hitting our goals.
The beauty of emotional intelligence is that as we become better versions of ourselves and that has a positive impact on everyone that we interact with.
Work through the steps
Walk yourself through all the pieces so that you can make the right decisions for you and not just what you think you should do and not just think what you think other people are doing that like actually for you.
Going through all the steps is much more effective when we really nail self-awareness.
In order to be self-aware, ask yourself, how are you feeling and how are you behaving? It’s a thought-feeling cycle. We have a thought, and that thought creates a feeling and then that feeling leads to another thought, and then that thought leads to another feeling.
The second tool is to recognize that our subconscious rules how we condition ourselves to react in this thought-feeling cycle. Ninety-eight percent of the beliefs, patterns and habits that we have aren't even ours. We’ve picked them up from very well-meaning people like parents and teachers.
Thoughts lead to feelings. It's like pulling a shirt out of a laundry basket and saying, “Hmm, this isn't mine,” or, “You know what, this one is mine, but it doesn't fit me anymore.” And so as you're sorting your thoughts and feelings, if you can treat it as objectively as you would sorting laundry and just give yourself permission to get rid of it. You don't have to keep everything in the laundry basket. And that is a simple way of processing our thoughts.
There are some powerful statistics behind why implementing and developing your emotional intelligence is directly linked to not only your financial success in business, but your happiness in life. Forty-seven percent of people report that personal problems affect their work performance. Sixteen percent of people report that personal challenges caused them to call in sick or not show up even in their own business. When we're more emotionally intelligent, it's one of the fastest ways to cut down on team turnover. So, even if you only have one or two people, as independent contractors or employees in your business, the financial cost of having to replace them is actually six to nine months of whatever it is that you're paying them. So, it's very costly to not develop this side of yourself. And the flip side is that this is something that anyone can improve on. This is not something that either you got or you don't, this is this is available to anyone who wants to go into their emotional gym and get their mindset workout in for the day. If you do, you can step into the top 90% of performers and get be the best performer in your own life.
If you want to find out what your success superpower is, especially around emotional intelligence, and your unique human operating strength so you can really know where to hone in, I encourage you to take the free quiz Bethany has put together at http://Bethperry.com/quiz. You can also follow her on Facebook or on Instagram.
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Podcast editing done by Eric Wellman