Dr. Relly Nadler: We always strive to bring you exciting guests who can add to your skills around leadership and emotional intelligence. Today, we are bringing to you, Joshua Freedman, one of the leaders in emotional intelligence.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: It’s going to be a great show. We love having wonderful experts like Josh Freedman with us. Many of our audience members will know Josh. He is obviously one of the foremost experts in emotional intelligence, At the Heart of Leadership, The Vital Organization, Inside Change and my favorite, The State of the Heart.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Joshua is one of the world’s preeminent experts on developing emotional intelligence and improved performance. He leads the world’s largest network of emotional intelligence practitioners, researchers, experts, creating positive change in over 175 nations. He has been working with emotional intelligence for over 20 years. www.6seconds.org is his website. Josh is going to tell us a bit more. Josh, welcome to the show.
Joshua Freedman: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Dr. Relly Nadler: We last saw you at the meeting at the United Nations and it was very exciting that you guys were helping host and create.
Tell us a little bit about 6 seconds today for our audience, about your global vision. Where you are and what things you are bringing to the world?
Joshua Freedman: Wow. Well, we seem to be in a place in the world right now where we desperately need more emotional intelligence.
That’s what we are trying to do.
Unfortunately, the research says it has gone down in the last decade. And we are seeing the effects of that.
Our work is all about supporting people to grow and practice these skills and teaching people how to grow and practice their emotional intelligence in a way that helps them support others to grow and practice emotional intelligence. We’d like to see basically everybody in the world able to have the support to do that.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: One of the things, Josh, that I wanted to bring to the attention of our guests it that when I went through some of your training, what I was really touched by was the efficacy, the sincerity of what this tool can do and how it is changing the world. Making everyone that comes in contact with you, your staff and your tools more emotionally intelligent.
How, when you went from being a consultant with 50 thousand consultants, I think it was worldwide, and you’ve now gone into this new environment? I think it’s mostly not-for-profits and that’s what we were focused on at the UN program. For you that don’t know, it was an annual, inaugural, and hopefully, we will be doing it again, of all the emotional intelligence specialists from around the world and it was fascinating that Josh was able to facilitate that. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about that?
Joshua Freedman: I think, probably, many people here are aware of the sustainable development goals or you can just think about any of your goals, really. The sustainable development goals are actually all achievable, now.
We have enough food. We have enough money. We have enough infrastructure to ensure that everybody has those basic standards of living. So, why isn’t that happening today?
The answer is because we are not working together.
From global sustainability, health and a thriving perspective, what are the capabilities that we need to grow everywhere so that we can build a better future? That’s the focus of the first-ever conference at the United Nations Head Quarters on emotional intelligence. I think it is really just about leadership and followership and citizenship.
How do we connect with each other?
The answer is we start by connecting with ourselves.
How do we collaborate with each other?
The answer is, we start by learning to listen to ourselves and find that self-acceptance. To be able to express what we are feeling in a way that lets us communicate at a deeper level.
This is the universal human language. Emotions are everywhere.
As we start tapping into emotions, we are able to cross boundaries. We are able to work together in ways that we couldn’t before. We have seen that in dozens of case studies that we have published on 6seconds.org. We have seen that in nonprofits. We have seen it in schools. We have seen it in huge corporations.
These skills of emotional intelligence really are the bedrock on which our human interactions can work better. Unfortunately, I think that bedrock is somewhat broken in some places and we need to do our work to rebuild those foundations.
Listen to the entire interview above.
Relly
