00:08 Hi, I'm Denise Simpson, a master life and leadership coach who helps women step into their authentic and feminine power. So they can lead like visionaries influence with grace and create a legacy of contribution and service. You'll hear about real leadership clients with real problems, navigating their success in life, business, and career. If you're ready to become a masterful leader, then this podcast was made for you. So let's get started.
My friend to welcome back. Let's talk about the emotional maturity of a leader. This is probably one of the most important topics I talk to my clients about because this is really about showing maturity and how you respond to circumstances when your emotions are heightened, because the fact is when emotions are high, your intelligence is low. And the neuroscience shows that when emotions have been triggered and these are emotions good or bad, right? Happy emotions and negative emotions, whenever emotions are high in a situation or a circumstance, your logic goes low. Why? Because your brain is distracted by resolving the heightened emotions that you're feeling. And so when I talk to a client about a circumstance or a situation that she has encountered, or that she has experienced, I always ask her, how did you feel, or what feelings came up for you when this happened?
Your emotions will direct the actions or inactions that you take in any given situation. This is the path, this is the neuroscience behind this. The thought creates the emotion and the emotion inspire action or inaction. And so let's say the situation, the circumstance that she experienced was being undermined by her subordinate. And we can prove that in a court of law, there's evidence behind that. This isn't a story that she shared with me. Let's say that there was actual evidence of an, a subordinate undermining her authority in a decision she had made. Okay. So that's the circumstance. And she has a lot of thoughts about that situation and it's my job to help her pinpoint. What's the thought that we wanna pull out from this situation that we wanna explore further. Right? And that thought that she had was I am being disrespected by my subordinate and my team.
And when she thought that thought the emotion of undervalued, she described it as being undermined. And when we dug deeper into how she really felt, she felt rejected. That was the emotion that we ultimately came up with. We wanted to make sure that that thought matched or was aligned with that emotion because that emotion then directed how she behaved and what actions she took or did not take in that situation. And everybody is gonna act differently. Honestly. I mean, my nervous system is different than yours. Yours is different than hers. So she froze while I'm a fighter. That's kind of my natural state. When I'm feeling rejected. When I'm feeling undermined, I'm ready to fight someone. But in her case, she froze. And that's just how her nervous system responded. And you, you may flee, I don't know, right? You may be running away, avoiding confrontation, right?
So we're all very different. But as your coach, we get to really look at that thought, that emotion, and then all the actions that you take as an individual, right? Because when your emotions are high and your logic goes low, your intelligence drops. You may take different actions than I take, right? So we have to look at you at an individual level. And so emotional maturity, my friend is something that we leaders fully need to understand. We need to fully develop the emotional maturity that is required to lead ourselves and to lead our teams. You know, something that I have spent my adult life in this field. cause I've been in leadership since I was 19 years old. When I was running the bath and body work store, I remembered my district manager being honestly an emotional basket case. And she was a great, a great leader, transactional leader at that.
But this was a woman who had zero control of her emotions. She would throw tantrums in front of us. She would call us out in front of our customers. She would embarrass us on the sales floor. It was always a, a matter of what's gonna happen. So my nervous system was always jacked up because I had no idea how, how she was gonna respond to me or to my employees. And so I remembered early on thinking, are all women like this are all women loose cannons? Are they all basket cases? And this is the myth that I have been fighting that women are too emotional to lead. Now, I, we are different than, than men because we were socialized as, as women. And so there are biological characteristics. There are social conditioning and patterns that are different than others, other non women. So is that true?
You know, perhaps but listen, I am the first one to fight that myth because I believe that everybody, men, women, you know, non-binary other folk, we all have the responsibility to be emotionally mature in our professions and especially as leaders. And so whether I'm coaching a man or I'm coaching a woman, or I'm coaching someone, who's non-binary trust me, these are the same tools that I teach everybody. And so I want for you to remember that when your emotion is high, your intelligence is low. And so it's important to know what's happening in your brain so that when you are in these circumstances, when you're faced with these challenging situations, when you are undermined by a subordinate or even your leader, you are able to manage and really navigate through these challenging circumstances. And so it's important that we do this work, my friend, it's part of the mindset bucket that I talked about last week.
Remember there are three buckets, mindset, skill building, and behavior and actions or strategies that a, that a leader takes. So three buckets. This is the mindset bucket that we're talking about, specifically, the emotional maturity of a leader. And, you know, emotional maturity really is it's cultivated through your experiences. It's not like a one and done thing. You've got a degree it's on the wall. It's forever more. No, that's not how that works. Emotional maturity is developed naturally through your growth as a leader. And it's the experiences that you have as a leader, the challenging ones, the ones where you feel rejection, the ones that you do feel fear, the ones that you feel overwhelming. These are the situations that develop you because you learn from those experiences you learn from these individual situations, right? That's the goal is that you learn from them. You don't go Harbor these emotions, you don't go repress these emotions, you don't retaliate because of these emotions, right?
You don't numb your brain or your body because of these emotions. No, we process these emotions that we feel in these circumstances so that we can learn from them so that we do gain emotional maturity. That's the point. And I wanna drive home today. So it's really about understanding that this is built over time. So look at where you are on your journey, on your path to leadership. Are you in the C-suite right now? Right? Are you in the C-suite where you're managing much more challenging, much more difficult situations. You be only because you have more duties and obligations and responsibilities. That's why, right. Or perhaps you're mid-level leader, right? A mid-manager perhaps a supervisor, a director. You still oversee people, but you're not at the top of that corporate ladder. You're right in the middle there. And what, think about what experiences you've been having at this level, and are you prepared emotionally to then go to that next level, to that executive VP or that VP position, or even a C-suite position?
Do you have the emotional maturity to get you to the top? Right. And what if you just started your leadership career? What if this is your first position, right? How are you managing your emotions? How do you regulate your emotions? How do you neutralize these circumstances so that you can evaluate your emotions? Do you have the proper tools right now? And I bet you don't and here's what I, I, what's interesting. It, it doesn't matter really what level of leadership that I coach on or work with, right? These leaders will face all kinds of emotional difficulties because when you reach a new level, there's a new double behind you. And if you haven't learned how to manage your emotions at this lower level of leadership, when you first started your path, then I bet if you're in the C-suite, you're having a very difficult time right now, because it's a whole other level of emotional maturity that you need.
And so I have a few ideas for you to put into place right away. I also want to invite you into masters of leadership. This is where I work with all levels of leaders, no matter what industry you are in, no matter the path that you are on, I help you with your mindset, your skill set, and the strategies, three buckets of leadership. And here's where we spend a lot of time on the mindset part, because I want to make sure you are fully prepared to handle any circumstance or any challenge that you're going to face on this path. And so if you are ready, here are my three points. Number one, let's go back to a situation, preferably a recent situation or a recent challenge that you've had. And I want for you to recall the details of that situation, where emotions were high, and we know your logic was low, but I bet you didn't know that at that time.
but you do now know this information very important, but let's go back to that recent situation and let's look at those details of what happened. Were you in a situation where you were handling a diff difficult conversation with a client or a customer, perhaps it was a difficult conversation with your HR person, maybe you were in a negotiation for your, for an increase in your salary, or perhaps you were handling some kind of difficult challenge with your leader, with someone that you directly report to go back to that circumstance. I want for you to pull out the facts of that situation, because there's a difference between facts and story facts versus stories. The facts can be proven in a court of law, the stories, however, the, the stories that your brain creates are not. We need to leave the stories, your opinions, any adjectives on the side, because I want for you to pull just the simple facts of the situation.
And that can look like had a, with my subordinate period, period, you left out the word difficult. You left out the colorful language to describe your employee. Very simple. I had a conversation with my subordinate period that can be proven in the court of law that was witnessed by others, or it can, it can be witnessed. It was witnessed by the person in the room, but the adjectives, how you describe the situation, the story that your brain wants to present is put aside. So that's the first thing I want for you to do is just pull out the facts of the situation, right? Cuz your brain will create all kinds of additional fictional information because you have bias, right? We all do. We all have filters that we use and we all have certain experiences that we use to judge a situation, right? We pull from our memories, we pull for our, from our childhood, we pull from all kinds of sources in our brain.
And then we make, uh, you know, a determination based on fiction, never based on facts. And this is what I want for you leader to start doing is to start separating facts from fiction facts, from stories. That's the first thing I want for you to do because now the second thing I want for you to do is look at the evidence that you just presented with, that you, that you just put on a piece of paper, removing all the additional emotional baggage from that story, from that circumstance, you've removed that all. And now our brain is left to see what the facts of the matter are. See how powerful this is, because if emotions are high and your logic is low, you, my friend are not thinking clearly in the situation, especially one that is heightened with negativity. And from this second point, I want for you to look at those facts and then ask yourself what thought can I think about this situation minus the emotional baggage, minus the story that your brain wants to present you with.
So in other words, you're removing all emotion from this. This is what we call neutralizing a circumstance. And I teach all my clients to do that. We neutralize the hell out of every challenging circumstance so that we bring the logic. We raise our intelligence back, right? That's what we do as leaders. And so that's what I want for you to do with the in the second point is I want for you to now come up with a thought about the facts that you just wrote down. And the last thing I want for you to do, the third thing I want for you to do is think of an emotion, right? Or, or not think, but feel an emotion that comes up when you think that thought, right? So whatever thought you decided to choose, right? Remember we, at this point, we hadn't talked about emotion, right?
You, you, number one was you put out the evidence so that your brain can see it. You wrote it out and then you step number two, you chose a thought, you chose a thought that you would prefer to think about based on just the evidence that your brain presented you with, right? Which is gonna be very different, a very different thought than the thoughts that you were having before this exercise. And so here's where we get to be deliberate and intentional in how we wanna think about the evidence of the matter, the facts of the matter. And I bet you anything. Step number three, when you choose the emotion that's tied to this new thought, this deliberate, intentional thought, it's gonna be very different than feeling rejected or feeling like a failure or feeling like a fraud or feeling overwhelmed or whatever other negative emotion that you were feeling before this exercise.
And that emotion can be very neutral. So it's not heightened in negativity. It may not be super positive because we're not there yet. But when your brain decides to choose a thought based on simple facts, right? Cuz when you, when the circumstance is, I had a conversation with a subordinate period, the thought is it was a long conversation period or it could have been, it was a conversation that could have been differently or could have gone differently period. Or it could have been. I had a conversation with this person like I do every day period. You see how these thoughts sometimes create a more neutral setting for us to work through. And sometimes these thoughts may be a little, you know, still triggering with some emotion in it, right? It's still may be emotionally loaded. And so that's your work to come up with the thought that your brain can wrap around the facts of the matter.
And that emotion could be hopeful, right? If the thought is I had a conversation with my subordinate or I had a conversation that could have gone differently with my subordinate period. Well the feeling may be hopeful. Well I'm hopeful, right? I sometimes I say I'm only human . I have a human brain and I have, you know, hu that produces feelings and emotions in my body. And you know, I'm only human, but I have my back and you know what? My employees are not my enemies. That was always a go-to thought for me. My employees are not my enemies. Another one was we're all on the same team or my employees are my allies and I am theirs. Right? So I started to think deliberately when I was faced with challenging situations. So this is the task. As you get to choose whatever thought that you wanna think about to neutralize your nervous system, to neutralize your brain so that you can then think through the solution clearly because when emotions are high, intelligence is low and your problem solving skills goes down the tube and leaders like us do not leave leadership to chance we do the work because we're moving towards mastering and emotional maturity of, of the leader is the most important, I think mindset and skill building that we need to create because emotional maturity is a skill set that we build through experiences.
Like I said earlier, it's not a one and done, you went to a training you're certified now it's forevermore. Hell no. If you're a human, who feels certain things who feels very passionate about their employees and about their work, trust me, you're gonna have some very difficult, challenging circumstances where emotions are gonna be heightened in you. And you're going to need the tools to neutralize a situation so that you, my friend can solve the problem, right? We need to have our logic back online, our intelligence back online so that we can work through any problem that we're faced with. So those are some, some points and steps that you can take. Now, if you wanna work on this together, the opportunity is right here for you. Join me inside masters of leadership. This is where we do the, the coaching work. This is where I help you see for yourself really how to neutralize any situation so that you can lead powerfully. So you can step into your authority and really your brilliance as a leader. And we do that through emotional maturity.
All right, my friend, I hope you found today's episode helpful. We'll talk so much more about emotional intelligence, which is something I studied intimately during my doctoral program. Daniel Goldman of course, has really commercialized, uh, this theory in the corporate world. And it's very relevant and it's very helpful. I, I kind of said, I said that with like a, a smug , uh, tone, and I promise you it's not, um, it's just, there were two authors that actually created this theory and Daniel Goman went off and really turned it into what it is today, which is a very powerful instrument. Emotional intelligence is really the capabilities of understanding your own emotional behaviors, how to handle them, how to really cultivate them in self in yourself and in others. And so it's, um, it's a great tool that we'll use inside the masters of leadership program, but know that you can start doing this work now with what I just shared with you on this powerful episode. Okay. Friend, take good care of yourself. Have a fantastic week. And I am looking forward to serving you on our next episode. Buy it for now. Hey leader, do you want weekly leadership tips, coaching and training straight to your email inbox? Yeah, I thought so. Head over to Dr. Denise simpson.com/leadership. Again, that's Dr. Denise simpson.com/leadership. Just submit your name and your email address and we'll get started right away. I look forward to serving you inside your email inbox. See you soon.
