Dr. Michael Gervais

You practice a skill, whether it's Pilates or throwing a football or speaking or singing in a calm environment, then a moderately intense environment, and then a highly intense environment.

There's an arc.

And if you think that...

You're going to be good with emotions in a highly stressed environment, and you're going to sort it out at that moment.

But you haven't practiced emotions at the former two levels, meaning the calm environment and or the more moderate stressful environment.

It won't be there for you.

So we need to work with emotions in calm environments.

How do you do that?

Meditation, journaling, conversations with people of wisdom, putting yourself in a situation to feel and follow that feeling, name that feeling.

Emotional intelligence is a skill set.

Intellectual intelligence, general intelligence as it's known, is pretty fixed.

according to research, most research.

Emotional intelligence as one of the core foundations for living a good life is a learned skill.

And so you got to look in.

You got to understand in just naming an emotion and following an emotion, it's two of the really big skills to be able to have in the bucket, if you will, of performance.

And the other bit I'll just add is that people are pretty stressed right now.

And when we think about our teammates and our partners, they're caring a lot.

People are carrying a lot around with them and the world is not designed to

for our success.

And if we want to have the great life that we imagine, we do need to understand how to work with emotions, more importantly, how to work with feelings.