Hi everybody, it’s Brian from the GAF team again. And we’ve been taking you through a series of frameworks that we use when engaging with our clients. And emotional intelligence is been around since about the mid 1990s. And it’s only now starting to really be taken on as one of the differentiators between great advisors and those that are great practitioners, but perhaps not as good at the relational skills as some others. So let’s have a look at some of this emotional intelligence, now.
If you walked out into the street and you met a person, you would know pretty much what was going on for them by the energy that comes off them. Now, we talk about this thing is emotion, energy in motion, the spirit that moves us, the emotion, energies coming off people. And when a client comes in to see you, you can pretty much in the first few seconds, be able to ascertain whether they’re feeling pretty relaxed today, or whether they’re slightly nervous about things or whether they’re angry or maybe a bit disappointed about things.
And the interesting thing too, is there’s energy coming off us as a practitioner or as the advisor. Where that energy meets, here, that’s where relationship occurs. And that relationship in here can either be harmonious or what we will call resonant energy or dissonant and clashing. And so my job as a professional is to be able to constructively work the space between us, as I said, relationship occurs in the space between us and it’s about using the energy of the other person, as well as my own, to be able to get us to the point where we can have the discussions that need to be had. If I just take you through something that we call the emotional intelligence flow chart. Now this is logically how things work and event happens, now whatever that is an event or an incident happens. And immediately as a human being, we attach a thought to that.
It’s an instantaneous thought followed by, is that good or not? And so we ended up in this world of judgment, whether it’s a positive or negative thing. Once I’ve decided that what happens is my emotions kick in and remember emotions make me act. So I’ll come down here and I’ll take action. Now, let’s just go over that again, something happens. I think about it a little bit, I work out whether it’s good or bad, I work out which emotions I need. And then I take action. Now, if you could do that, and if I could do that, I think we’d be really, really resourceful. But one of the things that happens for human beings is, and it stems back to our historic evolution. And that is we have our fight, flight and freeze response. And quite often when emotional things happen, we don’t actually go through the flow chart that makes it intelligent.
We actually act in a way that’s emotionally unintelligent and that is the event happens. And based on my emotional memory, the emotion kicks in straight of way. I act out of impulse and then I react. And a lot of times when there are emotional issues going on inside your office and with your clients, what we do is we end up going the short path, which is the fight, flight or freeze response. The emotion kicks in. We act out the way that we always do and where you react. So one of the tricks of being a really great advisors to be able to sit with the energy that’s coming off your client and be able to work through the purple way.
In the next series of videos, what we’ll be able to do is to show you how we can really work on this even more so, and be able to develop an emotional vocabulary so that we can actually check in with ourselves, how we’re going. And then also check in with them clients.