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Last summer I was visiting family in Singapore when I got a text message.
Please respond to my mail of yesterday, thanks.
Not knowing the number, I responded with the usual sorry, who is this?
Adam S comes the response.
Thanks for not realizing.
Thanks for not realizing?
That's obnoxious, but whatever.
I'm going to be polite in here.
So I respond with, sorry, what's your full name?
I don't see any emails from you.
To which he responds, Adam loosing patience solar.
Adam loosing patience solar.
Are you serious?
Who are you?
I'm being patient with you.
Your first strike was thanks for not realizing.
But this one's really pushing it.
Where are your manners?
So I pull my phone, I'm frustrated and be like, let me teach you how to spell losing
because you clearly didn't go to primary school.
>> [LAUGH] >> Instead, I paused and I showed
the text message to my younger brother who read it and said, wait a minute.
I think dad works for an Adam solar.
And then it dawned on me.
I was borrowing my Dad's SIM card in Singapore.
So I must have been texting his coworkers.
So I run to Dad and show him the phone.
Dad, I think I'm talking to your to your friends there.
And here's the conversation, looks up and says poke it.
I'm glad you're not the angry poker that used to be.
Otherwise today, I'd be looking for a new job.
This experience first introduced me to the notion
that emotional intelligence is extremely important in the business workplace.
>> [LAUGH] >> It can literally save your job.
>> [LAUGH] >> And turns out there's a lot of data to
support this.
>> [LAUGH] >> Daniel Goleman, who writes about this
in the Harvard Business Review, arrives at this conclusion.
He says emotional intelligence matters more and
more, the higher up you get in a company.
In fact, the difference between a star performer and
an average performer is 90% attributable to emotional intelligence.
Consider the following two examples where a lack of emotional intelligence
was quite harmful.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick got in a fight with an Uber driver on video.
The Uber driver's scene telling Kalanick though he lost $97,000 and
went bankrupt because Uber changed his policies and reduced its fares.
Kalanick then yells back saying,
some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit.
They blame everything on somebody else.
This outburst cost Kalanick personally $200,000 and
eventually contribute to him losing his job.
Or consider Elon Musk.
When British diver Vernon Unsworth publicly criticized Elon Musk's idea on
twitter, Musk lashed back, calling him a pedophile and a child rapist.
This led to a prolonged midyear crisis and a lawsuit.
My point is that I should be the CEO of Tesla and Uber.
But in all seriousness, as we progress in our careers, we'll be faced by
situations and people that test our patience more and more frequently.
And in those situations,
the cost of not handling that with poise will also increase.
So it's of paramount importance that we work on our emotional intelligence
before we go out and change the world.
So you're probably wondering now, how do I do this?
Well, there's two important parts of the brain that need to be
trained sequentially.
The first is the neocortex.
The neocortex handles logic.
So if you want to learn Excel, you read a book, and now you know how to use Excel.
It learns quickly.
The limbic system handles emotions.
This one's a little slower to teach something to the limbic system.
We need consistency or practice over a long time.
So how about we take the first step together?
Let's train our neocortex and let's take the example of anger.
So, first, our aim here is to convince the neocortex that in some situations,
anger is counterproductive.
So in the case of the text messages, when I get angry,
I'm excreting chemicals in my body that are literally poisoning my system.
In other words, I'm drinking the poison and
I'm hoping that the guy on the other side of the text message gets hurt.
So what does that neocortex say to this, illogical.
>> [LAUGH] >> In the case of Travis Kalanick,
we need to understand that anger is not helping him drive towards the objective.
If anything, it's pushing him further away.
Not only did he fail to convince the Uber driver of his side of the argument,
he also lost a lot of money and eventually his job.
What does the neocortex say to this again, illogical.
And in the case of Elon Musk, we need to understand that if he lets every hater
online get him bothered, then boy, he's going to live a terrible life.
In this case, he may not have lost his job, but he will definitely lose his peace
of mind everytime a bully picks up the phone and fires off a tweet.
So hopefully by now your neocortex is convinced that in some situations,
anger is counterproductive.
Now, comes the hard part.
The limbic system.
Because you can convince your neocortex or something.
But your limbic system will say, I'm still angry.
I still have anger.
Now, I've been working on this for
a while you remember my dad said I was an angry child.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
I found the PRO methodology to work really well for me.
The P in PRO stands for Pause.
Pausing in a difficult situation gives you time to act, instead of reacting.
So when I got the text message, I was able to pause, and gather more information,
and then act, as opposed to reacting with an equally sassy message.
The R in PRO stands for Re-frame.
When Uber CEO Travis Kalanick heard those words
he took that as a personal affront to him.
Instead, he could have reframed those words as product feedback
coming from a very important company constituents, the drivers.
Had he done that he could have probably avoided the 2019 Uber strike
that happened right before the IPO.
And the O in PRO, stands for Own.
Own your emotions.
And in my opinion, the most important one.
Currently, we blame the external circumstances for internal emotions.
So we're constantly trying to fix the external world to fix our internal world.
But the reality is that our influence on the external world is heavily limited.
So own means to go from an external locus of control for
your emotions to an internal locus of control of your emotions.
So Elon Musk did not get angry because somewhere
some person hated on him on Twitter.
He got angry because internally he was attached to the idea
that no one should criticize him publicly and
by changing that expectation, he can change his emotional state, one second.
[SOUND] So how about we handle this situation like a PRO.
>> [LAUGH]
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>> And pause,
>> [LAUGH]
>> Reframe.
Maybe spilling juice all over myself makes us more entertaining for you.
And there'll be more views.
>> [LAUGH] >> And own,
I am not feeling what I'm feeling right now because I spilled juice over myself.
It's because I had an expectation internally that this talk go flawlessly.
So my point is that when in these situations,
anger is not the only thing that can be worked on with PRO.
You can also do this with disappointment,
with hatred, with sadness, any other emotion.
So I hope that you walk out of this room, and next time you're faced with
a challenging situation, you evaluate the merit of the emotional reaction.
And then you pause, you reframe and you own, thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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