The Importance of EQ in Business’ Success with Michael Seaver

The Importance of EQ in Business’ Success with Michael Seaver

Sean: Hey, guys, Welcome back to the show. It’s me again, Sean Si, aka Mr. CEO at 22. And for today, we have Mr. Michael Seaver. We had the pre-show. It’s 5 a.m. his time and I’m so excited to have him here. So yeah, his days just started. He is an award-winning executive coach, leadership consultant, keynote speaker, and author, and he’s on a mission to unlock human potential, to help people uncover and live their purpose.

And of course, on the way to live a more meaningful and authentic life. And I’m so happy and blessed to learn from him today. And I hope that we will be both adding value to you guys, our listeners. Michael, thank you so much for being here on the show.

Michael: It’s my pleasure, Sean. And don’t mind waking up early at all.

Sean: Yeah, yeah, we were discussing that on a pre-show. You know, I’m already learning. We haven’t even been recording and discussing what we want to tackle today. It was um my assistant and yourself and we talked about EQ or emotional quotient. Now to start, why did you choose this, you know to be an expert or an authority on this topic?

I mean, it should be that important, right? For a guy like you who is a business owner and a speaker and an author to choose this topic. How important is EQ for you today?

Michael: Thanks for asking, Sean. It’s super important. I’ve been a coach for 11 years and over those 11 years there’s been a lot of iterations of the way that I uplift and serve people. But as time has passed and progressed, what I’ve realized is that the thing that helps an individual ascend and become their most authentic version of themselves the fastest is their level of EQ or emotional intelligence.

So for me, it started as a child when I turned back the clock and thought about my childhood and the folks that I was raised around. I didn’t have a coach and I didn’t have a mentor, and it wasn’t always the most emotionally intelligent environment. And so for me, I promised myself that as I aged and got older or was in business in any way, shape, or form, I would not only do my best to become emotionally intelligent myself, but then I would also pay it forward and try to teach others the same things because I know how hard it was in my childhood to not have that. But I’ve also seen the success that high EQ can bring inside businesses.

Because success inside of businesses is often attributed to someone’s or the team’s emotional intelligence. So I think there are a lot of reasons why I focus on it and why it’s so important to my business, but I just know the power that it can bring to making people live happy and meaningful lives.

Sean: Okay, So I want to touch base a little bit on that, Michael, because I have this theory that I haven’t been able to prove, of course, because it’s a theory. That’s why it’s a theory. But growing up, I also had a pretty tough childhood. Now I haven’t been able to hear your story, but I’m going to share a little bit about mine.

So I’m the firstborn child in the family, and growing up, I was physically, verbally, and emotionally abused by very close family members. You know, being an entrepreneur takes a lot of resilience and grit, right? It takes a lot of I would say emotionally high scores and you got to score pretty darn high in the EQ, right? 

And you got to be thick-skinned. You got to be able to receive feedback and ponder about that feedback, however sharp it was delivered to you. And now I’m wondering, do you find a direct correlation between tough upbringings or abusive backgrounds, or dysfunctional families? And they go on to start their businesses and become successful entrepreneurs?

Michael: It’s possible. I haven’t seen a direct correlation yet. There are some wonderful studies from across the world, but I’m aware of the ones across the United States because that’s where I live. But some studies show and there’s one that came from the CDC, and I think it was the University of Tennessee called the ACE study. 

So Adverse Childhood Experiences study. And I just got done listening to a book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. So there’s significant research that talks about people who have those adverse childhood experiences that Sean or myself have had that end up being more triggered by very serious events that happen later in their life. So they get sick more quickly or they are emotionally reactive and they don’t have quite as much career success. Maybe they struggle in their relationships.

So if there are more adverse childhood experiences in younger years, the likelihood of success I think is going to be a little bit lower. But those experiences, if the person can find a way to overcome them if they can work on their EQ as they navigate life. Just like Sean said a second ago, the likelihood that they’re going to become better leaders is far higher because they can take the challenge that they incurred in those younger years. 

They have found a way to overcome it, and now they can help others overcome that same challenge for themselves. And there’s significant power in that. So I don’t know if there’s a direct correlation, but I believe that some of the best leaders on the planet have found a way to overcome some of those childhood traumas.

Sean: Got it. I am just wondering because like, we’re two there’s two of us here and we’re one for one, right? Um, become an entrepreneur. So talking about overcoming these challenges, especially when you’re younger. So growing up and we both had it in our family, right? When we’re kids, our world revolves around our parents.

We think that whatever is happening at home must be pretty normal, right? Must be what other kids out there are experiencing. Me and you, that’s all I was thinking. That must be the normal family. Until I grew up. Went out and I realized my family’s, like, not normal at all. So how do you overcome this? And I know a lot of Filipinos here, especially in our country, who come from broken families or families with abusive relatives or, you know, family members, one way or another, whether physical or emotional.

Just earlier I was talking to an applicant and he was applying for a very good position here, in SEO Hacker. And he told me, I come from a broken family. My, my so and so was oppressive and, and he seemed to have been able to overcome it because he seemed to have been able to get, you know, things together.

But he also shared that he had to listen to punk rock and express his thoughts and feelings there. And how do you do it? Because you’re the expert, I want to learn from you. How can one be able to overcome it? How do we be able to overcome these things that happen in our lives?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. There are several ways that we go about this, but the very first step, my belief, is that we have to turn back the clock. So Doctor Joe Dispenza and Dr. Bruce Lipton have done a lot of significant research into understanding what happens in the human mind. And there are five brainwave states. 

And so the way that it works out is that for the first six years of human life, all humans are in something called the Theta Brainwave State, which is a very low brainwave state where everything that happens around us is automatically supplanted into our unconscious or our subconscious. So as we are, you know, from birth until age six, we’re kind of in this place where our caregivers, our parents, the religious institutions that we go to, the schools that we go to, the community that we live in, we are learning how to be a member of a community by spending time in those circles of people. 

But what we don’t realize is occurring is that we’re picking up on all of the communication and behavioral and emotional cues. So you come to Earth or you’re born into Earth like this perfect being, and then you have six years of being acculturated with learning everybody else’s emotional responses. So the first step in understanding your emotional responses is to turn back the clock to say, What did I learn from birth until age six? And then remember that your brain is effectively a computer.

So at the very front of your brain, you have a random access memory, which is your consciousness, your ego, and then you have your unconscious, your subconscious, which is very much like a hard drive on a computer or a cloud computing device. And so you come to Earth as this very perfect being, your unconscious is effectively programmed by your community or your caregivers, or your parents.

And then every time that you’re confronted with a choice or a decision today, what your brain is doing, your conscious mind is going into your unconscious looking for similar situations to say, what’s the safest route that I need to go? So the first step in overcoming this is understanding the way that your mind was programmed to begin with.

Okay, So that’s the key. So that after you get to that understanding of what was the level of emotional intelligence or the emotional responses that I was given, now what do I need to do to say, what do I want to keep? And what new forms of emotional intelligence do I want to create for myself? Right, Right. So step number one is how were you programmed? Step number two is a conscious choice that you need to make.

Say, which ones do I agree with and do I want to keep and which do I want to let go of? Yeah, and that’s the hard part. Sean is figuring out what it is that you want to let go of because there are five dimensions of emotional intelligence and each of them has a kind of a different effect on you and the relationships that you have. And there are different ways by which you develop that dimension of EQ.

But step number one is understanding the way that your mind was programmed. Step number two is this conscious choice to make say, I don’t want to live that life anymore.

Sean: Yeah, yeah. Got it, Got it. Okay. I listen to Theta Waves when I want to drift to sleep. Yeah, or relax, Right? I didn’t know that’s what our brain waves were growing up until we were six years old. Well, that’s very good info there. Um. So now I’m wondering, and when you’re able to identify these things and I just want to share. 

When I got married to my wife, my wonderful wife, I realized there were certain reactions that I would have that were inappropriate and stemmed from my trauma from childhood. And I was only able to realize these things when I think about, you know, after the conflict postmortem, where of course, I lost. Um, and, uh, and, um, and I’ve been thinking like, oh, it must have stemmed from, um, you know, my childhood.

And I have to make it an intentional decision to always be conscious about those cues, those triggers that would make me snap. And is that an accurate picture of the process of how we overcome our problems when it comes to EQ?

Michael: Yeah, you nailed it, Sean. What we have to remember about human beings is that we are feeling machines that think we are not thinking machines that feel right. The entire human system, whether your soul or your mind, your body, is an emotion first. 

Emotion always precedes action. So what Sean just said and what’s important to understand is that we cannot respond and react from emotion to become emotionally intelligent. We need to respond to patterns objectively. So what Sean was saying was that we’re trying to get to the point of understanding what those patterns are. So the very first dimension of EQ is what’s referred to as self-awareness. 

And the technical definition is the ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, and drives as well as their effect on others. But what it is, is for you to identify the pattern of who and what caused your emotion and what are your patterns in your response to that stimulus. Right. Whatever that is, that’s critical. So for Sean to take the time to say, okay, I had these series of events occur in my childhood, and here are the emotional response mechanisms that I was taught in those years.

I’m now in this new meaningful relationship and I need to tweak and adjust my emotional response. Well, how do I recognize what my triggers are? And then how do I, instead of immediately responding in the way that my parents taught me to respond, how do I respond in the way that I want to respond? Yeah, right. And that is so hard. But it can be done. And so the way that I do this, Sean, with clients, is I ask them for 2 to 3 weeks.

I ask them to keep a pain journal. So for 2 or 3 weeks, anything the ho was involved in, what the situation was, why they felt the way that they felt, what they think caused that particular trigger for 2 to 3 weeks? Every single time that they feel sad or mad, they need to track inside the pain journal what it is that caused that. So they have data about themselves. So then once you collect data about who you are and what it is that you’re doing now, you can identify a pattern inside that data, right? That’s critical. 

So because once you take what was once unconscious, right, those things that were implanted in you in the Theta Brainwave State when you’re consciously thinking in the beta brainwave state, you can now make different choices in responses.

Sean: Yeah, yeah. And there are just two triggers you mentioned: sad or mad. Is that accurate?

Michael: Well, the triggers can be any number of things, right? So there are 8 billion people on the planet and so the triggers are going to be unique to every single person literally on the planet. And so it’s just a matter of through the pain journal you recognize what the triggers are. But the way that we recognize what the triggers might be is through emotion, right? 

Because emotion precedes everything else. So if you’re feeling any type of negative emotion, I just use mad or sad as an example, but any negative emotion automatically writes it inside the pain journal so that you can identify who, what, where, why all of that stuff and then come back to it later to find the patterns.

Sean: Got it. I’m gonna ask my wife to do that.

Michael: She’s probably gonna ask you because mine has asked me.

Sean: Yeah. Yeah. Should I? I should do that.