0:00 and good afternoon and welcome to the way to wow people making money I am your host Kevin bemel and we are here every Wednesday at 12 30 p.m Pacific time uh 3 30 p.m eastern time and then an hour in for uh mountain and uh Central Time actually think about that for a minute I say the same thing every week and yet you know my tongue gets over my eye teeth I can't see what I'm saying so yeah you know that in five dollars will get me coffee at Starbucks
0:35 hahaha um so I I have um I have a a special guest um uh today uh someone that I'm I'm very excited to speak to because he's he's an expert in a topic that candidly I know almost nothing about all I know about it is is from what I've read in his book and it's it's quite a fascinating topic called um enneagrams and uh yeah okay Scott's been coaching me on on how to say this word and so um you know I'm I'm
1:12 not going to get into uh you know a long bio uh for for Scott A lender um I'll let him talk to you about um his his background and and the work that he's doing but I want to get right into this because uh the time always goes so fast so Scott welcome to the wait a while thanks for thanks for coming on well thanks Kevin I'm delighted to be here I appreciate you having me yeah my pleasure so um you know the typical way um I I get started with a guest is by saying let's let's take you back as far as you're you know willing to go
1:47 um many times I find that you know a lot like for me when I was you know 12 years old I wasn't thinking you know I'm gonna do a talk show and and I'm gonna be in the real estate business and all of that um so can you would you share with us a little bit about the Genesis of what you maybe thought you were going to be doing and and and then how you ended up being a writer and and and uh you're a I don't know if you call it a coach but but someone who who works with people with respect to enneagrams and and their
2:22 personal development uh was was that something you wanted to do ever since you were a kid or how did that all come together no uh well I was born at a very young age and um I I figured with your eye tooth joke I could start with mine as well so absolutely I could tell my daughter so uh well no so you know as a kid I I honestly I didn't I didn't really have a clear picture I don't think I was kind of um quite honestly I you know I I graduated high school and then I I spent you know the next four years at a two-year college so I didn't really know
2:57 what I wanted to do um then I spent the next two years at a four-year college so it kind of evens out if you do the math um but uh you know at some point well I think at some point I really realized I was fascinated with just how just The Human Experience um just really curious about how people operate you know why we do the things that we do I tried my hand uh when I was like 19 20 21 at writing songs and playing uh with playing music with people and and really wanting to explore what I was seeing in the world through
3:32 ART and turns out I don't have much talent for that so that didn't continue um and then I was very fascinated with psychology and so I thought that I would pursue um psychology at University but uh the quite honestly the place I was um financially at the time I thought I'm not going to be able to go all the way with this and I don't want to only stop at a bachelor's in psychology so I stumbled upon a business degree that had an emphasis an organizational psychology so I thought okay um you know my father at the time was pushing me towards business I was
4:08 resistant but this combination of sort of industrial organizational psychology that would look at business through the lens of how people engage with one another how they how they approach problem solving through a psychological lens sort of the interpersonal dynamics that really fascinated me so I set off on that path and spent years doing that um working in in HR working in business um and along the way I became particularly interested in working with leaders um quickly you know observing how how much impact influence and
4:43 responsibility that leaders really have um to care for the people that are in their command to influence the world in a positive way to solve complex problems and challenges and certainly not in isolation but they they shoulder an important responsibility so I started working more intentionally with leaders doing leadership development programs and these kinds of things and along the way as part of my offering for leaders I started pursuing various psychometrics got certified in Myers-Briggs as a personality system got certified in a
5:18 system called Hogan and then I started doing emotional intelligence coaching so got certified in the process that I use and reference in the book and kind of framed the book around in parallel about a decade ago or so I started um looking into the Enneagram and it felt like for a while no matter where I turned somebody was asking me my Enneagram type and I was like I better have an answer to this at some point so I started digging in and I really took a long time to figure it out and what's really interesting about the Enneagram is that whereas other tools Focus
5:55 largely maybe on what you prefer in terms of like your preferred learning style or how you prefer to maybe renew your energy or organize your time or other tools might look at how other people are likely to experience you the Enneagram is less concerned with that and gets underneath all of those behaviors and focuses on why do you do the things that you do so that really kind of got me intrigued because going back to my earlier uh description of my journey um the why that people do the things
6:32 that they do and why don't they do the things they do really fascinated me so I started exploring the Enneagram didn't really do a deep dive until much later when I started recognizing um some some things in my life like struggling to connect with my own emotional experience and really being able to name what it is I feel and seeing ways at that and I write about it in the book I had a pretty disruptive experience where my body kind of alerted me to kind of years of repressed emotions and it kind of started all coming out in very unproductive ways and so I then took a
7:08 deep dive into it for a personal journey and I spent the last 10 years really digging in um got certified as well but that was like a prolonged two-year process very intensive and you know about two or three years ago I was kind of reflecting on my emotional intelligence coaching practice I was looking at data around self-awareness and I found myself pretty depressed at the results of of everything right so we know all this studies all this research all this publication keeps coming out saying emotional intelligence is by far
7:45 the most important thing you can have for your personal and professional success 70 to 75 percent of the reason a leader will succeed or fail is directly attributed to emotional intelligence measures and yet the Cornerstone of emotional intelligence self-awareness is lacking and I don't think that's a big surprise when you look at the world that that we're fundamentally lacking in awareness and I did I read some research that suggested only you know 13 to 15 percent of people are truly self-aware and that the more self-aware somebody thinks they are the opposite is likely to be true so I'm thinking
8:21 we know all the measures of emotional intelligence or most of them we have very capable people and academics and coaches that are working with people to try to develop this thing called emotional intelligence and yet when you measure it the most important feature of it is awareness it's not there and so I had this moment where I'm thinking I think the same was true for my story I had all this knowledge I was getting I was training leaders working with leaders and yet I had all this inability to understand what was truly going on beneath the water line of Consciousness
8:56 until I started working with the Enneagram and started discovering all this like repressed stuff in many ways what the Enneagram reveals to us is one of nine personality archetypes that we over identify with as a young person and into our into our adulthood as a way to get our needs met there's no good type there's no bad type but it's it's just a limiting it's a it's essentially in many ways it's a mask of personality and I started doing all this work personally and said how do I merge these two things together I I think that if we could help people
9:34 who are on the journey to procuring Greater levels of emotional intelligence if we could help them get beneath the water line of Consciousness like I did then I think we could get somewhere and that's where I set off to write the book so I'm gonna I have several questions um that that I want to touch base on so um the first two are um for for we hear this term emotional intelligence all the time yeah and so I if you wouldn't mind giving us your
10:10 definition of what emotional intelligence really is um I think that would be very useful and then the other the other of this two questions is why do you think we're so uh we'll call it self unaware at a time because like this whole sort of awareness movement has been going on at least since the 70s it seems to me right I mean we talk about the 60s but I think the 60s really happened in the 70s in my experience I'm I'm old enough to have lived through both so anyway I'm
10:45 curious to hear your thoughts on on both of those yeah so we'll start with the first one um you know emotional intelligence is generally defined as you know how aware you are of yourself how how Adept you are at managing yourself and how aware you are of the people in your lives and managing those relationships and when you zoom in you see things like empathy and self-regulation and these kinds of things and those are all fair and all true and I'm really glad you asked this question because I I explore this in the book as well is I think that's an
11:21 incomplete picture of emotional intelligence and so I think emotional intelligence also includes awareness of what's going on in our bodies and awareness of what's going on in our in the quality of our thoughts or our metacognition and part of what the Enneagram actually brings together for us is of the nine archetypes you can break them down into three Triads known as body types heart types and head types and these types tend to identify more so the body types tend to identify a lot with physical Sensations and tactile
11:57 kind of um relationship to the world feeling types or heart types tend to uh really I want to feel something when they show up to life and they want to express themselves and connect relationally and head types have a proclivity to want to analyze and make sense of things and become certain about the things in which they don't understand and depending on where you fall head harder body you overuse that intelligence and kind of have a lack of access to the other two thereby giving you a very limited ability by which to create a sense of awareness because for
12:32 example head types will tend to until they become aware of what they're doing try to use logic and reason for everything even when logic and reason might not be the thing that's needed maybe it's something that's a matter of the heart or a matter of the gut right like and so part of so so I think emotional intelligence has been redacted to simply trying to pay attention to what you're feeling and then manage those feelings really well when I think it's actually about creating a greater container for awareness for optionality for seeing
13:07 problems from a a more broad open mindset through connecting all of these things um and then the second part of your question I don't know if that fully answers your first question I guess the second part is why why are we so bad at it well one is I think because we don't include all three of those things in the conversation second thing is even when we are talking about emotional intelligence and we're using systems that measure it we bypass emotions themselves and try to go into rational processing and behavioral change before people even show up and actually feel the feelings right so part of learning
13:43 to become emotional intelligence is to pay attention to all of these things so from the body perspective what are my physical Sensations and physical physical signals in my body ascending what are they telling me right and that's a tough piece of work like people don't often stop and think about the importance of that in fact oftentimes that gets dismissed as less important right if you hear somebody say oh my gut is telling me you kind of go huh your gut that doesn't seem that valid my brain is telling me we should do this right so you dismiss the gut but yet there's this girl and growing body of Neuroscience that would say our
14:18 bodies know far in advance before our heads and our hearts know anything it's called interoception like our bodies are constantly sending signals our organs are doing it all the time and the brain is locked in this little black box trying to make sense of the signals and so our bodies are interacting with life and it's then it's sending signals and our brains trying to make sense of it and through that process and through the emotions that often coincide with that the brain is now making predictions about what it thinks is going to happen so if we focus too much on the brain if we focus only on the heart or if we focus only on the body we miss the big picture we have to
14:53 bring all three three of these things together now what the Enneagram really goes much farther with is kind of what I started to say a while ago which is these nine personality archetypes it if you look at the root word of personality in the Greek Persona it actually means mask and so what we what we approach personality with in the Enneagram system is one of nine masks that we wear and those masks we adapted like I said we over identified we contain all nine
15:28 types we over identified with one type as a young person as a way to get our needs met essentially putting on the mask of personality to say this approach this way of framing reality this way of believing this way of thinking this way of seeing this is what's going to help me get be safe have love get approval and all of those things and that mass that strategy worked for us as a young person that's why we identified with it in whatever our lived experience was the problem is is what Carl Young says said uh in his work and I'm going to
16:03 paraphrase it what works for you in the morning of life will work against you in the afternoon of life so people reach a certain age a certain time and they start wondering why the relationships are is fulfilling or successful as they think they should be or expected them to be or they have work challenges and interpersonal Dynamic challenges there they can't figure out or a slew of other things around you know from relationships to decision making problems to the inability to handle the stressors that come their way because they keep trying to solve the problems of their adult life through the mask of
16:39 the young person that um was was sort of adopted in childhood and so part of what you do with the Enneagram is you learn about your type you learn about the mass you learn about the fears and the desires and all of the things and the stories that shaped it so that you can start to learn how to take it off right and so until you do that work I don't think awareness is possible not real awareness because what when you say like become more aware or become more emotionally intelligent and you don't even you're not even conscious of this like mask of Personality that you're wearing you just set about trying
17:15 to adjust the mask oh Kevin said I need to you know turn it to the right so I'll turn it to the right or I need to put more blush on the cheeks or I need so you keep trying to like make the mask look more presentable but you haven't even begun to excavate well what are the wounding messages and the stories that I carry that are self-limiting and all of this stuff that I have to tend to and that's really a tough thing to present in a leadership or business context because those kinds of conversations usually I'm not a lot of space for that right and so um because we can't do that we keep I think throwing more and more emotional intelligence tools which again are tend
17:51 to be far too logical and rational trying to fix the problems that we just can't fix because we don't know how to get underneath to see what's really going on um in our blind spots so you mentioned a few minutes ago um Myers-Briggs which I think a lot of people are have heard of it and may be familiar with it How would how does that system compare and in fact I saw like a high school uh you know teacher here compare and contrast you know Myers-Briggs with the
18:26 Enneagram but but for for people who um you know have heard of of the one and are are new to Enneagram how how do these I mean do they relate or are they really completely different systems how would you explain that that uh connection or lack thereof I think they're I think they're measuring different things um I I've seen some Publications I think you could do some some Googling on um you know the overlay and I think some people have made some pretty good efforts and strides at trying to make correlations between some of the the Myers-Briggs
19:02 um typing versus Enneagram typing um but Myers-Briggs is really measuring four things you know there's four letters in the system and the first letter is how do you prefer to renew your energy and that's through either extroversion or introversion um how do you prefer to take in information with whether that's through sensing or intuition how do you prefer to make decisions do you start with thinking or do you start with feeling and the fourth letter is how do you organize your time whether it's through judging or perceiving and it's I'm oversimplifying it these sort of four
19:37 letters um reveal more than just that you can when you get into the Myers-Briggs you can see the way that your energy renewal fuels your Intuition or your thinking or your feeling and how you're judging or you're perceiving it it it's actually much more nuanced than people tend to give it credit for so it's incredibly useful and I still find it really useful to go into like a team of uh you know an intact team a team of people that work together and in two or three hours you can create a lot of aha moments about oh you know you you're you really prefer to work this way and I prefer to work this way and it has it's not
20:12 personal at all and you can create a lot of strides but the Myers-Briggs a doesn't really get into why you prefer those things right and it doesn't purport to want to give you any it suggests that you've learned to flex once you understand where you you have preferences therefore you learn to flex outside your preferences when the situation calls for it but it doesn't really give you the how to do that and so I think with the Enneagram again it's not really about even what I prefer although preferences will align with motivations it's really about trying to understand
20:47 the unconscious motivations that fuel so much of these preferences that fuel how I tend to show up to my relationships that you know the the the the core fear of my type that I might not even recognize was even there until I discovered it and so it's just a much more and much more complex system you can learn that any it doesn't take a lot to learn the basics of the Enneagram but the Enneagram is pretty complex but again that's kind of why I like it because I think people are complex and any system that's too simplistic to try to describe the Human Condition I'm I has has pretty short shelf life in its efficacy right
21:24 yeah yeah I I agree so this is this is a good I'm going to show people your book I I was fortunate enough to get an advanced copy because I think it was released yesterday yesterday yeah it's in the world now and it's I I mean I I assume it's available on Amazon and all this Amazon Target pretty much any online uh resource that you like um you can find it there yeah okay and and this is the book The Enneagram of emotional intelligence and the the subtitle is a journey to personal professional success so um and I've been reading the book and um you know one of the first things
22:00 you know you go through in the book is figuring out which of the nine enneagrams um uh you know you think you fit into and and I mean I'm I I read through them and then I read through them again and I found myself you know struggling against a process of saying I want to be this one and I can't even really this one so how how do we engage and this is a really overused word so pardon me but how do we engage
22:36 authentically in discovering you know what our should we call it our key Enneagram is is yeah yeah our yeah or I've referred to as our core type um he is perfectly a good word for that as well um well there are resources out there that go into much more depth um if you are uh if you will if you like to nerd out on information like me there's a book by Beatrice Chestnut and it was her Academy that I got my certification she wrote the complete Enneagram and that's the it gets into the 27 personality types because there's actually three
23:12 different versions of each of the nine types called subtypes and believe me I'm not even going to try to talk about that right now but it it it really but it's like a textbook so you have to really like the textbook approach she's got another book um that she wrote with her partner Iranian Pais and I'm trying to remember um or the Enneagram guide to waking up and that goes into a lot more detail there's also two Enneagram tests that I really trust uh it's through CP Enneagram Academy CP enneagramacademy.com you can get a test link uh you have to pay for it and ieq9
23:47 those are two tests that I really trust to give you accurate information no tests can be a hundred percent sure because it doesn't know if you answered honestly or if you were drunk when you took it and has no idea so um but if you're if you have my own heart if you try if you if you know get a quiet space you know get into the test answers honestly to your point not answer in a way that you want to be but in a way that you truly are um it'll give you a pretty accurate result and much more information than my
24:23 book because I didn't have space to really go into major depth of the description so I try to I try to use it as a refresher for people who had heard about it and yet give enough information for people who are novice to understand basically what we're talking about and then kind of get into the Crux of the rest of the book yeah yeah I fall into that novice categories yeah yeah yeah right so hopefully we can follow up after the show and and I'll maybe I'll get those links uh from you for those two tests I can put them in the show notes so so for for um you know people who want to do that
24:58 like me you know would be able to just uh link right there after watching the show so so we we we figure out our core Enneagram yeah okay and and then what do we what do we do with that information yeah I mean that there's probably a huge question but yeah it is a huge question because many people probably most people um kind of go okay that's interesting and then sort of move on and that's fine um and then there's people like me that want to do the work of
25:34 transformation because when I recognized that I I the way I see the world is legitimate but it's incredibly limiting um there are at least eight other Vantage points from which to perceive reality and I'm only looking at it from one I kind of felt jipped I was like I yeah I I want to seem I want a bit a wider lens a wider field of possibility and so the Enneagram when you work with it um it does and I and I included uh in the back of the book some growth suggestions right and because this is probably getting a little too
26:10 um academic for for this conversation but each Enneagram type for example has what's known as Enneagram wings and that's the number to the left and the right of your core type so identify as a three so the number to the right of my type is two and the number left is four so those are wings and there's work to be done once you once once I learned enough about my three type and what motivates it and then you start learning to observe your automatic reactive tendencies that your type kind of tells you to do without really much conscious thought you realize how much your type has kind of lulled you to sleep and you kind of want to again it's that Essence
26:46 behind the mask as you start to realize the mask has lulled you into a sleep State once you do enough work in learning and observing your own type then there's things like the wings and then there's other stuff that I won't try to describe now that give you resource courses to start to move Beyond the vantage point of your type so you'll always be your core type but when you do the work you won't over time you won't automatically just see think and feel and respond from your core type and then there's other things you know that are separate from the Enneagram that I
27:21 always encourage people to do going back to my earlier comments around we have to learn to pay attention to what our bodies are telling us there's things you can do that improve interoceptive sensitivity um you know things like I try to do a daily body scan do you ever do those where you sort of whether it helps really useful when you first wake up but I try to do like a 10 minute breathing meditation I usually use like an app that's like a guided meditation helping me focus on the breath which is really really good for raising awareness but incorporating a body scan where you
27:57 start directing energy like just start paying attention I close my eyes after I've done my breathing and I direct I direct Focus to the top of my head what's going on at the top of my head you know I feel anything there if I do I don't try to change it I just notice it and I kind of work my way down through my face is there any tension in my forehead am I crinkling my brow and I kind of work my way down to my neck and my shoulders is there anything going on there okay there's something there again maybe try to breathe into it a little bit but don't judge it don't worry about it and I go down in my arms and my torso and down through my my legs and into my feet and there's research that suggests
28:34 that a daily practice of that kind of body scan it really increases your interceptive sensitivity which helps you kind of be able to be more conscious of what your body is telling you and learn to separate physical feeling from emotion and that becomes really important um I'll use an illustration of a 2011 study from some Israeli judges who were um seeing people up for parole and before 10 am the parole rate averages around 66 percent after 10 a.m before lunch the numbers
29:11 start falling off the cliff unless the judge had a snack so you literally see people's very Freedom start to go down in terms of their chances of getting out of prison wow based on an apple right that's not a good thing and it's an illustration of how if we're not sensitive and attuned to our physical feeling we can conflate that with emotion I'm sure those judges thought they were making sensible logical decisions completely out of touch with the fact that their
29:46 body was just under-resourced and they needed something to eat right and when you start doing the body scan and there's some other things I suggest in the book that improve that you start to be able to pay more attention to what your body needs to be fully metabolized and resource for what it needs and there's a bunch of other things I suggest in the book too around learning to name our feelings becoming more emotionally granular there's um you know getting an emotional thesaurus where you start to like go beyond how do you feel I feel good fine tired what you know you start getting more granular being able to name in a more granular level is
30:21 proving for people to have greater sensitivity so their emotional experience and so there's a lot we can do separate from our core Enneagram type that goes back to what the foundations of the system point to which is thinking feeling physical sensation integrating all of those into our lived experience so you know as you're talking about these various um processes you know it it reminds me of different times in my own life I know when I first started in business back in 1986 you know a relatively young
30:58 man you started at five right yeah but thanks you're my buddy um so you know I like I would go to interact with a potential I was in the real estate business um initially and I would go to interact with a client a potential client I should say who inevitably had they were you know reasonably wealthy because they had some real estate that right and and I would find myself having kind of a visceral dislike for these people so I'm
31:35 trying to get business from people at the same time I'm probably giving off a sense of I don't really like you and and finally it occurred to me I'm I'm working at Cross purposes here and I thought a lot about it and I realized um from my father I got a sort of fundamental distrust of people who were wealthy because his feeling oftentimes was people became wealthy through nefarious means right and so I had to sort of dig inside myself to figure that out and then so then once I figured that
32:10 I was okay well what do I do about this right you know so then I started I I frankly I joined a it was a networking group and a charitable group where there were everybody there was wealthier than me and found out that there were lots of nice you know very kind right wealthy people around yeah um but it was it was it was a long difficult process it took me several years and I I have to admit I I don't think I've conquered in the sense that it no longer right impacts me but uh you know I'm aware of it now yeah and so I can I've become I think reasonably
32:47 effective at shortcutting it's um its impact on me yeah so in in in in finding out our Enneagram and our our our sort of inbuilt tenancies if you will the the process then is is it is it seeking to and I'm not saying I don't know how this example I just gave you would relate to my Enneagram but is this the is this the process we're seeking to go through or or you know you know what I'm saying how do we somehow we've got to get below you know
33:24 here we got to get out of here yeah um and and and get into here and and hear like you're saying the heart of the gut or at least I did yeah so so I love I love that example because that's I mean that's that's an Enneagram lesson and of itself not not knowing your type yet um getting curious about this thing that you were experiencing right this sort of emotional trigger getting curious about why it's there and then getting curious about the story you told yourself or were holding that sat behind the feeling right um and most people don't do that we tend
34:00 to Outsource our negative emotions onto other people and blame them for these these bad these these negative emotions or even our own negative behaviors and I love what you said that finding that out didn't make it all just magically go away right but now you create more space between stimulus and response right instead of just having an interaction being feeling triggered maybe acting out in some way or not getting the deal done because you know they they didn't think you liked them and it was it was showing in your your performance um you're now more aware of when it
34:35 happens and I Ma I imagine tell me if I'm wrong that because you can observe it happening that you can release the emotion quicker than you used to be able to that's exactly right yeah and I think that's what happens too so for me um I'll just use one example because I've been talking a very high level we're not going to go through all the core motivations of all nine types but Enneagram three okay so there's a core fear that I had no idea was a core fear of my life until I did this work that um separate from what I achieve that I
35:12 don't have any real worth that's what threes believe right they don't consciously believe it but they that's what they internalize there's some perceived message that that people don't value me for who I am but what I can do for them and for others and accomplish in the world and you can kind of see it all over people running around like crazy trying to perform and Achieve and build bigger and bigger bigger things um and sometimes to the point where they end up in the ER with stress and heart issues because they've worked themselves to death never knowing that they weren't necessarily chasing I'm not saying this is true of everyone of course but for
35:47 the three motivation that the very reason they were chasing these successes and were constantly working themselves to the Bone may have had nothing to do with pursuing these entrepreneurial Ventures or the CEO of a company it might have just been on an unconscious level that they thought if they could achieve enough they would finally feel worthy and so for me I had to excavate and kind of go what are the stories I'm holding what are the self-limiting beliefs that's informing that and I had to go back and I had to think about um my parents relationship with each other and the Dynamics of what and post
36:22 divorce with them and you know perfectly wonderful people um but as a young person um through you know various interactions and the different messages I received I kind of felt lost in that process and I felt like my own identity and my own emotions didn't really matter and that I got the most sort of attention and um sort of sense of belonging when I was able to be demonstrate some kind of proficiency or some kind of success in the as a family relationship broker or whatever that was and I started building
36:57 on layers and layers and layers and very unconsciously to them suddenly as an adult um not able to connect with my own emotional experience you know one of the things that woke me up to this whole thing as I was in a um a men's group for about 12 weeks with about 15 guys my friend was working on his PhD at the time and part of what he was working on was the interaction of men connecting from the heart like like the way men talk about feelings relate over feelings all these things so we were his sort of Lab Rats for his first group
37:32 um and uh the first night you know he just put eight core emotions on the wall and after some you know food and getting to know each other a little bit with this new group of guys all we had to do was look up at the wall and name one or two emotions and we didn't have to give context I didn't have to justify the motion just say it and at some point I'm like I was struggling I'm like well just say one nobody's gonna know if it's real just say it right but I I couldn't really and I was the last to go and I actually chose the motion of loneliness because I felt like I was the only one that didn't understand it and
38:08 so I had to start going underneath and underneath and underneath to go ah because I carry a story that my own feelings don't really matter and so it's been an ongoing process from my Enneagram Journey to start to learn to pay attention to my feelings and that's been hard it's been hard and it's been hard to connect with feelings that aren't comfortable you know um one of the you know I mentioned the the heart Triads being enneagrams twos three and four and I'm a three some at the center of the heart Triad and a common emotional uh theme for heart
38:43 types right below the surface of awareness is the emotion of sadness so part of getting connected to your own emotions is to get connected to sadness and that's not fun and it's easy to want to put that away and say you know what ignorance was Bliss I don't want to do this anymore right that was fine but I've learned to to do that and you know um even recently I was noticing that I was able to access a couple of you know tears in some sweet not traumatic moments um with my family and I had never been able to do that before and it's actually
39:19 quite quite a beautiful thing yeah and so for each Enneagram type they've got similar a similar thing to do right it's finding out the the cork fear that's driving them the motivation and then learning to pay attention to when it surfaces and then starting getting with compassionate curiosity start to excavate and question the story what's the story you're holding is that story objectively true if not how can you start to release the story so one of the things it's it's uh gosh there's so I've got so many questions now
39:54 um so in in my work as a military chaplain one of the things that I and it's I'm not sure if you've been in the military but as you might imagine the military has a very strong culture and so everybody who comes into it brings whatever they've got but now you're in this culture and of course one of the cultures is or one of the factors of the culture is you got to meet the mission and if something is stopping you from meeting the mission go back to rule One Meet the mission right um and so um I was I was on deployment in 2011 when the um reactor in Japan
40:33 melted down and we we were the first um major ship on the scene we were I was on an aircraft in a U.S aircraft carrier and because of the radiation most of the crew had to stay within the whole of the ship because we weren't sure if we were going to get you know irradiated basically and I started getting this flow of sailors coming to my office and basically they're saying to me you know chaps I I feel sad and I have no idea why right and I mean if if they had
41:10 thought about it you know we would see pictures of houses floating by literally right and it doesn't take too much imagination to know that there's probably dead bodies in the houses right and so I found myself having to explain to them feeling sadness is not bad sadness is as much a part of life as happiness is and indeed happiness has no meaning if it's counterpart sadness isn't experienced as well yeah right because to a large extent I think we feel things in Counterpoint we know
41:45 we're happy because in part we're not sad yeah um but it was really it was a heavy lift for a lot look it's it's like a floating College dormitory right 90 of the people on the ship are under you know 24 years old um I was a heavy lift I think for these young people to come to terms with those kind of of ideas if you will so so this leads me to my question and and I I have a my daughter will be 16 soon how do we apply what you're explaining to us what you're teaching us how do we
42:21 apply it to our children as parents to maybe help our children not have to do I don't know quite so much deep work as maybe we had to do because I'll I'll add on to it real quickly so I don't want to talk too much but there was a point in my life in my early 20s when it was very popular for people to blame what was ever wrong with them on their parents yeah and I looked at that and I thought to myself gee you know my parents did the best job they could yeah now it's time for me to take responsibility for my own life and fix whatever stuff my parents and I did to
42:58 mess me up and that's to a certain extent that's been my journey you know sitting for the last 40 40 years or so is rather than saying oh you know I'm this way because of my father my mother or whatever saying I'm this way make this they may be the root of it but now it's up to me to make my life what I want it to be going forward so how do we potentially I don't know shortcut that process for our children if it's possible it's a brilliant question and a couple things come to mind one is you
43:33 know I think I think we we all had to put on an ego at some point and our children will as well and you kind of have to have any have an ego to just transcend an ego and much of what I've been talking about in this sort of massive personality is ego we're talking about learning how to transcend or even you know um and I'll say kill the ego but but move past the ego and I think that all of us in our lived experience will internalize certain messages that shape what that ego looks like no matter how great our parents were um some things happen you know on a very
44:09 unconscious level from when we were really young and maybe we didn't actually see it as you know we don't you know perceptual neuroscientist Bo lotto in his work points out that um we don't see things as they are but only as they were useful to see right none of us sees an objective picture of reality right even when it comes to something like do you remember the the Blue Dress gold dress debate back in 2014 do you remember like it was going around the internet and it was like people were like almost throwing things at each other whether or not the dress was blue or the dress was gold and you saw it and you're like I can't understand how somebody whatever side
44:45 you saw I think I saw gold I'm like how could anybody see that as blue like it was infuriating but it's such a perfect example of how your experience with things is completely different than my experience so as a young person the messages we receive you know the things we overhear the things we think we think our parents are doing when we have no idea what's going on it's going to all filter in and and create a story A Narrative of how we need to make sense of the world so that we can survive it um and like I said whatever that story is usually works pretty well for us up to a certain point
45:20 um but we can't live you know the later part of our Lives according to the programming of the early parts of our lives one thing I think that I've become more aware of because I've got two young girls um 12 and 10. and I'm paying more attention and the book illustrates uh the wounding message for each Enneagram type and again it doesn't have to be an actual objective this was the wound that I handed you right but in the Mind's Eye and the lived experience they internalize some form of that message knowing this anytime I think I
45:55 start to see my child maybe living out signs of that wound a little bit I try really hard to counteract it with messages right I think my one of my daughters is starting to she's striking me as potentially being putting on the the Enneagram one um I don't know she's all she's young I don't know and I'm not gonna sign a type yet and I think that's the wrong thing to do right don't don't type your kids they haven't even fully formed yet right their brains aren't done done going like until they're 24 25 so but I do see and ones are known as the perfectionists or the improvers and they tend to have a
46:31 pretty rigid way of looking at things that something's either good or bad or wrong or right and the message behind that is that it's not okay to make mistakes or you know I have this belief that I can't make mistakes and so I've got to be good and do good and and they work really really hard and it's this endless quest to recover the lost virtue of Serenity before they believed that they had they're at perfect peace before they internalize this message that they've got to perfect themselves in the world and everyone around them and I'm seeing some signs that's the first time I've
47:06 spoken about this sort of publicly but I'm seeing some signs that I don't know for sure but my wife and I've been trying really hard to send her the message of how just okay it is to make mistakes I mean when she's hard on herself this is constant and even before she's hard on herself it says constant can we at least try to subdue wherever she picked that up to try to counteract a bit of that so she doesn't keep making it more cemented and that neuropathway in her brain gets well worn and like then you have it's hard to you know create new exit ramps right so we're trying and um but who knows maybe we have it all wrong maybe she's not trying to be a one we're
47:41 giving her the wrong message I don't know maybe it's messing her up even more so in the end we are going to mess up our kids and at the end of the day [Laughter] I thought of an absolutely terrible joke when you said we shouldn't type our kids and I would think today we would want to you know WordPress our kids at least our word process I mean yeah yeah I just said you know go in a slightly different direction now
48:18 um and and part of it is because you reminded me about something that was in your book about that you were in this this men's group um and I was I was talking to a psychologist friend of mine uh sometime in the last week or two and he was saying to me he thought that um in some ways men sort of got the better were dealt the better hand um by the feminist movement um in the sense that um it's become much more
48:54 um acceptable for men to um get in touch with how they feel with their emotions to express them to speak with you know a vocabulary that certainly when I was you know a boy that was you did not talk about that kind of stuff especially with your buddies they would have abs that you had been teased to death right so I'm wondering how does that is how does that strike you are you are you seeing that
49:29 because I have another friend who who specializes in in basically helping men heal from trauma in their lives and sort of break through um you know barriers that that were caused by that trauma the trauma isn't necessarily like you know being sexually assaulted or something like that but we all have our traumas and some are you know more impactful than others so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that because I think it's an important topic um well any gender delineations above my pay grade um I haven't studied that um really I I I will say
50:06 I'm really encouraged that I'm seeing more and more uh progress towards uh men being able to and being encouraged to connects to their emotional experience I think that's incredibly um beautiful and necessary because you know those emotions are in there and they're coming with us no matter what and you know when people can like we talked about a while ago when people can name what they're feeling understand what they're feeling that allows them to metabolize what they're feeling and
50:42 actually re-engage the prefrontal cortex and be able to make rational decisions that the the moment calls for because they didn't push the emotion away they actually really deeply connected to it and allowed themselves to feel it um and I think you know when you see some really bad decisions in the world or things people have done they really regret it's because they bypass the emotion or the and by trying to bypass it the emotion becomes all-consuming and comes out in different ways Right comes out as Rage or some kind of you know overtly directed externally directed hostility or you know you know
51:17 oppression of groups like you see all this stuff and I know there's other things in their belief systems and cultural you know there's stuff in there that informs a lot of what we do but we could make huge changes in the world everybody could if we just took the time to feel what we're feeling I don't know where and why that the you know the message early in our cultures would say that feeling of feeling is some kind of weakness like that you know you know connecting to our vulnerability is one of the greatest strengths we could have you know yeah I mean again I I agree with that
51:54 and in that that was also a lot of the work I did in in the Navy as well was helping these service members understand that you are vulnerable and and yet look at all you've done in spite the fact that you're a verbal human being right I mean yeah and a lot of them had done quite amazing things I mean when you consider some of them are going into combat right yeah where you're facing a real existential threat and when you do when you look at Corporate America and you see there's research that that shows that leaders that can connect to and show an appropriate amount of vulnerability are more effective they become stronger leaders than when they
52:29 were trying to push that away and just be strong like sort of present strong yeah in fact I was just talking about that on my show yesterday when I was talking about um some of the the exercising courage in in being a leader in in business and and my point was a lot of times the the courage is the courage to say I'm wrong I made a mistake I'm a human being just like you are yeah um and and I found more often than not people respect leaders more for being able to be open and vulnerable like that
53:05 than sort of I don't know I'm gold always it's it's and the team and the team opens up more like there's there's studies around um you know leaders who and you don't do the start of every meeting of course but leaders who share a slightly embarrassing story or a thing where they made a mistake it relaxes everybody that everybody gets more honest and and more Innovative and creative and all the things that follow just because of that level of vulnerability yeah yeah so I I one last question because we're almost at the end of our hour I I wanted to go back to this idea of following our gut
53:40 because I know I went through a time in my business when I I every decision had to be you know logical up in my head and and then one day I came to the realization that every time I made one of those situations I would get like a massive stomach ache almost like and and then said I said you know you got to get back in touch with your gut feeling about these things because sometimes it it appeared that it was right and and so I'm out how do we you had and you had a word for
54:16 following our gut I don't recall what it is um like connecting like through the interceptive process connecting to what's happening right so how do we become um more interceptive would that be the the right way to explain it yeah I mean I think again I go back to you know you can even research developing interceptive sensitivity you know the body scan I talk about in the book um these all seem like silly things by themselves but when you put them together they actually work there's something a friend of mine showed me and it was really fascinating I put a you put a pulsometer on your finger and you
54:53 know you you slow your heart down you get you you get yourself uh you know relaxed and then you don't look at the pulsometer and you just try to tune into your heartbeat and you just count how many beats that you can over the course of a minute and then you look at the pulsometer and you see what the Delta is and if it's really close that's showing you've got really high interceptive sensitivity and therefore you will be better able to pay attention to what's going on in the body and the gut um if it's way off then you keep practicing keep doing it over time and that and the body scan and some other stuff um as a way to improve improve our
55:28 awareness of what our bodies are telling us [Music] um that that's the that's the biggest sort of like tips and tricks I have for that um and then I think some of it's just stopping and and before we take a decision you know and examining what are my physical needs a question am I properly resourced right now like did I sleep well last night have I been exercising like what's what's going on right and taking that into account and then moving up to the heart and going what am I really feeling right now can I name my feelings and then what am I believing about this
56:03 we didn't talk much about metacognition but you know we're the only creatures that can like think about our thoughts like step back and go what am I thinking and what's the beliefs behind it am I the beliefs that I'm holding right now about this situation what's informing that what data is informing that and by just asking ourselves about the body and the heart and the head will really help bring the whole picture into alignment before we take important decisions and and usually you'll feel much more relaxed and about it uh whatever you're doing much more confident about it if you're going through those processes and and it's
56:40 kind of a follow-up to that um as as leaders if if we have a colleague come to us and say essentially my gut this is what I think we should do I can't really give you a a logical reason why but you know my gut is telling me this is what we should do how should we respond to that that's a great question um well I think we should give it as much weight as more weight than we tend to do right I mean I think we should give it weight in the room
57:16 um I think it's okay to test assumptions from there right because we're all whether we think we're doing it with our heads or it's our gut instinct the truth is all leaders need to get really Adept at testing assumptions and taking little steps towards validating it right so before you make a big plan and invest a bunch of time and resources and then you find out you're wrong whether or not you're again you thought you were illogical or going on emotion or a gut that's that's disastrous right so take a Playbook from the sort of disruptive Tech in this industry and do a lot of test and learn like okay that's great look can we do can we run a little experiment to test what your
57:52 gut's saying and see what comes back to us can we check it with that stakeholder or with that external partner what have you and then just get the information so we see if we should continue down that path or we should pivot okay well unfortunately we we are we've got a minute left um I there's a lot of other things I can ask you so I'm going to have to have you come back and yeah the conversation but but so first of all I want to repeat the book is the Enneagram of emotional intelligence by Scott olender it's available wherever you buy books okay and and get this book
58:29 um it it look I do this I've been doing this for years as both a chaplain as and as a you know a guy in business and and I've I've found it to be absolutely eye-opening for me and so I I can't recommend the book highly enough so so do check it out there'll be a link in the show notes um to I usually link to Amazon so but but by all means do do get Scott's book and and it's it's actually short um but give yourself the time to really read and absorb the book it it will definitely help you so Scott thank you so much for coming on here today I
59:04 appreciate it very much I just want to remind everybody that um we are here every Wednesday 12 30 p.m Pacific Time 3 30 p.m eastern time again an hour in for mountain and Central and we're we're talking to people like Scott who can help us Advance our professional lives and and typically we'll also have an impact on our our personal lives as well so I invite invite you to to join me every Wednesday and also to go to our YouTube channel where we have I guess we're getting on close to a couple hundred shows now in in our uh our
59:39 backlog of of people with ideas that you can use to move your sex success forward so thank you all very much for joining us Scott thanks again thanks Kevin look forward to seeing you oh one last thing uh the uh the way to wow business lessons from the military is every Tuesday it's moved to 11 A.M uh Pacific Time 2 p.m uh eastern time it's a half an hour later now I had to make that shift in time but hopefully you'll still be able to join join me and um and and and that that wishing you a a wonderful
60:16 all rest of the afternoon and looking forward to seeing you next week thanks so much