Things to consider…

Covid forced many people to re-evaluate their priorities and their identity.

Many who used to tie their identity to work (and worked like their worth depended on it) felt like that was ripped from them - they were forced to connect other parts of their identity and other activities to sustain them.

Many of have found their priorities and perspective has genuinely shifted - work no longer feels as important as it once did.

Others may be afraid to go all-in because they're afraid to have it stolen a second time - a coping response to the initial trauma.

Are these the only possible reasons you're seeing lower than normal motivation? No.

But these are a few unique and timely factors I encourage leaders to add to their usual list because the pandemic is still impacting student-athletes and people everywhere.

Psychologists are encouraging people to think of the COVID pandemic as collective trauma. One of the...

Partially born out of a search for an alternative intelligence as researchers became increasingly frustrated that IQ tests didn't explain important life outcomes, EI initially surfaced in the 1990s and then became more popular in the 2000s with Dr. Daniel Goleman's book.

Now, is "EI" the end-all, be-all of thriving, high-performance, and excellent leadership? No.

The research shows there are some situations or roles where EI matters a lot, and some where it matters less (and may even be detrimental). And the research also shows there are a host of other factors, including IQ, that play a role.

In the area where I work - the human dimension - in sports, business, leadership, and teams…emotions and emotional intelligence matter.

So what is EI?
"The ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions." -Marc Brackett

Too easy, right?

Challenge yourself to consider these questions:

How...

"They ensure our survival. They make us smarter. If we didn't need them, they wouldn't exist." -Marc Brackett, "Permission to Feel."

Emotions influence

• Our attention and memory which determine our ability to learn.
• Whether we rely on our gut instinct or carefully weigh facts when making important decisions.
• Every aspect of the social relationships that are the most important element of our lives.
• The choices we make and the way our body functions that influence our health - from poor diet, excessive drinking, and inactivity to blood pressure, and healing time.
• Our ability to be creative in the ways that advance society and humanity through innovation and our ability to be creative in the ways that build resilience, like finding a way to get through hard times.

This is the tiniest snippet of the decades of research that clearly demonstrate the importance of emotion in our lives.

Sharing this with you, and you with others, is my effort to get people to give a damn about...

Too often, "emotional" and "strength" are seen as opposites.

There is an evolutionary component to this belief. We are instinctually wary of those who seem unpredictable - it feels threatening and dangerous. So if our inability to self-regulate makes us unpredictable to others, then we have a problem.

The bigger problem, though, is we have also come to believe that emotional suppression is the solution. The solution to appearing predictable. The solution to appearing strong.

It's not. Suppressing emotion makes us weaker - both mentally and physically.

I'll be adding content on emotional strength. I hope it challenges some of your beliefs about emotions and strength - and I hope you take the time to reconcile and work with those beliefs…changing them if necessary. I hope this series motivates you to assess your personal emotional strength. And I hope this series provides you with a few tangible strategies to adjust as needed.

Because the...