Surviving and Thriving as a Single Dad with Kent Frazier

[00:00:00] Les McDaniel: Welcome back to the Beard of Wisdom podcast. I am your host, Les McDaniel. I gotta tell you guys, we are on the verge of closing out this emotional intelligence. We got two more, I think. Two more. I mean, you know, I could get to the next one and just be like, no, we're gonna keep going on this pathway, but.

[00:00:16] Les McDaniel: We're always gonna be talking about emotional intelligence. I just am setting up a little bit of a framework now that, so that I, hopefully we can actually move forward in such a way from this point forward with a, an awareness of this is kind of the baseline, the foundational premise of what peace resides on.

[00:00:31] Les McDaniel: It's, it's our ability to, to navigate relationships. It's our ability to understand our emotions and to communicate those emotions in powerful and meaningful ways that are. Ultimately, we are here to create folks. And so today we're gonna be wrapping this up with the fourth area of this wonderful revised model of emotional intelligence by Mayor Solove, Androse, cruso and I, and there's a good chance that it, it's Meyer and it's solove.

[00:00:59] Les McDaniel: It's some, it could be any number of things, but that's how I'm gonna read 'em today. So just know that. That said, you have reached this Beard of Wisdom podcast, and this show is here to inspire the uninspired to unstick what is stuck and to liberate that leader within you.

[00:01:13] Les McDaniel: And I can't tell you how passionate I am about liberating those leaders because we need you to be liberated in order to ultimately liberate others.

[00:01:20] Les McDaniel: Because you can't give what you don't possess. And if you haven't heard me say that once, you're gonna hear me say it a thousand times over the next few months, years, whatever, however long I'm around. This is true. You cannot give what you don't possess. And today we're working on emotional intelligence and hopes that we can liberate that leader within you so that you can truly begin to navigate this world where your, you have emotions, others have emotions, and people just wanna understand and feel heard and seen and belong.

[00:01:51] Les McDaniel: And if that's too woo woo for you guys, I'm not sure you're living a full human, human life. You're living some sort of other, I don't know. Chaotic sort of life, you're always in it for yourself and, and that's just no way to live. This is the life of a narcissist. Someone who's just in it to win it.

[00:02:08] Les McDaniel: They're, they're gonna win at all cost, and that is not necessarily a healthy place to stay in. Sure. Competition's fun. Sure. There's ways in which it gives us a, a degree of a, of a grade of sorts where we understand where we, where we align ourselves according to where we hope to. But the struggle is, is that we don't recognize sometimes that our, our desires and our motivations and our ambitions sometimes drive us to lose sight of the fact that we are living this life among a lot of other people.

[00:02:40] Les McDaniel: And, and instead it creates this competitive environment where, where we have to create these false walls and draw lines in the sand that say that unless this, then this, because you, you're out. And life is so much more complex. And we know this because we can just simply look at yourself. You can. I can look internally and find the complexity of any given moment.

[00:03:04] Les McDaniel: The complexity of why I chose emotional intelligence has so much to do with where I am at personally. It has so much to do with my own internal wounds. It has so much to do with my own healing, with all of my growth. It has so much to do with where I'm at today and how it ultimately might create an impact and influence you in such a way that it brings greater peace and a more unifying element to our relationship as those who are podcast listener and podcast host, and maybe one day true friend.

[00:03:32] Les McDaniel: Maybe somebody where we can engage with one another. This is why we do what we. We live this life, not for ourselves, but for the highest good of all. And so as we move through this last SEC section today, I wanna remind you where we've been. We've been through this idea of perceiving emotions, which is us, our ability to navigate dishonest or inauthentic expressions of our emotions.

[00:03:58] Les McDaniel: We've, we've begin to discriminate for that even further with accurate versus inaccurate emotional response. We see this in that perceiving of emotions. It's the beginning point. It's the starting point of us beginning help to, to gain a healthy understanding of where we are in the midst of our oneness with all of the rest of humanity.

[00:04:19] Les McDaniel: The second piece of this is facilitating thought, using emotions. Once we can begin to address where those emotions may have been lying to us to some degree. What we can begin to do is to start to see where they speak truth and how that truth actually begins to be something that every person is sharing with one another.

[00:04:37] Les McDaniel: It's, it's the way that we, that we approach every engagement we have in a, as a relationship. We come to it with emotions and stories that we've told ourselves, and it's in that, that we can begin to be curious and navigate our own story amongst the those of other stories and find ways to find that compassionate.

[00:04:57] Les McDaniel: That place where we can begin to actively listen to someone and hear the fullness of where they come from, which is just for the third place, which is that understanding emotions. It's us being able to understand that our emotional state is built on a culture and a context, and that mine is different.

[00:05:16] Les McDaniel: Living here in the West. I respond to things so much differently than people in the East. That's just how it is. My, we've talked about how my, my Japanese clients, how we would have to engage in conversations, and I would have to use my curiosity in different ways than what would be easy to do here in the.

[00:05:35] Les McDaniel: There were assumptions I could not make when I would work with, with people from other cultures and other countries. And I think that's just common sense. I mean, today we can, we can go down the road and we can look at people who, who are living in what we call abject poverty, who live incredibly loving, caring, joyous lives, but because it doesn't align with what we believe is not impoverished, but is rich or what we are driving.

[00:06:03] Les McDaniel: We just automatically, oftentimes impose our own emotions, our own feelings, our own thoughts, our own beliefs on other cultures, in a way that it dismisses them and we start to impose our values and belief systems on others in ways that are not healthier or beneficial to us. Truly navigating. What is this?

[00:06:20] Les McDaniel: This diversity we call humanity, really is all about. And so what we do today is we now having moved through the receiv, And facilitating our thoughts around emotions, and now understanding the emotions of others and where they're coming from through curiosity. Now we jump gonna jump into managing those emotions in ways that are meaningful.

[00:06:44] Les McDaniel: And I found this in this this article on it's psycho thema.com. And I thought it was a really brilliant, it's an article that is around this emotional inte. Of Mayor Solove and Caruso, and I think it's something that's very relevant to us right now. And it says, when managing one's own feelings, people must be able to monitor, discriminate, and label their feelings accurately, believe that they can improve or otherwise modify these feelings, employ strategies that will alter their feelings and assess the effectiveness of these strategies.

[00:07:20] Les McDaniel: Now, when I hear this and when I, when I read this for the first. I immediately had this huge connect. Because I've been an entrepreneur my entire life and every single phase of starting a business, launching a business, moving on from a business, all of these things comes with a tremendous amount of insecurities as to what's next.

[00:07:44] Les McDaniel: It's, I mean, I am learning new languages every single day as I study and dive deeper into psychology and, and into coaching and into nlp, all of these things, they, they're new languages that, that create within me a lot of feelings of insecurity because I just don't really know what, what these things are.

[00:08:04] Les McDaniel: And, and these emotions that arise outta that insecurity are, are such a difficult thing to navigate when I'm working with someone that I, that has never experienced what I'm, what I'm sharing. And, and these, the idea of using emotional intelligence before the, the intelligence quos your iq, not maybe not a before, but along.

[00:08:25] Les McDaniel: It's something that is, is such a powerful piece, but it's such, it's one that has been for so long, a little too touchy feely for the, the masculine side of business. And I, I believe it is a, it's a sad reality that we have, we have for, that has been something that we have pushed to the side for way too long.

[00:08:45] Les McDaniel: And I'm thrilled to see the feminine energy that is arising in here with more feelings and emotions attached to it so that we can begin to really tru. Heal a lot of the wounds that we have experienced over the years. I mean the many years for, for centuries, in fact. Why, why am I going down this pathway of insecurities and all this kind of jazz? I, I think that really what the low hanging fruit of this conversation is, is just the baseline level of understanding.

[00:09:12] Les McDaniel: The premise of do unto others is you would have them do unto. , when I think about what I desire in my own life, it's understanding, and you've heard me talk about this already a little bit, but I really want you to hear that we just want to be understood. And now I don't disagree that there are people out there who have learned all sorts of self-protective strategies where they've, they've literally put themselves aside and they've forgotten about.

[00:09:36] Les McDaniel: They've put themselves on the shelf and forgotten about the. And they just go through this life checking, you know, punching the timecard of life for whatever situation they're in. They show up at home, they punch the timecard, they do their thing, they distract themselves, they do what they can. Then they, then they wake up the next morning and they go through their routine.

[00:09:55] Les McDaniel: They do their workout and no, not much emotion about it. They go to work and, and it's like, they're just drones, just moving through life, not really experiencing the present moment. Always just, just moving, just, just. I mean, I talk about, now this is a side note. Side note, we're just gonna put a side note in here.

[00:10:14] Les McDaniel: I talk about my, my, my old 13, 14 year old now dog, my little miniature schnauzer. And I think of her as just this avatar of life. She's sweet as can be. But she doesn't even know she's being sweet. She just kind of moves from one spot, stares into the abyss of, of space and time, and then moves to another spot and stares off into the abyss of space and time.

[00:10:39] Les McDaniel: And so many of us have made that our way of existing. We have these habits that we've created where we literally just move through the motions every single day and we don't find a lot of meaning in. We, we even isolate ourselves from some of our relationships, or we land on specific ideologies that seem to give us this sense of meaning and purpose.

[00:11:01] Les McDaniel: Like we stand for something and yet it often places us in a, a direct front standing against those on the other side of whatever that issue might be. And, and while we might need to talk about those issues, our agreement is not the basis for. An agreement on something is not the basis for how we as humans ultimately exist.

[00:11:20] Les McDaniel: What we are here to do is to begin to effectively manage our emotions alongside other people's emotions in a way that result in new outcomes that are so much more unifying, more meaningful. That tap into the existence of what it means to be truly human. I'm not even sure that really makes sense to be, to tap into the existence.

[00:11:45] Les McDaniel: It's to tap into what it truly means to be human. And so as we evaluate other people and our own emotions and we navigate these different ways in which we are, we are different and have similarities. Our experiences can be completely different while still navigating a pretty normative understanding of what it means.

[00:12:07] Les McDaniel: I mean, most of our religious stories are literally about the idea of, of a way human humans exist among this greater source called God, this divine being. And how our tendencies never really changes. Humans. Our emotions are there. Our responses to God still respond are the same or our, our finger to God, whatever you wanna call it, whatever we do, whatever we feel about those particular ideologies, they're all programmed within us in such a way that we just, we we're not really curious.

[00:12:43] Les McDaniel: What happens when we can begin to tap into and begin to understand that all of us are really operating from the same sort of narrative and that we have all been given this one life to experience it in such a way that, that it prepares us for continually supporting the, the humanity that is to come while carrying forward what was once started by someone else before.

[00:13:10] Les McDaniel: We all kind of walk through this life sometimes as though we've, we've laid our claim and staked our claim to, to the land that we own and all this stuff, and yet none of us really own it. Somebody we're, we're working so hard today for somebody else's pleasure when we're gone. And so when we can begin to recognize that this moment, this thing that we are, that you're the thing that you're passionate about, that that problem that you have in your life, both your passion and your problems have been given to you in such a way for you to truly begin to have a deeper connection to oneness, to be able to lean in on one another, to depend upon one another in interdependency, not co depend.

[00:13:51] Les McDaniel: And not in this some autonomous state that we see happening and playing out in our world today. We are more than that. And so as we continually engage our emotions with others, it is beginning to be a helpful process for us as we begin to break down the walls and erase the lines that have been drawn in the sand that, that we see today as our world shrink.

[00:14:17] Les McDaniel: It brings about the opportunity for us to be more unified and yet for some reason, as we gain more knowledge and information about the way other people engage life or how, how their ideologies are different than ours, we, we, we throw up in a front immediately and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We can't go there.

[00:14:33] Les McDaniel: That's not true without ever really giving it a good listening and, and understand how that, that their experience has truly shaped the truth of that moment. We are all in this moment and never, ever, not in this moment. There is no future. There is no past. There is only this present moment and a realization of what might come, but that is not really our control and there's not been one movement throughout life that I have heard of,

[00:15:07] Les McDaniel: There's not been one religious ideology. That somehow didn't start with someone asking a question about what once was and moving forward with a different ideology as they've learned something new and we continue to learn new things and we sometimes act like this thing is just, well, it's reached its pinnacle moment, and the truth is the truth and it's never going away.

[00:15:30] Les McDaniel: And yet the truth always proves to be only found in the loving representation of something that continually provides life. This is something that is bigger than me and no matter how badly I mess up, life continues and no matter how great I do, there's always something bigger than me. No matter how big of a success I become.

[00:15:53] Les McDaniel: No. No matter how big of a success you, you become, the truth is there's always something bigger. Every bold claim, every truth that I'm, every hill that I'm willing to die on. That is the moment that I actually lose my ability to grow more and more and more.

[00:16:13] Les McDaniel: I, I expand in the same. That the world expands, that, that, that our cosmos expands that, the way that, that, that, that literally we, the more we find something, the smaller we can go in microscopic things, elements and, and particles and, and all the little scientific things that we know about today. All we find is that it can continue to be split smaller and no matter how big we.

[00:16:42] Les McDaniel: The moment we think we've, we've fully grasped the size of our, of our cosmos, of, of the universe, the more we realize that it is always expanding and then always shrinking and then always expanding, and then always shrinking and it can't be nailed down. It's too big for us. But when we come together and we can find our, our differences being on the fringes and more interested in the overlaps of, of those things that we share, the experiences, the feelings, the emotions, that's where we begin to have the ability to manage our emotions with an awareness that, that this, that this emotion isn't where I land.

[00:17:24] Les McDaniel: And that your emotion is where you land forever, but that it is only informing our creativity moving forward. I'll say that again today. Our emotions are not where we're stuck. They are only the place from which we are now merging our feelings and our emotions, our in our creative, our experiences come together to create something new.

[00:17:45] Les McDaniel: I believe at the core of my being, I've never met someone where I didn't begin to create something new with that relat. I did not stay the same, and nothing in our world stays the same. I promise you, if we meet that as our epics, our stories come together and we fuse them together because they can only be fused together once they come together for good or bad.

[00:18:12] Les McDaniel: We do have the opportunity to create a greater impact in our world than I could ever do without have known, without having known you. I hope you can hear that very clearly. And if you're sitting there today feeling down and out and feeling like, man, I, my emotions are outta control. I don't get along with my wife.

[00:18:30] Les McDaniel: I don't get along with my kids. I don't get along with my boss, I don't get along with my partner. Whatever it is. I can tell you that if you will take the time to do the work and first and foremost, start getting curious about those feelings. Start beginning to truly actualize what you're feeling in such a way that you have this clear understanding.

[00:18:52] Les McDaniel: I mean, there's a, there's a a wheel out there right now that is very helpful. It's the emotional flywheel and there's many different versions of it out there, but there are literally over 108 different emotions for you to be able to use to describe your current situation. And as you, the more, the more succinct, the more minute you can get in that actual feeling, if you can begin to tap into and say, yeah, I'm angry.

[00:19:17] Les McDaniel: Well, that's one level that is the most baseline level of, of a feeling. And then move that from anger to, well, I'm actually feeling irritable, and then move that irritable into, actually, I'm feeling annoyed or aggravated. Well, it's in that moment that I'm actually getting more minute, more fine tuned and able to address something more succinctly in my relationships with others.

[00:19:39] Les McDaniel: This is what we're talking about when we're talking about managing emotions. That said, I've got one last little thing that I'm gonna drop on you that I think will be amazing from my, my wonderful friend who is no longer with us. God bless his soul. He truly is an amazing person. Dr. Danny Friedland, who has a great opportunity for us to really see this in effect.

[00:20:00] Les McDaniel: And, and I want, I wanna share just a little bit of the tidbits, just another way of, another tool to be able to help you maybe begin to manage these emotions in ways that that lead you from reactivity to creativity. And I'm excited to share that with you tomorrow. Talk to you soon, and for now, once again, peace be with you, talk to you.