Stress doesn’t have to be our enemy, and Dr. Steven Stein is here to drop some serious wisdom on how to make it work for us instead. As a world-renowned clinical psychologist and emotional intelligence pioneer, he’s spent years helping folks thrive under pressure, and today, he’s sharing his insights on hardiness—a mindset that can turn stress into a stepping stone for achievement. We dive deep into his latest book, which lays out a powerful framework for transforming stress into resilience and growth. Plus, we explore the traits that help people not just survive but flourish in high-pressure environments, and how to cultivate that hardiness in our own lives. So kick back, grab your favorite drink, and let’s get ready to learn how to tackle stress like a pro!

Takeaways:

• Dr. Steven Stein emphasizes that understanding emotional intelligence is crucial for thriving under stress, which can be a game changer in both personal and professional realms.
• The concept of hardiness, defined by challenge, control, and commitment, is essential for turning stressful situations into opportunities for growth and resilience.
• It's not just about bouncing back from stress, but about coming back stronger, and this mindset can be cultivated through training and practice.
• Preparation for the unexpected is key, and having a clear sense of purpose can guide decision-making and coping strategies during challenging times.
• Many people mistakenly believe stress is entirely negative; however, it can be harnessed positively, leading to motivation and achievement if reframed correctly.
• Daily habits like visualization can enhance how we handle stress, allowing us to mentally rehearse and navigate potential challenges before they arise.

Links referenced in this episode:

• stevenstein.com
• amazon.com
• barnesandnoble.com

Foreign.

Welcome to Becoming Bridge Builders, the podcast where we connect people, ideas and perspectives that help us grow as leaders, strengthen relationships and build bridges to greater success and purpose. I am your host, Reverend Dr. Keith Haney.

And today's guest is someone who has spent his career helping people thrive under pressure rather than be defeated by it.

He, Dr. Steven Stein is a world renowned clinical psychologist, entrepreneur, best selling author, emotional intelligence pioneer, and the founder of Multi Health Systems. He has advised organizations ranging from the FBI and US military to Fortune 500 companies and a professional sports team.

His latest book, making stress work for you to achieve your life goals, provides a powerful framework for turning stress into a catalyst for growth, resilience and achievement. Dr. Stein, welcome to the podcast.

Well, great to be with you, Keith.

Good to have you on. Looking forward to this conversation. Hope I won't get stressed out by it, but if I do, you can help me out.

We'll try.

So, Dr. Stern, I'm going to ask you my favorite question. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Well, I guess one of the, one of the best pieces of advice I got was to be open minded and to be flexible.

So, you know, listen to what's going on around you, pay attention to it and be open to new suggestions, new ideas, and be willing to change when it looks like it's in your best interest to do so.

That's probably very helpful when you deal with clients who are dealing with stress, I take it?

It sure is. It makes a big difference in their lives.

Yeah. So you built an extraordinary career as a psychologist, entrepreneur, author, thought leader.

What sparked your interest in understanding human behavior?

Well, I guess it started when I was pretty young.

My brother was a few years ahead of me in medical school and he kept complaining about this one course they forced him to take, which happened to be psychology. And one night he left his book, one of his reading books, on the night table and it was the introductory lectures of Freud.

And I picked it up to see what he was complaining about and I couldn't put it down. And I thought it was the most amazing thing to read and learn about.

And I guess that was the beginning of my, my search into the world of psychology and continued ever since.

Emotional intelligence is something I know that's been the bud, the buzzword, the hot thing on the, in the, in the marketplace today. What was a pivotal experience that shaped your passion for emotional intelligence and resilience?

Well, you know, when, when I started working in that field nobody knew about, it was still pretty new. We published the first psychological test or measure of emotional intelligence.

And that was developed before Dan Goleman's book actually came out, which is the big multimillion dollar seller on emotional intelligence.

We can't keep focusing on what's wrong with people. Maybe if we learn more about what's right with people, that can help set people in a different direction.

So that's when I met Reuven Baron, who was the original author of the EQI instrument that we use. And we started doing more research on that and developed that. And it just opened a whole new world of looking at people or the way we look at people.

I did research to my doctorate, not as quite extensive as yours probably, but I'm curious, as you did this research on emotional intelligence, what was, what surprised you about your research?

It surprised us that this was something that would been neglected for so long, that especially when you look at kids, when they're strong in these particular skills, they can really excel in life.

But a lot of kids, because maybe they don't do well in school, they're not academic, they don't read books, they get put down, they have a tough time and they, they have negative self esteem, they look, look down on themselves. But the fact is, some of these kids have other skills that are at least equally or sometimes more important.

And we started to discover that, you know, these kids, instead of excelling in, in the way they should be, they were down on themselves and not doing well.

So the teaching them these emotional skills allowed them to do a lot better in life and to navigate the situations they were in in a much more successful way.

I love that. So you founded the Multi Health Systems more than four decades ago. What problems were you trying to solve when you fueled you to start this?

Well, I have to tell you, it wasn't a huge problem that we started with as a psychologist. You know, at that time computers were brand new or microcomputers were brand new.

There was these two guys named Steve, you may have heard of them, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak out of California. And they developed this Apple computer. And at the time I was doing a lot of work with kids, really difficult kids.

And I had a big Research project where we were looking at different treatments. But in order to evaluate the treatments, I had to measure where they were at before we started, as well as once the treatment was over.

Problem was those kids didn't want to go through my evaluation. They would tell me what to do with my psychological tests, which wasn't very pleasant.

So I saw these new computers came out and I said, well, what if we put our tests on one of these computers? And which we did. And all of a sudden the kids enjoyed taking my test. So it really turned things around in terms of my work as a psychologist.

So my goal at that time, because we, the hospital I worked at really wasn't interested in that. And we found that assessment was not only more fun to take, but more insightful.

We learned things about those kids that none of the other clinicians knew. Like they never told the clinicians about suicide attempts or some drug uses and other things, sexual abuse, but they did tell the computer.

So I wanted to focus on that. Hospital said we're not too interested in that.

So my wife and I decided to set up a little company on our own at night, hire programmer and start working on. Basically my goal, my focus, as you asked, was to make life easier for psychologists, make it easier for them to do assessments.

So that's where we began the company. But we've certainly come a long way over these 46 years since then.

I love that you work in high pressure environments. What common traits do you find among people who consistently thrive in that kind of environment?

Well, traits are that we find there's something that we've been studying and we'll get to it, I guess which we call hardiness.

But the traits is their ability to sort of keep calm, to evaluate the situation, to try and cycle through different possible solutions and come up with the best one.

Maybe not the perfect one, but they're able to act and get something done and make some progress rather than falling apart or blaming other people or some of the other sort of excuses that we see people come into.

So the people who are successful in those high pressure positions have a certain set of skills or what I call a mindset that that helps them get through those situations.

And you segue nicely into talking about your book. I wanted to get to right away. So let's talk about that. Your newest book tackle a topic that many listeners can relate to. Stress.

The title itself is intriguing. I love it. Hardiness. So tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write the book at this stage in your career.

Yeah, the book was really inspired by my co author, Paul Bartone. Paul was a colleague friend of mine and he was a military psychologist. Actually he was the chief psychologist in the U.S. army.

And he had been doing research for many years, maybe 20, 25 years on this area of hardiness.

And, and I was familiar with his research and the problem, I told him was that, you know, you're doing all this amazing stuff, but it gets published in these military journals or scientific journals and it really doesn't get out into the world. It really doesn't benefit the public as much as it really should.

So I really convinced Paul that together we should write this book and get the message out there on how important the work that he's been doing can be to the world at large.

So that was my motivation for writing the book, really to get the message out there that we can really not only deal with stress, but we can be stronger, we can learn a lot from the stressful situations that we encounter.

So for those who haven't read the book yet, how would you define hardiness?

Well, hardiness is really a mindset that helps us get through difficult situations. And it's composed of three different components.

One is challenge, which is our ability to see change and navigate or work through change when it's in front of when we encounter it. The second is control, and that's the ability to understand what we what's within our control and what's beyond our control.

So if I'm a tennis player and I'm playing tennis and there's a gust of wind or my opponent insults me, those are two things I can't really control. But what I can control is the way I react to those things, the way I hit the ball or the way I don't pay attention to what my opponent is saying.

And the third area is what we call commitment.

And people who do really well under stressful situations are people who tend to have a purpose in life, be engaged in the world around them and to, to really see life as interesting.

So those three components, the three Cs, we call them challenge, control and commitment, are really the focus of hardiness and what we write about in our book.

So how would you, how would you distinguish between resilience and hardiness? Or are they the same?

Yeah, resilience is really more about going through a difficult or stressful situation and then coming back to where you were when we look at hardiness, that the ability there is to not only go through a difficult situation, but to come back stronger than you were from when you began.

So Hardiness, we found, and again, we've documented a lot of research on this and a lot of Paul's work working at West Point and looking at leadership and people who go on to be successful leaders in the military, we find that they, with a hardiness attitude and way of thinking, they're able to come back stronger than when they began and not just be resilient, which has come back to where they started from to their baseline.

That's good. And I'm assuming my son's in the military, so I kind of really appreciate the way the military prepares the soldiers for hardiness.

But why do some people grow stronger under stress and some just get overwhelmed by it?

Yeah, we're all different in terms of how we. We deal with these kinds of situations.

There are some people who are kind of born with that way of thinking or they've been trained or their parents have taught them, you know, that this is the way we deal with these situations. We don't get overwhelmed. We manage to think our way through them or plan our way through them.

And there are other people who are just very reactive, right? They. They react to everything. Everything's the worst thing in the world. It's awful.

Or they grow up blaming other people for things that are going on in their lives, and they just don't have the agency or don't take the responsibility for what's going on around them. So that kind of differentiates some of who are able to.

And some of them are, again, are naturally able to deal with it, naturally have this ability to use this mindset. But more. More often than not, these are things that can be trained. These are things we can learn.

As you mentioned, with your son in the military, they're prepared to deal with these situations. They train on how to deal with these situations. And we can all benefit from that kind of training no matter what we do.

We don't have to be in the military, on the battlefield to learn how to deal with stressful situations.

We could be in our offices, we could be in our factories, we could be anywhere and learn to deal better with the situations that we encounter that are stressful.

So from your research, what are some common things that we can do to manage stress better or some traits that we could. We could implement to do manage stress better?

Well, one thing that's really important is preparation, being prepared for. For the unexpected, being prepared for things that. That may happen. And again, that gets back to our mindset.

So at the very basic level, when we talk about commitment, that 1C. I mentioned that Means finding purpose in your life.

You know, if you have values, strong values that you live by, that can really help you a lot in dealing with stressful situations. It helps you in your decision making. It helps you in your coping skills.

So one of the first things we try and do is have people really examine, look into what their values are, what do they believe in, what's important to them in their lives, what drives them. And once we understand that, then we can move on to challenge. We can move on to how do they deal with these unexpected events? How do they.

How do they look at them? What's the. What's the lens that they see them through?

What.

And we try and teach people to think of those kind of situations as more of a puzzle.

Instead of something that's going to just overwhelm you or throw you or make you give up, you look at it as a problem to be solved, as a puzzle, and you look at how someone else that you know might solve it.

So we move to challenge, and then we move to control, where we actually try and understand, well, these are the things I can do, and these are the things that are beyond what I can do.

And once we understand or get a look at these situations through these three lenses, we find that people are really much better able to deal with those stressful situations.

When I talked to my son when he first joined the military, he's like, dad, they never tell us what's going to happen next. We have to always expect the unexpected. And I like that you mentioned that, because that's just something that's part of the military.

It's like whatever you've been told is subject to change without warning, and you have to just deal with. And so I like that that's part of what you talk about.

Absolutely. That's right.

So what do you think is one of the biggest myths that people believe about stress that's not true?

Well, people believe that, you know, stress can be good and stress could be bad. People believe that stress is all bad and it's all negative and it's going to cause ulcers and do all these terrible things to us.

And yes, it can be harmful, but there's two aspects of stress. There's kind of the, the good stress and the bad stress.

And the bad stress is, is just endless worrying and, and going in circles, just spinning your wheels when something negative is happening. The good stress is using the energy that you feel, but reframing it in a more positive way. And I think most people don't understand.

I mean, if we, if the only time we in our lives where we will have no stress is once, once we've passed on, right. We're not alive anymore. That's the only way you'll have no stress.

So I think what's really important is that we learn to harness the energy that stress causes within us and turn it around. And we do that by these reframing exercises that help us see. Yes, that's a pretty awful thing. It's a terrible thing. But, but what can I do with that?

How can I turn my life around or deal with it differently? And I think that's one of the big learning points.

So I'd like to get practical a little bit. So what are some practical habits that people can develop to strengthen their hardiness on a daily basis?

Well, one of the things we use is visualization. We use this a lot, especially with high performance athletes.

So if you know that you're going to be doing something that is stressful to you, maybe you're going to do a presentation or you do a sales call or you're going to do, you know, something in your life that you know coming up, there's going to be some stress around it. Well, we teach people to visualize that situation and we teach them not only to visualize it going well, but to visualize it not going well.

What are the things that could go wrong? And you know, when you visualize that and then you can come up with coping mechanisms.

So if that goes wrong, how can I see myself in my, in my mind correcting that or dealing with that or overcoming that negative thing? You know, when you, we did a lot of work with airline pilots and part of their training as a pilot is to think of all the things that could go wrong.

When you're in a flight simulator, they throw all kinds of things at you, right? And you learn over time not to deal with the ordinary day to day task of flying, but what to do when a storm hits or when an engine goes or whatever.

Those are the things they throw at you. And you rehearse and you practice them until you get those right.

And you know, that's what we have people do who, who even, even though it may not be that stressful coming forward, you get to practice or rehearse that, even if it's just in your mind so you have an idea of the path you're going to follow when you actually encounter the stress.

Like landing a plane on the Hudson River.

Unbelievable, right? Right. Now how could you do that unless you've practiced emergencies before, and he clearly did.

And he was able to keep his cool and he was able to know exactly what to do in that situation. Right.

So how do highly successful leaders use setbacks as opportunities in your work?

Again, it's all about learning. You know, we've all had setbacks. You know, I've, as you mentioned, I run a company for 46 years.

Obviously there's been various setbacks along the way. It's a matter of sort of, you know, stepping back and looking at the situation and saying, you know, what can I learn from this?

You know, maybe the bank turned us down for a line of credit or something. How do I take that situation and learn from it? What could I do differently to be more successful the next time?

So instead of being defeated and saying, I give up and you know, people hate me or they're against me or whatever, we don't take that attitude.

We take the attitude of I'm going to succeed regardless, and if that bank doesn't like me or thinks I'm a failure, I'm going to go to the next one or I'm going to find someone who, who thinks differently. And I will keep trying until I'm able to do that.

Today we live in a, in a time where so many people are dealing with mental stress in their life and mental illness even. What are some warning signs for people to kind of keep an eye on that stress is becoming destructive in their life, Right?

Well, there's a number of things that we could look for. One is, of course, it affects our sleep.

So people under stress tend to get less sleep or have trouble falling asleep or wake up early or wake up during the night. So sleep is usually a good indicator. Aside from that, you know, behaviors can change.

People can show fear of certain things or certain people or certain situations. Sometimes when people under stress, they get very short tempered and nasty, which is not their normal way of behaving.

So we look for changes in behavior and see if we can attribute, you know, what we can attribute it to. It's not the type of thing where you say, if I say to you, Keith, are you feeling stressed? And you may want to say, no, no, I'm fine.

I have no stress at all. But we see those changes in your behavior, your sleeplessness, your eating patterns may change. You may not be hungry or not want to eat at all.

Or some people, when they're stressed, of course they overeat, right? That's when they put on more weight. They can't manage or control their, their eating habits.

So there's a number of signs that we can look for to determine whether someone's experiencing stress in their lives.

So if someone picks up your book and they need something to immediately have a greatest impact in their life, what would be the one principle you would say implementing from your book?

I guess the first principle as alluding to is to come up with some kind of purpose in your life to find out, you know, who you are, what you stand for, what you believe, you know, what guides you. Are you someone who feels strongly about your country? Are you someone who believes strongly in God? Are you someone who, you know, believes in family?

Like, what are the things that are really important to you in your life?

And, you know, once you get anchored, once you have a strong anchor and those foundational beliefs, I think that's going to make the next steps easier to manage.

So that's where I like to start them with foundational beliefs, values, things that you know that are anchoring you, that are rock solid, that you can depend on.

So since you are one of the leaders of emotional intelligence, I always have people talk about that now who are, who are really kind of talking and pouring into leaders about that, getting it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. What role does emotional intelligence play in leadership success today?

Well, we found again, lots of research over the years that we've written about that emotionally intelligent leaders do better.

One study we did looked at entrepreneurs, and we found that leaders of companies, the leaders that have higher emotional intelligence, had more profitable companies than the leaders with lower emotional intelligence. That's just one of many, many findings of studies that are out there. What is one of the important skills we find for leaders is what we call empathy.

The ability to listen, to pay attention to not only the people around you, the people who work with you, people who report to you, the people in your organization, to your customers. Empathy is just one of those really, really important skills. And the good news is it's a skill that we can learn, we can develop.

And when we've seen leaders develop that skill, along with several other skills that we've identified, their. Their ability to lead goes up astronomically. They're rated as better leaders by their subordinates.

Their performance goes up in terms of the organization. There's just an overwhelming amount of evidence of the importance of emotional intelligence and its influence on leadership today.

How do you push back on the people who say, the leader who says emotional intelligence is just a soft skill or it's a sign of weakness?

You know, 25 years ago when I started presenting this, I Would hear that all the time. I remember one guy went after me.

I was giving a talk in London, England, to about 200 HR professionals, executives, and one of them stood up there and said, you know, that emotional stuff is all a bunch of garbage. I think you ought to take that back to America. We don't need that here in England.

You know, I said, you mean you, you go to work in the morning, you cut off the emotional part of your brain when you go to work in the morning, and then it grows back when you come home at night? Or it was just unbelievable. But it's changed significantly since then. They've really adopted it in the UK as well as elsewhere.

I, I don't hear much of that anymore, of that negativity as I used to. I think those are the dinosaurs as I see them. Either.

I, they don't come to me like, I don't think anyone, any leader would, would want to come to me who has that attitude because they know I don't respect that or, or take it seriously. And we have so many examples of unemotionally intelligent leaders that have failed on a number of different levels. Right?

They failed because they have high staff turnover, a lot of absenteeism in their business, their sales are not doing well. I. We have so many variables that we can look at that I don't even have to sell the concept of emotional intelligence to leaders anymore.

You know, we're just. We have so many that we see that we're dealing with who really want to get better at it. I. The people who dismiss it.

I haven't seen them in years, to tell you the truth. Or maybe I'm in the wrong circles or I'm missing out on something.

But I see a lot of leaders, whether it's military, whether it's organizational businesses, nonprofits. I see hundreds of leaders and I don't get that attitude anymore. So either I'm missing those people or they avoid me or I don't know what's going on.

It could be. So we're going to have some fun. Some lightning round questions now. Coffee or tea?

Coffee, definitely. Cappuccino especially.

All right. Early morning or late night?

More of a late night.

One book every person should read.

Good to Great. Jim Collins.

Love that book. Love the book. Most underrated.

Leadership skill, empathy.

Biggest misconception about emotional intelligence.

It means being emotional all the time.

A habit you never skip.

Oh, that's a tough one. A habit I never skip. I mean, I would say waking up in the morning, but that's not really A habit. What don't I skip? Oh, man, that is a real hard one.

Having breakfast, I guess. Best stress reliever for me, playing music. I'm a saxophone player.

Oh, cool. One word that defines great leadership.

Huh? Well, resilient.

What's your favorite quote?

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Biggest lesson Entrepreneurship. Taught you,.

Be adaptable. I love it.

I'm gonna ask him another favorite question. What do you want your legacy to be?

I think it would be that the organization that my wife and I built has literally helped millions of people around the world. And I'm not just talking about the talent part. We are the number one test in the world for adhd. We deal with children's depression, with anxiety.

Our tools are used by millions of people around the world, and we've affected change in their lives by helping them find the right treatment or better treatment, identifying what it is they're suffering from so they could find the help that they need to overcome that.

And I think that's, you know, and even our work in public safety, the fact that we're helping people either rehabilitate from issues they've been having or protect the public from people who really need to be protected from certain people. So in all the.

The areas of our organization, whether it's the clinical side, the public safety side, or the talent side, the fact that we've touched millions of human beings and made their lives better is. Really means a lot to me.

Wow. So we got something new on the show this year. A surprise question. Pick a number from 1 to 10 for your surprise question.

8.

Heat. When you think about success, who comes to mind and why?

Oh, you got some good questions. When I think about success, wow. It's a tough one. You know, there's different levels of success. There's. There's business success. There's worlds that.

There's life success. So I think of people who. Who made significant changes in the world. I guess that's one. One form of success.

And you think of great leaders who would be a great leader that. That's sort of changed the world. We think of everyone from people like Martin Luther King to. I guess sometimes we think of John Kennedy.

We think of some people. I guess in the past, it's hard to think of people today, but let's think of people in the past who we.

We appreciate for the big changes they've made in the world.

Yeah. So, Doc, where can people find you and buy your book and connect with you on social media?

They can find [email protected] or it's www.stevenstein.com. My book Hardiness is at Amazon.com or wherever books are sold. Barnes and Noble I guess as well.

And yeah, that would be the I guess the main places to find me in the book.

Dr. Stein, thank you for sharing your wisdom, your insights and your practical strategies for us today.

Your message that stress doesn't have to be our enemy and that hardiness can be developed to help us achieve our greatest goals is one that every listener can benefit from for our audience. Be sure to pick up a copy of Dr. Stevens book making Stress Work for you to achieve your Life goals.

You can also learn more about Dr. Stein's work in emotional intelligence, leadership, workplace performance and psychology well being through his books, the Speaking Engagements Assessments and the podcast Work Therapy. If you enjoy today's podcast, please subscribe, share it with your network and leave a review.

Every share helps us continue our mission of building bridges between ideas, people and possibilities. Dr. Stein, thanks so much for being a guest on the show.

Thanks for having me, Keith. Been great to speak with you.

You.