Dr. Scott Livingston joins Lee Stephenson, executive director of Converge Church Planting, to help you better understand what emotional intelligence is all about and how to process your emotions.

0:29 Lee introduces his special guest, Dr. Scott Livingston.

1:04 Scott explains what emotional intelligence is. 

5:20 Scott says whether we have good emotional intelligence relates to how well we know ourselves.

6:47 How well you know yourself and the impact that emotion has will impact your judgment and decision making.

7:39 Self-awareness is understanding what triggers you emotionally and the impact of that trigger on you. 

8:42 Scott shares an example of a time when he didn’t have control over his emotions. 

11:23 Scott says our emotions are signals to us. They’re giving us information from our outside world. Do we allow our thinking to come in and process with the emotion so that we can make good decisions? Or do we react so fast that our emotions rule the day?

12:11 Scott talks about empathy and compassion.

15:17 Scottthinks church leaders’ job is to understand other people’s perspectives and show care and compassion without sacrificing their self-regard or self-confidence.

15:38 Scott discusses the importance of balancing our emotions.  

18:04 Scott says he’s seeing a lack of hardiness, or stress tolerance, in leaders during this season.

18:28 Scott talks about the three components of hardiness.

23:09 Scott explains why we need to pay attention to and trust our emotions.

24:03 Scott talks about the importance of rest.

26:11 Lee and Scott discuss why you need to have a hobby.

27:23 Scott says leaders need to care for their body (What we put in it; how we use it; are we exercising it?)

28:37 Scott says relationships are the key to being wise. Community matters.

30:12 Scott recommends resources to help you grow in your emotional intelligence.

32:50 Scott shares how you can contact him on his website.

Lee Stephenson: I want to welcome everyone to the Unfiltered podcast, where we’re having real conversations about church planting and church leadership. My name is Lee Stephenson and I have the joy and privilege to serve the Converge movement as the executive director of Church Planting, also a local church planter here in Orlando, and I got a special guest with us today. This is Dr. Scott Livingston, and it is a pleasure to have you. So to give you a little bit of background to our listeners, Dr. Scott, you are a professor, you are a business consultant. And before kind of jumping into this, correct me if I’m wrong, but you were kind of in charge of leadership development at Eli Lilly, and your sweet spot is talking about EQ. And I would love to just kind of get us started. Tell us a little bit, what is EQ? And why is this an area that should matter to any of our listeners?

Lee Stephenson: No, I that’s a great setup. And I personally, given this kind of overarching understanding of what EQ emotional intelligence really is about. Is emotional intelligence, like how do you know whether or not you’re skilled in it? You’re mature in it? Or if you’re immature in the emotional intelligence? What are factors you look for as you’re working with executives and things like that to kind of help you identify very quickly where this person is at?

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, exactly.

Scott Livingston: So how well you know yourself, and the impact that emotion has, will have an impact on your judgment and on your decision making. Can you sit in the car when somebody does something wrong to you in traffic? Or that you consider wrong in traffic? Can you get a hold of your emotion? And get curious about what the other person’s behavior is? Or do you automatically assign judgment? Hence, your understanding of what you’re feeling and they’re feeling? And you’re presiding over both of you. So to be self-aware is to really understand what triggers you emotionally, and what the impact of that trigger is for you. Right? You’ve been working with a lay person for three or four months, and you’re working on a church planting project. And you’ve told them two or three times how something should be done. And they come back to you in month four. And they haven’t done it the way that the two of you agreed. Right?

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, yeah, I’ve been there.

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, right.

Lee Stephenson: Makes sense.

Scott Livingston: I was wrong. So I think that’s what we mean by self-awareness. I never tell clients that I work with how to feel. How they feel is a choice that they make. Our emotions are signals to us. They’re giving us information from our outside world. And do we allow our thinking to come in and process with the emotion so that we can make good decisions? Or do we just react so fast that our emotions rule the day?

Lee Stephenson: No, it’s great, great perspective. And, I mean, what you’re illustrating here in kind of getting to is, is really comes down to a level of empathy as well, that emotion has to be connected to empathy in order to process that in a mature way. Is that a fair amount to say it that way?

Scott Livingston: There is, and I think you’re wise to bring the idea of empathy into the discussion. Because empathy has components to it of caring and compassion, right? Of, and that word compassion is interesting. Because it’s, it actually means at its root to be with others in their suffering, that passion, like the passion of the cross, compassion to be with others in their suffering. And so it is, it’s an idea of how to understand and relate to them, as opposed to just being slave to whatever emotion I’m feeling in the moment. Back to self-awareness. Am I indeed aware of the impact that my emotions are having on my judgment, my decision making?

Lee Stephenson: I appreciate that, and I’ve been in situations, I’m sure you’ve been in situations as well, both either from a leadership standpoint, or even observation within the church world, where you recognize people that have a low EQ, and I mean, why is this such a critical thing? Do you believe for church leaders and church pastors to understand and grow in their understanding of EQ? And, I mean, I think that’s an easy question. But I think it needs to be stated on the other end of this is, this is a critical aspect of just good godly leadership within the life of a church that sometimes isn’t there.

Scott Livingston: It is, and I think emotions happen to church people. They happen to church pastors, they happen to church leaders. And they are very real, because people have systems of belief. And any time, your belief is different than my belief, that’s good. Even so I’m not, we could talk big picture beliefs, you know, like theological differences. But we could also talk, I had an instance in my own life, where a church leader thought that an American flag should be on the podium next to the Christian flag, and the pastor just thought that the Christian flag because God loves all countries the same. Each of those two people had a belief. And they were in a very strong, strong belief and emotionally tied to the belief. Right? And so I think as church leaders, our job is to understand other people’s perspectives, and to show care and compassion, without sacrificing our own self-regard or our own self-confidence. And so there’s a balance here. So we, in the emotional intelligence world, we talk a lot about balance. We don’t want to have our self-regard or our self-confidence be higher than our empathy. That creates arrogance.

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Livingston: And by the same token, if our empathy is higher than our self-confidence, now we’re a pushover. And whatever way the wind blows people in the church or the congregation can take us, right? So we want to balance between emotional intelligence competencies. And so when we think about things like interpersonal relationships, and our own, what we call self-actualization, or in the church, we call it calling. I have a calling. But I also have relationships. How do I balance that tension? So that my calling doesn’t seem so arrogant to people that I lose the relationship with them? Yeah. So now it comes back to self-awareness, what we started with. Am I aware? And can I temper my emotion so that I have that balance that is needed? Can I see the grease on their hands?

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Great, great perspective. I’m curious, as you’re working with executives from around the world. This has been a unique season, you know, COVID, lockdown. We’ve had all kinds of racial tensions in our world. I mean, the list goes on and on, my interactions with pastors and executive leaders in this season. There are a lot of them that are just tired. They’re worn out. I’m curious what trends you’re seeing in your day-to-day interactions with executives, and what are you telling them to do in order to be careful of in the midst of this season.

Lee Stephenson: A prime example, I mean, you see Jesus as well stepping away from the crowds spending time by himself and wanting to be about his Father’s business. I think it’s a great example for all of us that no matter what pressure leadership challenges we’re facing, we need those moments where we just we find ourselves to be grounded, and get rid of the mess, get rid of all the white noise behind us and just focus on what’s really important right now.

Lee Stephenson: Great perspective. Absolutely.

Scott Livingston: I think it goes back to that alone time so that prayer and solitude is number one. Number two for me is rest. This is the one where I see a lot of spiritual leaders falling down. They don’t take Sabbath. It’s too hard. And we’re no better than the people, what I think it’s in Leviticus, right, where they talk about the year of jubilee, but they never experience it. And so how are our leaders today resting? Because we’re always on and we’re always on.

Lee Stephenson: You don’t need to feel guilty about stepping aside and finding rest.

Scott Livingston: Well, God did. On day seven, right. So what we’re saying is we’re more powerful than God because we don’t need to step away in rest.

Lee Stephenson: Or we’re more important than God.

Scott Livingston: More important. And so now, what happens when we don’t rest? Our emotions are on edge. They’re always on. It’s like little spiny things like on a sea urchin. Like the more we’re not rested, the more tense we are. Psychologist Matthew Walker has written a great book that talks a lot about this in terms of even our own sleep, why we sleep. And there’s a lot of data right now suggesting that leaders are getting about five to six hours of sleep. But the literature is really clear that we need seven to eight. So not only are we not taking Sabbath, but we’re not sleeping. The other thing, Lee, I think we’ve lost perspective on especially during all this COVID stuff. We’ve forgotten how to play and have fun.

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I mean, it’s interesting that there were some research that was done recently about pastors and burnout. And the overarching reason why pastors kept from burning out of ministry wasn’t their prayer life. It wasn’t their devotional life, it was whether or not they had a hobby, something that they could distract themselves and get away from their normal routine and thought and just lose a train of thought into this project, or whatever it is.

Scott Livingston: Yeah, that’s right. And so I think that play and recreation and creativity, all of those having a hobby, you know, go play golf, you know, go work out, you know, I, you know, people say I don’t have time, I think that goes back to remember we talked about hardiness and control. That goes back to us choosing not to have time.

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, that’s great.

Scott Livingston: Because our self-regard is so low, that we think that if we’re not working all the time, or at least giving the image that we’re not working all the time, that other people will think poorly of us. It’s totally distorted. The two other things that I’ll mention are care for our physical body. So I think that as leaders, we have to pay attention to our physical bodies, what we put in it, how we use it, are we exercising it?

Lee Stephenson: And you and I both know it changes from the time you’re 20 to when you’re 40 and beyond.

Scott Livingston: It completely. Yeah, I mean, I, my wife and I are in our 60th year. And we have to pay closer attention to what we put into it and how we use it. If it’s going to work for us, if we’re going to be any earthly good to to the movement that we serve, right, if we’re going to be any earthly good we’ve got to take care of it. And the final thing, Lee, that I’ll mention, and this really comes out of some research that I’ve done with Dr. Vern Ludden at Indiana Wesleyan University, who’s now retired by the way — what a great scholar Dr. Ludden was, is. He still alive, but he’s retired — that relates to wisdom. And we’ve looked at wisdom and what that means for organizational leaders. And relationship is key to us being wise. So relationship, having a core life team, if you will, who will speak truth into you, and that you will listen to. If you’re not going to listen to your life team, go get another one. Like, if they if have two or three people on your life team and they say, “Hey, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” but you go do it anyway. That’s not a life team. So and then I think community matters. And this is one that I think that’s been a struggle for us during this season is how do we get community beyond maybe a small group of people that we connect with. Leaders who do that do seem to exhibit wisdom at a different level than leaders who choose to go it alone.

Lee Stephenson: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Great, great perspective. I appreciate that. Thinking through for those who are listening, Scott, that as they are processing and recognizing maybe some blind spots, or potential growth areas, even in their own life, what are one or two resources out there that you would highly recommend say read this, or do this if somebody wanted to grow and mature in their emotional intelligence.

Lee Stephenson: Love it. Love it. Which speaking of I mean, this is what you do. And if one of our listeners said, “Hey, I want to get a hold of, you know, Dr. Scott Livingston,” how do they connect with you?

Scott Livingston: My website, drscottlivingston.com. And there’s a tab there that you can click on and send me a message. And if you’re interested in working with me, great. My price point tends to be a little higher. And a lot of church leaders kind of flinch at that, which I understand. But I also have a significant group of students who are, you know, they’re learning, they’re in training, but they’re certified in the tools. And so, always happy to hook people up with whatever budget they have available for this element.

Lee Stephenson: Love it. Hey, you’ve been a wealth of information. I appreciate it. I know this was a helpful conversation for many out there. And I think we’ll have to have you back to talk about this a little bit more depth. I feel like we just scratched the surface.

Scott Livingston: Let me know if I can help, Lee, always great to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity.

Lee Stephenson: I appreciate it. For all of our listeners. Thanks for tuning in. This has been the Unfiltered podcast and until next time, keep it real.