Eric Pennington takes us on a deeply personal journey through the themes of empathy and belonging.

Reflecting on his recent emotional intelligence assessment and the transformative experience of navigating his son's life-threatening auto accident, Eric Pennington explores how self-empathy and growth in emotional awareness have impacted his relationships and perspective on the world.

He also breaks down the Spirit of EQ development model, illustrating how strengthening domains like awareness and belonging can ripple out positively into our broader lives.

Listen for candid insights, practical wisdom, and encouragement to foster emotional growth—both within yourself and those around you.

00:00 Life-Changing Impact of Trauma

04:05 "Embracing Change and Growth"

07:39 "Empathy, Awareness, and Belonging"

11:09 Self-Care Reminder

5 Keys You’ll Learn in This Episode:

1. Empathy is a Two-Way Street: Discover what it means to not only show empathy to others, but also to yourself.
2. Dealing with the Inner Critic: Eric talks about learning to quiet the inner critic and how self-empathy can be dramatically increased.
3. Healing and Growth After Trauma: You’ll hear a moving story on how a personal crisis—like a family emergency—can spark transformative change.
4. The SEQ Model in Action: Learn about the three domains—awareness, belonging, and insight—and how strengthening these muscle groups improves not just our personal lives but ripples out into the world.
5. Letting Go of Control: Get practical wisdom on focusing on what you’re actually responsible for—and letting the rest go.

In each episode, Jeff and Eric will talk about what emotional intelligence, or understanding your emotions, can do for you in your daily and work life. For more information, contact Eric or Jeff at info@spiritofeq.com, or go to their website, Spirit of EQ.

You can follow The Spirit of EQ Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Android, or on your favorite podcast player.

New episodes are available on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays every month!

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This podcast was created to be a tool to primarily help you to discover and grow your EQ. Science and our own lived experiences confirm that the better we are at managing our emotions, the better we're going to be at making decisions. Which leads to a better life. And that's something we all want. We're glad that you've taken the time today to listen. We hope that something you hear will lead to a breakthrough. We'd really appreciate a review on your podcast platform. Please leave some comments about what you heard today, as well as follow and subscribe to the podcast. That way, you won't miss a single episode as we continue this journey.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the show. I want to talk to you a bit about some new experiences for me related to belonging and how I've been showing up lately. And it's going to include some information related to our SEQ development report as well as the say EQ assessment that we use from six seconds. So I'm going to start with a most recent assessment that I took with the say and it's a very thorough report and I've taken many of them over the years. And you know, at this point I don't have true scientific evidence, if you will, but I'm able to get a sense about the direction that I am heading as it relates to the competencies. And today is not a day where I'm going to explain all the competencies. You can check out some of our past shows to get a sense of what those are.

But one of them specifically is something called increase empathy. And the increase part is just part of the methodology that ultimately it's a verb designed for action, you know, to do something with, with the competency. And believe it or not, and if you're new to our show, you may not say I get a sense of this. But if you've listened for a while, I'm a pretty empathetic person. But when it comes to the assessments, not so much. My scores were relatively high compared to previous, but it always stood out to me. And with empathy, it's a two way street, right? It's the empathy that we show to others as well as what we show to ourselves, self empathy. And over time and me doing some reflection and looking inside, I could tell it where maybe what was causing some of the lower empathy scores was related to self empathy.

I've had an inner critic that at one time in my life followed me wherever I went. Over time putting in the work, I've managed to keep my inner critic and it's his proper place, which is typically to sit down and be quiet. Not always successful in that, but for the most part now it's a calmed, I wouldn't say it's a friend, but certainly it's no longer intrusive. So this time around when I took the assessment, my scores and empathy had dramatically, dramatically, dramatically risen. And obviously I was pretty excited about that. But of course you don't want to just look at a score and say, oh, close the door, end of story. You want to examine it and reflect on it. And I did that.

And here's what leaped out to me once again, for those who are new to the show, you may not know this, but for our regular listeners you probably would remember that my son was in a life threatening auto accident about a year at least from the recording of this episode. And I mean it was, it was really, really hard. I mean it still is in some ways. I don't think I fully healed from it, but thankfully he came through, survived and is almost back to 100%. However, it did some things to me and I know early on I really had this sense that maybe, man, there's some things that are changing in me and I can't really put my finger on it. And maybe that makes sense because of all of the trauma that was related to the event and the post care that he had and some of the times when we weren't sure if it was going to work out at all. But I knew something was happening. And in those times, you know, you're tempted to be frustrated because you want an answer.

But thankfully, because of this work I was able to. Okay, just let it flow, let it have its and stay tuned. And I remember telling a couple of my business partners that there's this song from Robbie Robertson and this, the, the line in the song, the song is called Unbound, but in the line it says, I am lost, I am lost, has anyone seen me? And as much as that sounds kind of morbid, if not overly enigmatic, I looked at it as a very positive thing because again, I felt like something was changing and I was going to meet up with it at some point. But I would get questions like you would expect from people asking, how are you doing? How's the family? How are you coping? And all of that. And what I, when I was telling my business partners this, I said, no, it's, it's kind of like, yeah, I know that I'm a little lost. I'm not sure exactly what the ground is underneath my feet. Well, fast forward. And as I looked at the results of that assessment, I'm thinking, yeah, I can see how my empathy would increase for others, certainly.

Right. And for me, one thing is very clear to me as I look back now I can go, I'm walking lighter. And what I mean by that is that I'm not in such a hurry and I'm not sort of striving to get and to control. I'm just walking around very grateful. And certainly having my son still in my life is a big driver. But it's flowed over into other areas of my life. For example, all of the world situations. And I'm in the United States, so the politics the divisiveness and all of those things are not really shaking me up like it used to because I have something that I know of value.

Relationships, right, is especially big there. I really don't. I don't. If I don't have control and I don't have the responsibility, I pretty much let it go. I pretty much, I'll let God have that because I can't do anything, nor am I supposed to do anything. I didn't always live this way. Let me just stress that I spent a lot of years trying to control and to manipulate to get things to go the way that I wanted. But the lessons learning, right? So this relates also to our SEQ model, the development report that we have.

And if you can track with me, if you're not familiar, I'm going to try to keep this very high level. But ultimately at the center of this tool are these domains. There's the domain of awareness, which really you could maybe translate to mean you, your soul, your uniqueness. Then there's belonging, a domain called belonging. That's how we're relating to those closest to us. Certainly family, friends could be close co workers or business partners, whatever it may be. But these are the people that are near you and important to you. And then the third domain is insight.

That's the world at large, right? The bigger picture, the bigger scene. And this can be. You could fill in multiple things that describe what insight would cover. But here's where I'm going with this. I'm thinking, at least for me, is that my awareness gets stronger in the situation I just described. My, my empathy and the, all the lessons coming from it that's getting stronger, which is flowing over into the belonging, which is my closest others, because more empathy for them, fueled by empathy for myself as well. And then this idea of not being so put out by the controversies and the insanity that sometimes seems to be a daily thing because it really is impacted most positively when those first two domains have their muscles growing and strengthened. Right.

It doesn't mean I don't care. I don't want you to misunderstand me, I do. But I'm laser focused in on what is in front of me to pour out, to address, to, to be responsible for. And as I learned in therapy many years ago, if you're trying to be responsible for what you have not been given responsibility for, you're gonna, you're gonna harm yourself. I didn't always practice that. Thankfully now it's coming into frame more and more that I need to focus in on. What again, I've been given responsibility for and what I've been giving, given authority or control of. So it's easy for us as a business at Spirit of EQ to talk about assessments and training and workshops and tools and things of that nature.

Cohorts. But this is, this is where this work is showing up. Personally, this is not about a pitch. It's about, this is the work. This is the thing that changes us for the better. And you know what's interesting to me? As we get close here, I'm going to wrap up. The more that I grow again, I'm going to go back to that S EQ model, the domains. The more that I grow in my awareness, the more that I grow in my belonging, it floods out, it ripples out to the world at large.

And I think maybe that's the secret to making the world, making our walk in this world a positive thing, a good thing that benefits others. And that's always what I wanted. And it's nice to see that it's. I'm getting a glimpse. Hopefully this is encouraging. You obviously you know how to reach out to us if you have questions, if you want clarity around the content that you're hearing today. But all the same, I'm so glad that you joined us. I look forward to the next time that we're together.

Take care.