29 - Emotional Intelligence in Business with David Cory

Be the Anchor – Strategies and Support for Small Business Owners

Today I’m talking about emotional intelligence and why it’s so important for corporations and small businesses alike to invest in. I’m excited to introduce you to my guest for this conversation, David Cory. David Cory is a leadership development coach, trainer, keynote speaker, and he founded the Emotional Intelligence Training Company. David has worked around the world on the design and delivery of leadership development programs, all of which include emotional intelligence (EQ) assessment, training, and coaching. David is exactly the right person to guide us through a discussion on emotional intelligence.

I love exploring where people’s business passion comes from and David is no exception. I asked him how, even though it was more than 26 years ago for him, his passion for teaching and emotional intelligence came to be. David explains his childhood love of teaching everything from outdoor skills to guitar to downhill skiing and how that led him to study education and leadership development. He came into EQ as a focus when he attended a conference from the person who established the publishing company which published the world’s first scientific assessment for emotional intelligence.

There is an optimal balance, in leadership and management, between getting results and impact on people and that, according to David is where things fall apart for us. We have historically overemphasized the “getting results” part instead of relationships with people and understanding how to create an attractive workplace culture. David and I talk about how logic still involves an emotional context, where self-regard comes into developing EQ, the lack of relationship training we get in childhood, and how emotional intelligence is a skill that we can learn and don’t have to innately be born with. This conversation is so important and David has such brilliant insight to share.

Key Moments

06:04 The trouble with overemphasizing getting results and not examining workplace culture

09:40 Why our evolution towards a greater understanding of connection needs a systematic approach

12:01 This is a skill anyone can learn, it’s not a function of personality

• How emotional skills help us combat imposter syndrome
• What is the difference between a transactional interaction and a relationship?
• How groups and teams can work with David Cory on learning emotional intelligence

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About David Cory:

David Cory is a leadership development coach, trainer, keynote speaker, and consultant known for his expertise in applying the concept of emotional intelligence to individual and organizational performance improvement. With a Masters’ degree in Adult Education, Professional Certified Coach (PCC) accreditation from the International Coaching Federation (ICF), and “Master Trainer” status in emotional intelligence from MHS Inc., David founded The Emotional Intelligence Training Company (EITC) which celebrates its 26th anniversary this year.

David has worked with the most progressive organizations around the world on the design and delivery of leadership development programs, all of which include EQ assessment, EQ training, and EQ coaching as the unique elements that make them cutting-edge. In addition, David has been a keynote speaker at conferences around the world, including the Harvard Medical School, the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Shanghai, and a 7-time keynote speaker at the Asia HR Congress held in Bahrain, Brunei, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur (2x) and twice virtually. David and team are the only ones to have ever created an EI course for an entire nation – the Republic of Botswana in 2013.

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Resources discussed in this episode:

• “The Fearless Organization” by Amy C. Edmondson
• Be The Anchor Episode 14: Take the Emotion Out of It and Other BS Advice
• Free monthly webinars on emotional intelligence: EITC.ca/webinars

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Contact David Cory:

• Website: EITrainingCompany.com
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram

Contact Kari Lotzien | Be the Anchor:

• Website: BeTheAnchor.ca
• Facebook: BeTheAnchorLtd
• Instagram: BeTheAnchor.ca
• Linkedin: Be-The-Anchor-Ltd

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Transcript:

Kari Lotzien: [00:00:01] Welcome to Be The Anchor, the podcast. I'm your host, business and leadership coach Kari Lotzien. When the seas of life get stormy, and they always will, it is not up to us to captain anyone else's ship or to try to calm the waters of the ocean. It's up to us to set our own destination for what we really want, and to learn how to navigate those waves of life together while finding that place of security and stability with others. I call this being an anchor.

Kari Lotzien: [00:00:38] Welcome to Be The Anchor, the podcast. I'm so excited to introduce you to my guest today. David Cory is a leadership development coach, trainer, keynote speaker, and consultant known for his expertise in applying the concept of emotional intelligence to individual and organizational performance improvement. With a Master's degree in Adult Education, Professional Certified Coach accreditation from the International Coaching Federation, and Master Trainer Status in Emotional Intelligence from MHS Incorporated, David founded the Emotional Intelligence Training Company, which celebrates its 26th anniversary this year. David has worked with the most progressive organizations around the world on the design and delivery of leadership development programs, all of which include EQ assessment, EQ training, and EQ coaching as the unique elements that make them cutting edge. In addition, David has been a keynote speaker at conferences around the world, including Harvard Medical School, the Graduate School of Business in Shanghai, and a seven time keynote speaker at the Asia HR Conference. David and his team are the only ones who have ever created an EI course for an entire nation, the Republic of Botswana in 2013. Welcome, David. What an amazing bio.

David Cory: [00:02:05] Thank you, Kari. It's great to be here.

Kari Lotzien: [00:02:07] To be in this industry for 26 years, I know that it might feel like you're going back a long ways thinking about what initially got you into this area of interest and kind of what keeps you there. Let's start off with your story.

David Cory: [00:02:23] Sure. Thank you. I've always loved teaching people stuff, ever since I was a little kid I taught stuff. I worked at a summer camp and I taught outdoor skills, I taught horseback riding, and then all through school I taught guitar lessons at a local music store, and you can see some the guitars hanging on the wall behind me, so it's a passion of mine. I taught downhill skiing, both in the Canadian Rockies and over in the German Alps. It was natural that I went into education and so I got a bachelor's degree in education. I thought that schools were not for me. I did not want to work in schools, but rather I became interested in how organizations learn and how they train employees to do certain things. And that interest, if you follow that path, takes you into team effectiveness, leadership development. And so I was teaching leadership development courses with a Master's degree in adult education for a post-secondary institution that had a corporate training department. And I thought it was fascinating that we were teaching these very sophisticated skills, assuming that people had a basic level of personal and interpersonal skills. And of course, as you know, there's a wide variation of personal and interpersonal skills out in the world. Some people have them and they are effective at whatever they choose to do in life, and other people struggle. And I didn't know what to call that or how to understand that until I went to a conference and learned about the concept of emotional intelligence from the person who founded the publishing company which published the world's first scientific assessment for emotional intelligence.

David Cory: [00:04:02] So I learned about what emotional intelligence was at the same time as learning about the assessment for emotional intelligence and immediately thought, this is important, this is going to be big, and immediately partnered with that individual who gave the presentation and his company. And that was 26 years ago. And so I left my job at the post-secondary institution and started this company. We called it the Emotional Intelligence Training Company, not knowing that that's what people were going to type into Google when they learned about emotional intelligence at a conference or in an MBA program, and then they go back to their company and they would think, okay, so we need to get someone in here to tell us about emotional intelligence, what it is, how to develop it, how it can make our leaders more effective, and they would type in emotional intelligence training. And there we were, again, quite by accident, a happy accident. And immediately the calls started coming in in the early 2000s from all over the world. And we've all been traveling ever since.

Kari Lotzien: [00:05:05] Wow. I mean, I had a conversation this morning with someone around SEO, and it sounds like you stumbled into some very brilliant SEO early on. So, I mean...

David Cory: [00:05:16] If you're trying to name your company, name it what people are going to type into a Google search when they're going to go look for you.

Kari Lotzien: [00:05:24] Brilliant. And I mean to have the passion as well, at the same time that you add to it. I mean, what a great startup story.

David Cory: [00:05:31] Yes, in fact.

Kari Lotzien: [00:05:33] And now here you are. Now when you think of when you were first teaching at that post-secondary education, and you saw the value of interpersonal relationships and being self-aware. It sounds like this was a really quick sell, that other big corporations got it really quickly, really easily, they saw the importance of it. Was that truly the way that it was?

David Cory: [00:05:54] Interestingly, Kari, all managers on the planet have to find the optimal balance between getting results and the impact on people. What we overemphasize is the getting results part, which means that managers are scrambling to try to get those results in ways that they know, the ways that they have on hand. And so what you find managers doing in lieu of having proper training in leadership, is what they do is they are hard on people. They have high quotas and targets. They are threatening to people, telling people that if they don't, you know, make their quota, they're going to lose their job. They do ridiculous things like fire the lowest performing person on a monthly basis, like that is absolutely ridiculous. You know, there's really two motivators for us, Kari. One is the carrot and the other is the stick. And we respond much better to the carrot. What's in it for us? How is it going to benefit us? When we know those things and understand those things, then it's much better for creating the kind of workplace culture that people want to work in. So they're attracted to that particular organization that has taken the care and attention to create that kind of an attractive culture. That's where they want to stay. They don't want to leave.

David Cory: [00:07:15] So people have attraction problems and they have retention problems when they don't pay attention to workplace culture. And in order to create workplace culture, they assume that their managers have the personal and interpersonal skills to create that kind of culture, but they don't necessarily. In fact, so much so that the woman who made the concept of psychological safety famous, Amy Edmondson, the Harvard University business professor, she wrote in her book The Fearless Organization that many managers don't have the emotional intelligence to create psychological safety. Now, I'm paraphrasing her because the actual details of that quotation are many managers don't have the emotional intelligence skills to realize when their people are holding back, when their people aren't asking the questions they need to ask. And this is all part of being intelligent about emotions, is understanding that emotions drive everything that we do, and that emotions are far more important in our behavior than we ever thought through much of the 20th century. We always knew that emotions were important, but at the same time, you've also heard let's leave emotions out of it. Let's use cold hard logic on this. The over-focus was on technical skills, again, the results, not on the people.

Kari Lotzien: [00:08:32] You know, I recorded an episode a few times back and it was called 'Leave the Emotion Out of It and Other BS Advice You've been Given for Management', but I think there was some truth to that that, you know, especially back, let's be honest, you've been in this field for a couple of decades and times have changed. That whole corporate philosophy of, you know, it's lonely at the top and you just need to put the pressure on people and rule by fear, that's changed. And have you seen over time that the recognition of the importance of developing emotional intelligence as a skill set, has that become more a popular concept over maybe even the last decade? Have you seen a shift, or do you feel that just more and more companies are getting on the bandwagon?

David Cory: [00:09:18] We have seen evolution in action. We're evolving all the time. And of course, how that happens is that it's not the baby boomers who get to determine how everything goes in an organization. It's all the different generations and the different influences that have happened to them, and the way that we as a species are evolving. And so we are evolving towards a greater awareness of the importance of connection, of being vulnerable, of expressing ourselves emotionally. And so many of the initiatives that are going on in organizations have some relation. What's unfortunate and what doesn't happen as often as it could, is a systematic approach, which is what we bring. A scientific and systematic approach to the development of these critical and important foundational skills, skills that are foundational to human effectiveness. That's what we bring. There's a lot of models out there. Your listeners are probably aware of other approaches or methods with respect to emotional intelligence, but they're often lacking. And the reason is because they don't come from empirical science. When they don't come from empirical science, we recognize it right away. They're missing critical and important elements. One element that is often missing from emotional intelligence models is the way that emotion and logic work together, because what we know is that logic doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum.

David Cory: [00:10:48] It always takes place within an emotional context. So what is the emotional context? Is it one fraught with worry, anxiety, avoidance, fear? Or is it one of calm and confidence and courage and authenticity? So we have to get to that place where people feel comfortable being themselves. And there's a whole lot of discomfort out there, Kari. People who are uncomfortable in their own skin, who don't want to let you know who they really are, don't want you to know what cards they're holding. And all of that prevents us from connection, which is really what we all desire, and we all want is more connection, more realness, more humanity, more of what's genuine. And what we don't want is pretense. But that's what we get, a lot of pretense. People who are pretending to be the kind of manager they think their company wants them to be instead of being themselves, which is much more attractive, far more effective for people.

Kari Lotzien: [00:11:50] I want to circle back. I call it putting a pin. I want to put a pin in a couple of key points that you made, because I want to make sure that people truly understand and absorb the impact of this. So the first thing I want to point out that you talked about in your systematic approach to emotional intelligence is this is not defined by your personality. This is not just a trait that you have. This is a skill that can be taught. So I wanted to make sure that people really hear that, that this isn't just you're hiring... because I think in my work as well, I hear a lot about, well, I just need to hire the right person. Just like any skill set, we can learn, right? When you love teaching and you love training, to recognize that this is a skill set that can be learned, it can be improved over time to make sure that we truly hear that, that even if you don't have it - and I think a lot of my listeners are small business owners who have a dual role in the company where they're the founder and the owner, they're the one that has the passion behind it. They're also trying to manage. And when you talked about that fear that we sometimes see managers putting towards employees, I think we also have a fear as owners sometimes that if we're not kind enough, if we're not, you know, vulnerable enough, if we're not willing to do the work ourselves, there's also a fear that if people don't like us, they'll leave. So I think the flip side of that psychological safety is also, can leaders and managers continue to hold people accountable while finding that balance of being approachable and being warm and compassionate? So I wanted to just--

David Cory: [00:13:34] -- absolutely.

Kari Lotzien: [00:13:34] If you want to add to that. I'm sure you have thoughts.

David Cory: [00:13:37] Absolutely. So the model that we use has five categories of emotional skills. And the categories are all things that everybody knows about. This is self-perception. So you know do you really know yourself? And so we we really encourage people to know themselves. And self-regard is one of the emotional skills within self-perception. And so there are ways that we regard ourselves where we are absolutely our own best champions. And there are ways that we absolutely get in our own way, that everybody's familiar with imposter syndrome. And that's an issue with self-regard, with what we believe to be true about ourselves. And so when we dig down into some of these areas, we can understand people's effectiveness or lack thereof, and we can help improve. Really knowing oneself is the beginning of the journey. And then it's about expressing yourself in ways that are authentic and genuine and honest. Honesty really is the best policy, and we all know when people are being honest with us, and we know when we're being honest with ourselves and when we're being honest with others. And so it's about having those more honest and genuine kinds of conversations with others. It's about being able to have boundaries in our relationships and saying what's okay and not okay in terms of how people treat us and the way that they speak to us, etc. And all of that is part of emotional expression or, sorry, self-expression, rather.

David Cory: [00:15:07] And then there's the whole interpersonal area. There's understanding. Can you imagine, Kari, if we all had courses or classes or lessons on relationships when we were young? Imagine--

Kari Lotzien: [00:15:18] -- oh my gosh--

David Cory: [00:15:19] -- imagine what we could do to the divorce rate and to the separation rate? You know, we don't get systematic lessons in these things. And so this is what we're trying to replace is we're trying to, okay adults, you didn't get this when you were young when you really needed it, we're going to try to give it to you now. So what is a relationship? What makes a relationship meaningful? As everybody knows, a relationship is meaningful when it's characterized by trust, loyalty, commitment, showing up for each other, really being there. And when we don't learn about relationships and we don't know that, we don't know how to improve a damaged relationship and we don't know how to start a relationship. And so really, it's understanding all those kinds of things. And then we have to battle beliefs because there are these traditional beliefs that you don't come to work to make friends, or you don't have relationships with people in the workplace that are not directly work-related. And we say those are not relationships because you're not actually relating with each other, those are transactional interactions. And there's a big difference between a transactional interaction and a relationship. A relationship is when you put some humanity into it and you talk about what's actually going on, how your day really is going. It's not asking how you're doing as a pleasantry, it's asking, how are you doing? Let's just sit for a moment. I really want to know how you're doing because, you know, I noticed this or that, and I'm just, basically you're saying I care about you. I care that things are not okay for you.

David Cory: [00:16:49] And when your manager says that it's extremely powerful. And people say, I don't have the time to do that. We don't have the time for a lot of things, but we make the time for the things that are important. And so there is a definite return on investment for making the time to say no, how's it really going? How are you really doing on that project? Is it going well? Are you are you coping okay with everything? What do you need from me? How can I help you and support you in that? When managers learn these things and learn that the employee engagement of their employees are directly determined by how they treat employees, they start thinking, okay, what do we want those employee engagement scores to be? Do I want to cause people to quit and leave? Because we know that people quit and leave companies, not because of the company treated them badly, because companies can't treat people badly. It's individuals within companies. It's managers who treat people badly. That's what they say. They leave bad managers, not bad companies. So again, we can change all this, but it's one person at a time.

Kari Lotzien: [00:17:58] Gillian is an incredible entrepreneur who is going through a time of scaling her very successful business. When she offered to record a testimonial about her experience with the Anchored Leadership Academy to go on my podcast, I was so honored. Have a listen to what she had to say. 'My name is Gillian and I just finished the Anchored Leadership program with Kari Lotzien. I'm a financial planner. I've owned a practice for eight years. And I'd hit a space of exponential growth. Everything was going great, but I always struggled with, um, the management of team, how to hire, how to fire, how to have those yucky conversations. And that was a huge takeaway from the Anchored Leadership, where I got tools and practice as to how to implement those things into my business so I can continue to grow and continue to thrive. It was an exceptional experience that I would highly recommend to any business owner who is looking to push through their discomfort to that next level of success'. In the Anchored Leadership Academy, we combine weekly live sessions for one hour that focus on a key area of leadership, and then participants have the ability to work through all of the content in the modules between sessions. This allows a nice balance between accountability for really busy entrepreneurs to keep moving forward with the program and get it done, while also having the ability to flex their time a little bit and make it work for them. An added bonus: all participants get lifetime access to the videos, the audio, all of the resources in the course so you can keep coming back to it again and again when it applies to that specific time in your business. If this sounds like an interesting thing to you, click the link in the show notes, book an inquiry call, and let's see if the Anchored Leadership Academy is right for you at this stage of business. Thanks so much. Back to the show.

Kari Lotzien: [00:19:59] I often talk to my clients about routines of connection. I think so many companies, and you alluded to being in, you know, our grade school, right, when we were children and that idea that when someone was in a position of authority, whether it was a teacher, a principal, someone who was considered to be in a position of, let's say, management over us as children. We remember the fear, you know, in our cell memory that says you're being called to the principal's office. There is one reason for that. And it means something catastrophic is about to happen, and we carry that with us into our adult lives.

Kari Lotzien: [00:20:38] So then when you have a manager that the first time they call you into their office, your nervous system will automatically assume that you're in trouble, something terrible is about to happen. And when we can reframe that and have routines on a regular basis to connect with our team members and beyond that place of if you have an issue, my door is always open, come talk to me. Right? We can't rely on our employees to say, oh yes, I feel safe going into my manager's office and talking about I'm really confused about this, or I'm just really struggling right now, and sharing that vulnerability when the stage has not been set. The other piece of that is, I wonder how often when people don't feel comfortable, when they aren't able to be themselves at work, when they feel unsure, you talked about beliefs. How many times when we have a model that says we fire the lowest performing employee, but then in the same breath we say, oh, but come to me if you have a question, how many times do we see this uncertainty as incompetence? How often is it mislabeled as someone is not competent in their position, when really the true issue is we have an issue with approachability of the manager to be able to provide the support they need to make this person really successful in the position that they're in.

David Cory: [00:22:06] Absolutely, Kari. And our preference by far is to send a group message to an entire team or division of managers and say, this is the way that we want to interact in the organization versus the other, which is we've got this manager, we can't afford to lose them because of their technical skills, but we can't afford to keep them with the way they treat people, will you work with them? My first question always is, are they open to coaching? And if they're open to coaching, we work with them and we have seen some incredible dramatic turnarounds from people when they see what other people say about them, how other people perceive them. And we use the EQ 360 for that. So the assessment that we use is the Emotional Quotient Inventory, that's the self-report version. We use the EQ 360 for more senior people in organizations, for executive teams. And we'd much prefer to tell the group of people this is a better way. And you talked about setting the stage, and we quote John F Kennedy when he said, the best time to fix a roof is when the sun is shining. So build those relationships when times are good, don't expect that you're going to be able to build that relationship in a time of crisis. You know, when you need someone to stay for the weekend because you've got a critical project, a mission critical project, if you don't already have the relationship and have some investment in that emotional bank account, don't expect that person to be happy about staying for the weekend for you. But if you have made that investment and taken that time and built that relationship, then of course they will understand the need to stay for the weekend if that's what's required.

Kari Lotzien: [00:23:46] And I think, again, I want to pull this back also to the small business owner, you know, who doesn't have an HR department and a lot of middle level managers, because I want my audience to make sure that they hear, no matter if you are in, you know, a large company or you are in a very small company, the principle is the same. That when you have that relationship investment with your small team, when things get hard, and they will, those people will also stay late on a weekend. They will help you. You know, we had a situation in my company years ago where our clinic flooded. And I remember how humbled I was in the moments that the staff were like, what can we do? You know, do you need trucks? Do you need extra hands? What do you, how can we help? And my first instinct was and I actually said out loud, I can't afford to pay you for this. And they were like, oh, that's not why we're here. You know, and that sense that there's actually a reciprocal relationship here. And there were certainly times where, you know, the hours were longer and I definitely was paying for those. But the relationship goes both ways no matter if you're in a really big company or if you're very, very small. Like the same principles apply of self-reflection, boundaries, interpersonal relationships, like it all is the same.

David Cory: [00:25:04] Absolutely, yes.

Kari Lotzien: [00:25:06] I love to hear how systematic the process is, because I think sometimes I want to address this concept of we live in North America, where I think that hustle culture is so ingrained and our performance and results and return on investment. How have you seen the concept of emotional intelligence differ across the globe? I mean, you have been traveling extensively. What have you seen?

David Cory: [00:25:34] What I've seen, Kari, is that how one is emotionally intelligent differs from culture to culture. So, for example, in our culture, we value people who are quite a bit more direct in their conversation and their communication, whereas other cultures, and even starting to learn the language in some parts of the world really point this out, that some languages are context dependent, our language is context independent. So in a high context culture, they use very few words and everybody knows what the intended meaning is by the context, whereas that's not the case for us. And so they perceive us as to be a bit aggressive and overbearing and too direct. And so if we're trying to connect, we need to understand more about their culture and have some empathy for the differences, and then try to meet in the middle somewhere. We frequently encounter challenges and difficulties based on this lack of attempt to understand each other.

Kari Lotzien: [00:26:38] You talked about in our culture, it's context independent and in other cultures, language is context dependent. Can you give me an example, like do the actual words change?

David Cory: [00:26:47] Absolutely, absolutely.

Kari Lotzien: [00:26:49] The words themselves change?

David Cory: [00:26:51] In Mandarin if you wanted to ask someone if they'd like something to eat, you simply say, eat something. In our culture, it's would you like something to eat? So you can see that we use a whole lot more words. And so you can imagine the two cultures trying to connect and in one culture viewing the other as a bit verbose, overly dominant, taking up a lot of space with the words that we use with our, in some cases, our big personalities as well. So again, it's really understanding cultural differences. So the 15 emotional skills that we measure are the same and help us to understand human effectiveness all over the world. It's just the extent to which those different emotional skills are used and the way that they're used, the actual behavior between people is going to differ from culture to culture. So it's important to understand more about the culture that you're in.

Kari Lotzien: [00:27:47] What you've explained is that even though the cultural norms change, the system doesn't. The system works no matter where you are. It's a matter of how aware are you? Are you self reflecting on how much space you're taking up in the room? And are you addressing the contextual element of where you are? Part of what I heard in your example was, even though in our North American culture we tend to take up more space, use more words, I still think that concept of being able to acknowledge when we can use silence, when we can speak less, is such a skill set that I think we still need to develop. And I'll be perfectly honest with you, I'm still working on that one.

David Cory: [00:28:36] We're all working on all of these skills, Kari, all the time, and it's a journey. And it's one of the reasons that we don't ask questions is because we think that we should know and we can't know everything, and so we have to make it more comfortable. We have to make it more common and usual for people to ask questions. Schooling did not help us. We frequently learn that there's only one right answer to every question and if you don't get that one right answer, you're wrong. And that's a shame. And then we get people into the workplace after their years of schooling and we say, okay, now we're going to get innovative. So what are all your great creative ideas? And nobody has any. And it's like, well, because they don't know what the right answer is. And they're, and so we have to get to this level of expression where we just express ourselves instead of worrying about whether it's right, worrying about whether it's wrong, worrying about what people are going to think of us, etc., because all these things come up for us because of our culture.

Kari Lotzien: [00:29:39] David, I can talk to you forever. I feel like I have just tapped such a small, such a miniscule amount of your knowledge and your experience. And, you know, I hope very sincerely that this conversation continues, and I really hope that it will. I want to make sure, before we wrap up today, that people know, how can they find you if they are curious about how do I do this self-assessment? Where do I start? Where's the best place to find you?

David Cory: [00:30:07] Yeah, the best place, the easiest thing to remember is EITC.ca. We are very easy to find, type in emotional intelligence training and we come up, it's the Emotional Intelligence Training Company. And we would love to tell people more about how they can take the self-assessment and learn more about themselves. It's the kind of assessment that is where a review of results is required. So there's an expense obviously. And so happy to let people know more about what's involved there. Best is when everybody on a team or in a group takes the online assessment prior to a group session, and we do a review of results virtually with them before we get together as a group, either virtually or in person. And then we talk about the importance of these various emotional skills to the workplace and to creating the kind of a workplace culture that everyone wants to be in, where everyone feels supported and safe and like they belong and where they want to stay.

Kari Lotzien: [00:31:02] This is what I want my audience to hear from that. So the link will be in the show notes. Make sure you just can click on that and you can find David easily. But what I hear is that this is not a one and done. It's not that you take a quiz and then you find out, oh, here's where I land and here's how it will be forever. You are really with these companies every step of the way, not only to address where we are now, but where we want to be and how we can get there together. And I just, I love your outline of that. As we wrap up today, just one final question. I always like to ask my guests, how do you stay anchored? How do you find that place of calm and stability in yourself?

David Cory: [00:31:42] That's a great question, Kari. And my answer is music. I look forward to getting through my workday so that I can play those guitars behind me and write music, perform in various places. And that is my passion. And that's how I stay grounded and connected. The work that we do is important. Our work grounds us and connects us where we're helping people, not just in their workdays, but in their entire lives. They are better parents, husbands, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons as a result. They're more connected to their communities, their families, and themselves through the work that we do. And you're right, it's not a one and done. It's a never ending job of increasing self awareness and increasing intention.

Kari Lotzien: [00:32:29] Thank you so much. And hearing you speak just about your passion and how what you're doing, we talk about finding our why, and I mean, not only did you find it, but you've held on to it for decades. And to feel the impact that you're having in the world when you talk about, you know, you're a better friend, you're a better community member. This is what lights me up. I get really excited about business because I think this is our impact. I think schools have the ability to change how children are perceived and how we come into those years. I believe that it is business that does it in our adult years, and we want to appreciate the power that we hold, and this is such an integral part. So I wanted to just finish by saying, thank you so much for sharing your your wisdom with us today in just such a powerful way.

David Cory: [00:33:18] My pleasure, Kari. Thank you. Anytime.

Kari Lotzien: [00:33:21] Thank you. Make sure to click on the link, reach out, find David, connect with him, and follow along on his social media platforms as well. We're going to share those links in the show notes. Thanks so much for being here. We'll see you next week.

Kari Lotzien: [00:33:35] Please know that this podcast is meant for entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitution for medical or professional mental health advice. If you require support, please do reach out. Thanks so much.