Better EQ for better results | Jenelle Friday | TDSU Ep. 41

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What's up Lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value where we're giving you fresh new ideas in the customer success space every single day. I got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? Salam Lifers.

That's because Rob's in Jordan. He needed everybody to know that. He's across the pond.

I got my man JP here. JP, do you want to say hi? Hi. That's JP making fun of the way I change the tone of my voice randomly.

We've got Jenelle here. Jenelle, do you want to say hi? Hello everybody. I am your host.

In case you're not watching on video, I have one angry red eye from my allergies. Can you guys tell? Can you see it? Yeah, now I can. It's gnarly, right? It's gnarly.

Jenelle can't tell. I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Jenelle, thank you so much for being here. Would you introduce yourself please? My pleasure. Hi everybody.

I'm Jenelle Friday. I am a passionate thought leader in customer success about emotional intelligence. That's my niche.

That's what we're here to talk about today. Love it. Why did you laugh? Was it the passionate part or the thought leader part? Yeah, it was both.

It was just I'm getting more comfortable and saying, tell me about you. Instead of putting labels on, oh, I'm married and I have dogs, I'm this. Instead, I'm kind of giving you a glimpse into what I'm about.

Right on. I appreciate it. Well, Jenelle, you know what we're here to do.

We want to hear what is on your mind when it comes to customer success. Can you hit us with it? I can. It is the incredible power of self-awareness that leads to emotionally intelligent leaders within business, specifically customer success, because we are very uniquely positioned to be game changers.

That sounds slightly self-aware in and of itself, but do you want to give an example of where being self-aware is really valuable? Yeah. I think a lot of people say self-awareness and there's a negative connotation. Self-awareness is I need to be more aware that I do this, or I need to be really thoughtful that I have this shortcoming.

And so I need to be more aware of that. And that is true. However, what I've found is that when you use self-awareness as a tool to understand who you are, right, again, you could be married, you could have kids, you could have a book of business, that's 50 million.

All of those are descriptors that are variables of your life. The question is, who are you? Do you know who you are? That element of self-awareness builds a confidence and a sense of conviction that when you embrace that and really understand what are your strengths and how do you lean into those strengths to benefit your customers and your company, that your growth potential, your profitability potential, your ability to really go and do whatever you want in life, because you're very grounded in exactly who you are, is the most powerful element I've ever found in my studies and in real world application for myself. It's your superpowers, right? Let me ask you this.

I like to subscribe to this idea of lean into what you're good at and avoid the plague, the things you're not, versus the alternative would be constantly try to shore up those things that you're not good at. Where do you land on that spectrum? It's definitely a balance. You cannot ignore the things that you're not good at.

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But if you're... I'm trying. And because really emotional intelligence is such a gamut, right? It's twofold. It's loving yourself.

There's four pillars of emotional intelligence, what I've talked about a lot. It's loving yourself and it's loving others. And I know love is a scary word to use in business, but that's basically the concept that when you're comfortable with you because you know who you are and you know what you're good at, it means that you can lean into being uncomfortable to talk about the things that you're not great at or talk about the areas that you might have a few blind spots.

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The goal is to offer a safe place for professionals to do that because it's not great to be like, yeah, I'm a little bit ugly in this area of my life. And when you talk about that, it makes people uncomfortable. But in a safe setting in the right situation, what I'm finding is that by being vulnerable myself, it allows someone else to be vulnerable and talk about those difficult things in a way that just is, let's talk through it.

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What are the challenges? Why do you see this as being an area that makes you uncomfortable? And let's work through it to get to the other side. I want to say one more thing before I let the gents jump in. But I have found, took me a really long time to figure this out, but when I practice vulnerability, I get the best results.

And it doesn't matter what result I'm looking for, personally, professionally, I always get the best results. But what I have noticed is that I have got to be hyper aware of how I take feedback from folks, because I want the feedback. I want to get better.

I want to practice vulnerability. But I know for me, if I get feedback in a weird way, or I'm like flat footed when it happens, like all bets are off. So anyway, gents, I want you to whoever, raise your hand and jump in here.

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I'll jump in. What's up guys, it's Dillon here. And you know why I'm here hat in hand.

I got a favor to ask of you. If you like what we're doing, give us a like on whatever platform that you find us on. And if you want to know when we're dropping new stuff, give us a follow, give us a subscribe.

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And maybe best of all, you want to give us some feedback, drop a comment and let us know what you like, what you don't like or how we can get better. We want to make sure we're giving the best content we can to you and others within the community. Thanks so much, guys.

I'll let you get back to the show. I'll be quick. I think the ultimate form of emotional intelligence is letting me know why we're having a meeting, especially if you are my manager.

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That's really good emotional intelligence. I think it's... Oh, you mean the surprise check in meeting in 15 minutes? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so like coming down to some of those action things, you know, like being aware of some of the assumptions that we can make in our interactions with each other, right? Like assuming maybe that some say internal language that you're using, that some other customer client or other person uses the same internal language, then we have a different concept of that.

I think that's a very actionable example of using emotional intelligence for a better sort of business outcome. You're talking to someone, your ability to just communicate in a smoother way because you're making less assumptions and you're making sure that there's more of an understanding. That's the same thing you're doing when you say, hey, I want to meet in 15 minutes just to chat about these specific couple of things really sets the tone, you know? Well, that's specifically, I mean, in emotional intelligence, JP, that's setting and managing expectations, right? There's a statistic that leaders, not managers, because there's a difference.

Leaders with high emotional intelligence outperform their peers by almost 30%. So there's one. Second one.

Emotionally intelligent leaders are 85% more likely to make sound decisions under pressure through emotional intelligence. So you're talking about an individual coming in at a leadership level to think through the choices they're making and the expectations that they're setting by communicating through emotional intelligence, right? That's a leader versus a manager that says, oh, well, you did something wrong, or we got to talk about this. I'm going to throw time on your calendar and I'm not going to blindside you, or I'm not going to deliver that news very well, Dillon, to your point, right? That's the difference between a manager who's checking a box to derive business outcomes versus a leader who is looking to inspire and motivate an employee through maybe a difficult or uncomfortable conversation.

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The approach is completely different. Somebody must have slipped you a note that we love supporting documentation on this show. So thank you so much for sharing your citations.

Rob, do you want to close us out? Yeah. No, I love, Jenelle, that you always bring up some of the stuff that's hardest to talk about. You know, this has been one of the most fun and reassuring things about chatting with you, Jenelle.

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Like you mentioned, using the word love is scary in a business environment. Personally, I think what's scary is this question of who are you and what are your strengths? That's a question that puzzled me for more than a decade. I spent a lot of time trying to do a lot of emotional work on myself to reassure myself that I was going to eventually figure myself out and I was going to be okay and that I was going to find strengths, my own strengths in whatever work, whatever path I did choose for my career.

I was happy to find that in customer success. It reminds me too of, so Jenelle and I met at a conference, guys. At that conference, Jenelle gave an amazing presentation, by the way, on some practical strategies to improve your emotional intelligence and your own self-awareness and even just to calm yourself down in different situations.

It was a good segue because mine was about how to deal with escalated customers. One of the things that came up in that talk, there's this quote that I heard that essentially it implies that you can't de-escalate someone if you're not yourself de-escalated. I thought that was just such a good point to what Jenelle brings up that basically you kind of have to know who you are before you can figure your customers out and their outcomes and the strategies that work best for them.

I really appreciate the topic, Jenelle. I love that stuck with you, Rob. What I've come to understand through all of my reading and research and being neck deep in emotional intelligence for the past couple of years is that if you're not self-aware, you can't self-manage, you can't be socially aware, and you can't be great at relationship management.

It starts with you. I think our society tells us to isolate. We're told to stay in and order food from the grocery store.

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We're encouraged to stay home because of COVID and all these other reasons. I don't think it's good for us. I think we have to give more grace.

We have to be more patient with each other and realize that we're human, every single one of us. If we ignore the human element of business, we're all lost to AI and digital transactions. I don't want to live in that world.

I want to live in a world where relationships are encouraged and people are embraced for who they are. We're encouraging and supporting individuals, especially the boots on the ground, to be confident and to speak with conviction and be excited about professional and personal development and not terrified of what we might find. I love that.

I love that. Thank you so much, Jenelle. That's our time.

Thanks for having me, guys. This is a fantastic message to get out there. Thank you so much for sharing it.

I hope you come back soon. Me too. Let's do it.

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Until next time. Thanks so much. Only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers.

For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Until next time.