Jeff Ma
Hey folks, we have some exciting news for you all. We have just launched a brand new company founded on the tenets of our love as a business strategy philosophy, the same philosophy that you've grown to know and love. This new venture is called Culture Plus. Culture Plus is a culture as a service company that provides training experiences, consulting services, and digital tools to help companies achieve high performing and high reliability cultures and teams. To learn more, visit culture-plus.com. That's culture- plus.com. And now, let's get to the show. Stephen Barth is a professor, lawyer and author, keynote speaker and entrepreneur. He shares with us some incredible stories and insights from his over 30 years in teaching leadership, he helps us break down the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace. And let me tell you, it is so good, I pretty much guarantee that you'll find something insightful and valuable from this conversation. So get ready to take some notes, and enjoy.

Hello, and welcome to Love as a Business Strategy - a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business. But we want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from, we believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. And each episode, we dive into one element of business or strategy and test our theory of love against it. I'm your host, Jeff Ma, and I'm joined today, my co host and friend Mohammad Anwar and co author, of course, wow, an hour Mohammad. How are you doing today?

Mohammad Anwar
Doing good. Glad to be here.

Jeff Ma
Yeah, awesome. Mo. Anyone who knows you, at all knows that you're also you're an alumnus and a die hard fan of the University of Houston. You're younger for life. So I wanted to make sure you're here for today's guests. Make sure your today's guest Stephen Barth is a lawyer and author, a keynote speaker and entrepreneur and notably for you, Mohammad. He's a professor of leadership and hospitality law at the University of Houston. So, welcome to the show. Welcome to the show, Stephen.

Stephen Barth
Thanks, Jeff. Hey, Mohammad. Yeah, where when were you at the school?

Mohammad Anwar
I went there from 2000 to 2003.

Stephen Barth
Okay, good. Yeah, which program.

Mohammad Anwar
Computer science. So I graduated in fall of 2003. I also enrolled in the master's program, but then I dropped out. Summer of 2004.

Stephen Barth
Okay, well, seems like you've done done very well for yourself. So good. Glad to always see success from our alumni. Congratulations. And thank you in the hotel and restaurant school, the Hilton College has had been there for I hate to admit it, but 30 plus years now. Long step. Yeah. But it's been great. Been a lovely career. Great people. And I'm sure you feel the same way I do about you of age under the tutelage of Renu Khator our president and she's just, I think done a remarkable job at positioning us and, and getting us to where her vision you know, was it's really been a nice, nice thing to watch.

Mohammad Anwar
Absolutely, totally agree with you. Yeah.

Stephen Barth
And I should say, to engage, because she had to have a lot of buy in from the faculty, which I'm sure as you guys know, it, employees are one thing, faculty, totally different. Totally different animal. It's jazz being a lawyer, too. I can tell you, if it's lawyers, it's even worse. But faculty. It's, it's quite an interesting group dynamic, for sure.

Mohammad Anwar
Awesome. Maybe we should dig into that a little bit to understand the difference. Yeah, yeah, we'll get there for sure.

Jeff Ma
Stephen, I have a gigantic list of things that you've accomplished, created and done. And I want to get to all that. But first, we have icebreakers that we do every time. And I make Mohammad go first. So you have time to prepare. Mohammad, through icebreakers? What's the best thing you bought this year -2021?

Mohammad Anwar
That's a hard question. And if it's a tangible thing, and not like an experience, I will go with my remarkable tablet. It's like a digital notebook. Which, you know, I've owned iPads, but I've always missed the experience of writing with a real pencil or a pen on a piece of paper. And I think this is a there's been a pretty good tool that makes you experience writing on a piece of paper you feel different friction factor lead runs out you have to change it. It's yeah, it runs you have to put in new tips. Because there's friction it like it, like goes away just like lead in a pencil. And yeah, so I've been using this and it's like really helped me keep my handwriting skills going while in the digital world so I really enjoyed it and it does a really good OCR, you know, converting into actual type digital documents and everything. So I would say that's my best purchase investment this year.

Jeff Ma
Yeah, so remarkable. If you're listening, if you want sponsorship deals, you know.

Mohammad Anwar
sales job of selling

Jeff Ma
this will trade you some books, Stephen Barth, what is the best thing you bought this year?

Stephen Barth
You know, the first thing that came to my mind when you asked Mohammad that was a plane ticket. So I think I'd probably stick with that. Yeah, it was it was kind of remarkable right to be able to do that again. And so I feel like that's probably top of my list.

Jeff Ma
Plane ticket to where?

Stephen Barth
Well, at the when I bought it. I don't even remember where it was, but it doesn't matter. I just feel it's just good to get back on the plane. My big getaways are La Jolla, California. So San Diego's the ticket plane ticket, or I did spend some time in Europe, which was really nice. And then of course, Columbia, I love to come down here. The people are just wonderful. Oh, yeah.

Mohammad Anwar
Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Maybe? Well, you know, they do have tickets that go To Nowhere, available, I think. Which was it the Qantas air in Australia were the first airlines to offer in COVID. Time, a ticket to nowhere, they just fly around and bring you back to the same airport. And they got sold out within like, just a few hours of opening it up. Because I thought that was interesting. That's great.

Stephen Barth
I hadn't heard of that Mohammad is ready to check that out. What a cool idea in the middle of the pandemic. Yeah.

Jeff Ma
Oh, my goodness. All right. Well, my intro was, as I mentioned, missing a whole lot of detail, and there are blanks to fill. But Stephen, I'm gonna let you fill it in for us, can you can you tell us just about the work you do, and kind of where your expertise and passion lies.

Stephen Barth
Sure. So I try to develop synergy around the different things that I do, it starts my My priority is teaching at the university. I've had, I guess, at last count a little over 15,000 students in my career. And so that's been a wonderful part of, of my career. And then I have a few businesses outside of the university that we once called hospitality lawyer.com that we created about a little over 20 years ago now. And the concept there is we're like match.com, for lawyers that want to represent hotels and restaurants. So just kind of the digital matchup there. And then in that concept, we put on conferences, and face to face conferences, virtual seminars, we have libraries that people can access to try to help the hotel and restaurant industry, meeting folks prevent liability from occurring via education and training. And then I also just part of that we have about 15 years ago, we moved into travel risk mitigation. We put on war game type situations, for companies just to use a name or to you know, the larger fortune 500, the Google's the Facebook's the people that have lots and lots of people traveling on a regular basis. We try to help them keep their employees safe when they're traveling. And as you can imagine, in the last 24 months that has grown quite dramatically in terms of interest of employees, employers, excuse me, focusing on their duty of reasonable care to their employees. Speaking of love, right, that's part of the love that, in my opinion, at least they should deliver keeping employees safe when they're traveling all the time, actually. But certainly when they're traveling, we don't focus on that as much. And then I do quite a number of talks that you alluded to each year and I do a little litigation support, again, primarily focused in the legal safety and security side of hotels, restaurants, meetings, travel risk mitigation. But again about 15 years ago seems to be my magic number i, I got introduced by a mentor to the concept of emotional intelligence. And I have started to do some keynotes and talks around that subject. It's become near and dear to my heart. When we sit around my, my mother's home or one of my brothers homes in Dallas, during the holidays, one of the things we the kids typically do, the nieces and nephews or my daughter, they say, if you could have learned something earlier on in your life, what would it have been? And my answer is always emotional intelligence. I just, I just can't. Matter of fact, I saw a post on Facebook the other day where somebody said, what should we be teaching in school? And of course, there were all kinds of things love was one of them, by the way. But I also felt like I added emotional intelligence. I just feel like, it's so important, especially today, given what's going on, you know, not just in our country, but in the world. So that's a little longer than I anticipated answering that question, Jeff, but I, but I try to connect all of those dots.

Jeff Ma
Yeah, I warned everybody is a long list. So that's actually that's condensed as far as I'm concerned.

Stephen Barth
Yeah. What really means is that I'm just old

Jeff Ma
So I, there's so much I want to dive into there. And one of the things that you've been teaching leadership, specifically, for some time, and we talk about leadership here all the time, because it's really hard to talk about love as a business strategy without starting at the top without talking about leadership behaviors. I'm curious, I guess, overall, this time, like working in leadership, has it changed drastically? Has the approach changed? Or is it still at its core the same? Or what is your take on like leadership fundamentals in the way you've been approaching?

Stephen Barth
You know, that is a great question. And it's interesting, you ask it, because the last five years I, I kind of decided, well, at least for me, what I have decided in studying and researching leadership, and watching leaders and all of that for the last 30 years or so is that there's really always have been, and really is today, only two types of leaders. There are leaders that are egocentric, it's all about them. And then there are leaders that are empathic and objective. And they interpret everything through a an objective lens, rather than the first type, the ego centric, that object that excuse me, that interprets everything through their ego centric lens. And and you know, not to get too political. But you in the last two presidents Biden is he's certainly in the second category, not the first, but I think Barack Obama was positioned very, very well, in the latter category. He I felt like he was very from a leadership perspective, he was constantly giving credit to others, I really felt like that he put the country first, then the president after that, I, I, I think that's a fairly good example of the other type of leader, it's all about them, everything's interpreted through how it's going to impact them. And I think when you get back down to a micro level in businesses, it's the exact same thing. We've all known examples of people that are one of two types. And the look, the people that are the first type they come in with a big blow, they're like a hurricane, right? They come in with a big blow that looks really good, it sounds really good. But then they lead destruction in their wake. And the second type, the much more objective, authentic, empathic leaders, they're there for the long haul. And those people spawn other leaders, right, they surround themselves, they're not afraid to surround themselves with people smarter than they are. And they want those people to succeed, in some cases, even more so than they have. You know, a great example I'll give you just very quickly is a guy by the name of David Kahn. David just retired after 20 years at Best Western, the Hotel Group. And just when he came into Best Western, it was in a bit of a chaotic state, but he steadied the course. He created enormous opportunities for the people that work there. Consequently, guys, they have people that work there 20 30 40 years, right there in the corporate office. Their turnover rate is immensely below the normal turnover rate that you might see in a business like that. So that's kind of what I've seen, Jeff, I'm not sure it's changed. I think my perspective of what has occurred has changed. Or I'm not saying in life, but that's what I walked away with.

Mohammad Anwar
So Stephen, I have a question. So is the first type of characteristic that you define the egocentric type of leader? Would it be fair to say they are not a leader then? Or is it? Like, do they still deserve the title of a leader? Based on how you're describing it?

Stephen Barth
You know, that's such a fair point. I really haven't given that much thought Mohammad. It reminds me though, sometimes when we talk about coaching, which is I think, part of leadership, and my you know, growing up, I had negative coaches, right? Basketball, football. And when I look back, those people weren't coaches. Right? I just don't think there's any such thing as a negative coach, right? I just been it. But I didn't know that when I was 14 15 16 years of age. So your question about leadership, if I follow that same path and reconcile those thoughts, I'd have to agree that they're probably not leaders. But the thing is, is they do have some, at times, incredible influence, and a number of followers. And so depending on how you define leadership, which a lot of people traditionally define it as influence. Right, then, I'm not sure how we could walk away from that, but my goodness, I think you make a fair point.

Mohammad Anwar
Got it. And then context of business, um, is it like, this is my perception, so I'm probably not living the real world. But it appears that, like, a lot of the businesses that appoint leaders, or as their CEOs and presidents of organizations, for most part seem to be from the first type, maybe this is wrong on my part, or assumption, but it looks like status, shareholders and leadership are aligning to the egocentric or selfish or self centered approach of, you know, taking care of what I need for the business for myself, like, look at the pay packages, the bonuses, the decisions on laying off employees, while a $25 million, you know, bonuses being issued to a CEO, and investment groups, venture capitalists investing into those organizations, you know, knowingly that, hey, you know, if you want our money, you got to cut your, you know, stop by 900 employees to cash in, you know, there's this whole business environment rate seems like it's very apt to have that first type of leader in place to be successful in business, versus the second type of leader that you defined. What are your thoughts on that? This is my perception, my observation, how have you seen this in the business world?

Stephen Barth
No, I think you're exactly right, in your description of what's going on. Let me just add one other thing that happens, that is just totally, I just hate it. When I see it, you'll see all these layoffs announcing the stock price goes up. I mean, we're fun to our fundamentals are out of whack. But let me back up just a little bit to prop I think properly answer your question. I think you'll find the second type of leader, the authentic objective leader, oftentimes, in family owned businesses, oftentimes in smaller startups will not where venture capital is involved, right? Because they're in it for the long term. Not necessarily to have an exit strategy in two and a half years, right, that's being forced upon them by the VCs. Now, what happens though, and we've seen it throughout the hotel and restaurant industry, which is kind of my bailiwick. But once those organizations are snapped up by VCs, and quarterly reporting becomes the most important aspect of operating that business, then what you described is exactly what occurs, and it quite frankly, it it not only disrupts the marketplace. So a few people can make a whole lot of money. But what we never stop and really realize and think about is the disruption to the individual employees who get laid off. They can't pay their mortgage, they can't pay their child support. They can't put food on the table for their children, they can't make their car payment so that somebody that already has $20 million can make another five. Or instead of a 20,000 square foot house, they can build a 30,000 square foot house. Right. And it's what I call the creed of greed. And you can look back when the markets began to really focus on quarterly earnings. That's when this really exploded. And of course, that's when venture capital groups became involved, because they only care about the money. And we know you guys know, with your writing and your philosophy, that when you just care about money, at some point, you're headed for a train wreck for some of the people involved. Yeah,

Mohammad Anwar
for sure. That makes sense. I appreciate that. Um, so I wonder, do you have any examples from your experience in the hotel and hospitality industry with organizations that do have authentic objective leaders at the helm? And have been successful in business love to hear those type of stories if you have any in mind, right examples?

Stephen Barth
Sure. I've got a couple. I'll start with Delta Airlines. You may you guys, you're not old enough, maybe to remember but you know, 1015 20 years ago Delta used to stand for don't ever leave the airport.

Mohammad Anwar
Right? Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.

Stephen Barth
It was very unreliable. And that was among business travelers, which I, you know, I am, it was at the time, that was kind of what the acronym stood for. But then you, you know, you also saw American Airlines, which had, probably 30 years ago. Now I'm getting my time as I did all that. I can't put everything in context. But they had a guy named Bob Crandall, who just air American Airlines used to be one of the best airlines in the entire world. Best airlines in the entire world customer service on time, reliability, amazing. And then they got into a labor dispute. And he became a he was already one of the people, we the first type of leader, the ego centric type. And he just his ego got in the way. And he his goal was just to crush labor. And that airline has never been the same sense. Never been the same sense. There are still people to this day that work for that airline, that resent the people that cross the picket line, and it shows it shows and their customer service. And they and I won't even use the words customer care, because from my perspective, America, and I'm lifetime flyer on American I switched over to Continental into United because of some geography things but they just have never recovered. Now. Delta. I was fortunate enough, it may be 10 or 12 years ago, now I was sitting in a room where the new CEO of Delta was speaking to his customers, all the business travel buyers, people that spend millions of dollars every year on airline tickets on Delta, right. And the first thing he said when he got up, I'll never forget, he said, we have been wrong at Delta. For many, many years. He said, we've been wrong. Think about the courage this took. He said, We have been wrong because we have been focusing on you, our customers. He goes, We're not going to do that anymore. He goes starting today, we are going to focus on our employees. Because if we take care of our employees, they will take care of you. And now if you look at any business travel survey, about the top airline for customer service in the US, there are foreign airlines and probably do it better. But in the US Delta always tops it out. It always tops it out, and what an enormous shift and enormous courage that took and then there's a guy named Doug Brooks. Doug, probably five years ago retired as the C president, CEO of Brinker international Chili's Macaroni Grill, right Eat Sees. Doug's story is a remarkable story and leadership and resiliency. Doug's now actually on the board of Southwest Airlines. Another cool you know, yeah, example of you know, they started out with love, right. And they Yes, and we talked about that but Doug's story. Doug was an avid runner. When he was president of Chili's one of their verticals. He was an avid runner and sadly and tragically, he was out running one day in his neighborhood in North Dallas and a truck I think I have this story right but he a truck lost control. and pinned him up against one of these big sound walls that protects neighborhood from the traffic and the truck and he lost one of his legs from the hip down. And, and, and to his credit and he'll say this with the support of his wife. He recovered, and I think it was within six or eight months of the injury. They named him not just president of Brinker, one of the of the Chile's one of the verticals. They named him President CEO of the entire organization, Brinker, and he did remarkable things. But one of the greatest things I think about Doug is he would travel to many of their stores every single year. And after leaving each and every one, he would write them a hand written note to the management and staff expressing his deep appreciation for all of their hard work. You know, Doug, and to this day, Doug is all about organizations. He is all he's about everybody, but and he's just a remarkable person. So I would I put him in that category as well.

Mohammad Anwar
Awesome.

Jeff Ma
Also, I wanted to because because you mentioned such a key term emotional intelligence earlier, and I wanted to tie that in here. I mean, can you can you help define, first and foremost, your your definition of emotional intelligence, or how to spot that? And then where does that fit in the picture? Where does that fit in these stories that we're hearing about these great leaders?

Stephen Barth
Yeah, that's, that's a very good question. Let's see. So most of your audience probably familiar with the term emotional intelligence, but a lot of people have been Daniel Goleman, kind of coined that phrase, maybe about 2025 years ago now. But really, the concept has been around for over 2000 years. The Kabbalah philosophy was all about the Ego is the Enemy. And so you can kind of see from that, how it fits with that. Authentic, you know, if you're emotionally intelligent, you, you really put your try to put your ego aside, and you you are authentic, and you're empathic, right, you're self aware, and, and the emotional ei part is understanding who you are, but also understanding who the other folks are and what drives them, what triggers them. And it's really quite a concept that encompasses self awareness, self regulation, resiliency, and empathy. You know, when it comes to resiliency, it's never how far you fall that matters. It's always how high you bounce, right? And Doug Brooks, the story I gave you about losing his leg is a perfect example of that. I try to hold him up for all of our students, and he's very involved in our college, which is why I know his story. He's actually an alum of the University of Houston, Mohammad.

Mohammad Anwar
Oh, wow. Yeah, we should try to get him on our show.

Stephen Barth
You should know you. And Mohammad also, he's now on the Board of Regents for the University of Houston. Really, Oh, y'all, I'm sure he'd love to visit. He's very sharing with his time. And I tell him, he's a fabulous speaker, too. I tell him he should go on the speaking circuit. But he literally he tells me he devotes 1015 hours to these talks that he gives. And I'm like, and it shows when he does that. He's so well prepared. But anyway, but he's he Doug has an enormous amount of emotional intelligence. And of course, as did the gentleman from Delta, I'm sorry, I can't remember his name because he not only had courage, but he had empathy for his employees and right, and he understood what they've been going through all this time. Whereas if you look at the inverse, the contrary model, you look at Bob Crandall, with American, there was zero empathy there, zero empathy. And if you look today, we typically are divided into two camps, it's the same concept, you have a significant part of the United States that has empathy that cares about other people, that that has self awareness about what they do and how it impacts other people. And then you've got a segment that they're only focused on themselves. And they really don't care about their actions and how it impacts other people. And that's, it's really unfortunate and sad. I'm not quite sure how we ended up here, but we definitely are. We're definitely there. So I hope that I can talk more about that emotion intelligence but I hope you see that the way if you take it all the way back to the Kabbalah philosophy about the Ego is the Enemy. Well, that sits right there in the middle of emotional intelligence. And then if you go back to what I talked about, about the two types of leadership, you know, the second type, the authentic objective leader, they're going to have high levels of emotional intelligence. And the first type are going to have next to none. They read, and you know, the last piece of emotional intelligence, Jeff, is you transition from being reactive to being proactive? You learn not to take things personally. Right? You don't get defensive. You know, I could go on and on. But yeah, I think you get the point. Yeah.

Jeff Ma
Well, you made it an incredible I'm very aligned to everything you just said, You made incredible list of emotional intelligence, and the qualities that it possesses. And it's a wide and varied Oh, yeah. And all the and all the things. So I guess my big question for you is, being a professor that that works with, with students and mentors them towards this goal. How do you teach emotional intelligence? How do you build emotional intelligence?

Stephen Barth
Wow, okay, let's see, well, I've asked myself that a few times. And the first thing I tried to do is model it. I think it's very important that we determine anybody we're teaching that we try to give them examples of good behavior, you know, a model that or like, if I asked them to write a paper, I always try to give them a sample paper from the past that I thought was a good paper, right. So here, this is what we're looking for, right? Something like that. So I tried to model it, then I asked them to go out and find people like Mohammad asked me for examples, I tried to get them to go out, either in their own experience, or what they find online, or perhaps even in the movies, or Tik Tok, or anywhere, Instagram today, anybody that demonstrates, but I also ask them to show me who does not demonstrate EI cuz I'm a firm believer that you can learn just as much from experiencing poor behavior as you can from seeing good behavior, you know, or experiencing good behavior. And I think that helps a lot of them, kind of get that. And then we spend two, three or four hours every semester, going through the fundamentals of emotional intelligence, and with stories and anecdotes, that, that hopefully, they I think they grasp it and, and it's all recorded, so they can go back anytime they want to. And then I have a little ebook that they can get if they want, and kind of reinforces what we talked about. So and then we again, we try to practice it in the classroom. So if, you know our goal in the classroom is to treat each other kindly with dignity and respect. And, and sometimes that's hard for say, it was certainly hard for me when I was their age. And I know it's difficult for them, especially with COVID. And everything that's go and all the cold snap that we had in Texas, oh my gosh, these poor kids, and then they don't ever, they would never say they're victims. My students are never like that. They're they're very, very authentic. They all work. They work full time they go to school full time, these kids and but they've gone through the wringer. It's been tough. So they, they welcome the concept of emotional intelligence, because it gives them a way to pat themselves on the back, and to look ahead, and to be the kind of person that they ultimately want to be when they get out of school.

Mohammad Anwar
So Stephen, how do you approach a corporate world where I think maybe you're not allowed to practice that emotional intelligence entirely? What is your thought about that? And how do you think we can address bringing this type of emotional intelligence as described by you into the corporate world?

Stephen Barth
You know, Mohammad, I've been trying to do that for 15 years. I, I call it emotionally intelligent leadership. It's interesting, I got asked by a big hospital group in Houston to come speak to all their physicians and staff, because they were having some friction between the nurses and the doctors, right, and which is understandable. And so I said, it'd be happy to do it. So we set aside two days, an hour and a half each day so we could catch people at different times. And I had an enormous number of nurses and staff show up and over the two days I had one doctor show up.

Mohammad Anwar
Okay, you're hitting home right now for some reason, like keep going, I'll share it, but keep

Stephen Barth
then and then I got invited from an engineering group oil and gas engineering group, but they all came I think they had to, right, and but and when it was all said, you know, You get a lot of people who sit in the audience with their arms crossed, right? And their legs crossed and their eyes crossed. And, you know, what are you trying to tell me? And I'm like, Just stay with me. Right till we're finished. Right? When it's all said and done, I think people, you know, they finally get it. You know, you guys have learned over time, the people that don't get it don't get that they don't get it right. And, and sometimes, you've got to hit people in the head with a brick. And I tell some stories that I think, bring it home to them. You know, for instance, one of the things I talk about is remind me to come back to lawyers and emotional intelligence, Mohammed in a minute, but

Mohammad Anwar
I wanted to definitely ask you about that. Okay, yeah,

Stephen Barth
one of the examples I use is driving down the freeway, right? We've all had the experience of driving down the freeway and getting cut off on the freeway. And then I asked, I said, Okay, well, what's your first reaction? When that happens? And I add up, no sign language, please write? You know, we're not, I don't want to know that you flip somebody off for that. But people's how I get mad, or I get angry, I get this and the other and, and, and they and I say to them, I said, here's the most important question I'm gonna ask you today. If you don't get angry about that, what happened? And it takes a while, but somebody always in the audience will say nothing. And that's exactly right. If we see, it's our reaction that brings significance to these trivial things that happen in our life. And the more we react to them, the more we and here's a key word, the more we let some body get under our skin, the less productive we're going to be, the less peaceful we're going to be, the more disrupted our life is going to be, the less love we will deliver. Right? Because we're letting this third party who we've never met before, never going to meet them again, unless we chase them down. Right? Yeah, let them get under our skin and, and disrupt it and it's, and we all of us do it at some time. I certainly did. When I was younger, I it took me a while to get certainly where I am today. And I have to pry I live and breathe this stuff. And I have to remind myself about it every single day. And so it's it's a, it's a lifelong journey. But as I asked my audience, I say just commit to me one minute a day to, to transition to being more peaceful and productive in your life. And of course, everybody takes that. And then I leave them with a little bookmark that I asked them to read at night before they go to sleep and to wake up in the morning, set their intentions for that day. And, you know, and and share that with you guys. But it's just, it's just the it just reminds us how to we've got to rescript what's going through our subconscious because that's what controls when we get cut off on the freeway. And it's really, you know, in the final in the final analysis, you have to ask, can anybody make you mad? And you'd be surprised how many people say yes, but they're just giving away their emotional power. Right? Nobody can make us mad unless we let them. Right. That's the bottom line of emotional intelligence. But then you, you, you flip that into the corporate world, look, every relationship has conflict. And then you say to people, Look, I need you to understand that the way you are reacting to people cutting you off on the street, is probably your conflict resolution style, whether at home or with your employees, and they're like, Wow, really. And then then you if you open that door, you can start to have a conversation about self awareness, true self awareness. And the I could talk about this stuff forever. But yeah, that is one of the ones that I use. And and you mentioned, you know, how do you get it into the corporate world? You got to do it. You gotta give them an example that they can relate to, that they've experienced and go, Okay, now let's, I did a talk one time, there were three guys there. And they were just adamant that it was their job to teach people how to drop. And I said to him, I said to you guys in the Highway Patrol, these guys were travel managers. I said, if you want to teach people how to drive, go to work for the Highway Patrol, the Department of Public Safety, but you're in it, you know, and I say to them, how long have you guys been behaving this way? I'll 20 years ago, right? And nothing's changed. They were just adamant the entire two hours we're together that they weren't going to change. Okay. But some people can't get it that way.

Jeff Ma
Stephen, if you're wondering why Mohammad are just grinning from ear to ear while you're talking is because it's like it. Everything you just said over the last 10 minutes of bits from healthcare to oil and gas through self awareness. Even a traffic analogy. Yeah. It's like we've you've either been we are literally cut from the exact same cloth. You're you're basically describing all the things that we fervently and passionately preach

Mohammad Anwar
In your own experience. Yes. Same reactions. It's the examples you gave..Yeah. With the traffic cut people off the person does the exact example we use to get people to realize their triggers? Have you said the conflict style? We talk about it as triggers for misbehaviors. What's your default style of misbehaving? Right? Is this crazy? Even the example of the doctors nurses are like, Oh, my gosh, Stephen has gone through what we were going through or have gone through as well.

Stephen Barth
Sounds like I'm telling Noah, about the flood.

Jeff Ma
It's uncanny. And it's amazing. I love it so much. Because it's, we've we've been working in different ways in different spaces and it's just this, it's so it's so warming for me to hear it come from you, someone who's, you know, been there done that in a lot of ways. And also validating I guess, to hear you take these take these approaches and these angles, it's it's, it's, it's refreshing for sure.

Mohammad Anwar
As you know, Stephen like our whole approach. So we host eneca Leaders events for the corporate world, that's an offering where we're hoping you can make an impact to bring your own love and emotional intelligence in the workplace. And our whole philosophy and approach is, we're not going to go there and teach them you know, tools and better time management or any other thing, we're there to teach them self awareness. And the way we bring about self awareness, or a two day workshop is all about taking them through our stories, leader to leader, were able to share, look, this is where I messed up. This is how these are my realization, these are the things that I've done that I'm not proud of. And we share our own lived experiences create an empathic connection with the audience, so they can see themselves through our stories, and take them on a journey of introspection. Not so they're like, Oh, crap, whatever. I did, I've done that. Yeah. And, and see themselves through our stories. And we're able to get their guards to be down and open up and be more vulnerable with us and have a moment of introspection and reflection. So that the end of the two days they have like aha moment, like, Oh, I haven't been self aware about how I behave and how it impacts others. And hopefully, then take them on a commitment journey to transform those behaviors. So everything you're talking about is aligned, validating and like giving us goosebumps, right? Okay, cool. Stephen counter cynical leader session now. To help facilitate and speak and validate,

Stephen Barth
just for your audience, we did not rehearse this. Yeah.

Mohammad Anwar
Not at all. I've never even met you till now. Yeah, awesome.

Stephen Barth
We cross paths. It's it's a, it's an exciting concept. And it's so cool. And it's so powerful. And you just, you hate it when people don't get it. Because when we got it, right, I know you guys had the same experience. You're like, wow, or to put it in today's lingo snap, right. Yeah. All right, here we go. I'm showing my age. You know, man, please. Bounce on outta here.

Jeff Ma
Oh, goodness. Speaking about.

Mohammad Anwar
Sorry. One last thing I was gonna take you take it good. Yeah, I was just gonna say like, I think we've very committed to get people to have that snap moment. Yeah. And I think I think we can do it is I think we have to use our emotional intelligence to get people to have that aha moment. And I think the solution is to get them to be more emotionally intelligent and we need to use emotional intelligence to get them to be emotionally intelligent.

Stephen Barth
very good point. Yeah, I think they do perpetuate

Yeah, yes.

Jeff Ma
Coming up on time, but I did want to quickly hear about emotion intelligence in lawyers.

Stephen Barth
Well, you know, here's the thing about lawyers, lawyers, and I'm a lawyer. I think your audience heard that. But um, but I, I never had the patience to, I tried, but I really didn't have the patience back then. I'm not sure I would today, either the law grinds so slowly. But what I did learn is that lawyers are the only profession professionals that go to school for three years to learn how to get their way. Right, that's what we're taught. Or if you represent your client, you're going to represent them zealously you send a letter, if you don't get what you want, you fire off a lawsuit. If that doesn't work, you appeal it if you appeal it, right. And so lawyers are control freaks. But just, you know, goodwill, control is about getting your way, right. And that's what lawyers are taught. And so they come by it honestly, the challenge for lawyers is they, they have to recognize that they can't act like a lawyer at home. You if you want to be a lawyer and act, and I'm not saying it's healthy to do it in the workplace, or with your employees, or with judges, or whatever, whatever it is, but a lot of lawyers do, right? Because they have that egocentric thing, and they're taught how to get their way, that's only tough. But if you bring that philosophy and you start cross examining your children or your spouse, it's going to blow up. So lawyers are kind of my next space where I want to spend time trying to help them understand why we are where, how we are, for a long time out of law school, and then sadly, a lot of lawyers never get it. I certainly had to be woken up. And I'm hopeful. I can help others do that as well, because it really makes an impact in their life.

Jeff Ma
I love that. Yeah, I would agree. I would I would extend and that I think lawyers the most extreme case, but I mean, doctors if they behaved the way they did at home, any any leader managers in general, if they treated their family, the way they treated employees, sometimes it's a big aha moment right there.

Stephen Barth
Yeah, we you know, guys, just real quick, I know we're out of time. But you know, when you think about love in the workplace, to me, it starts at home, because you have so many parents that don't give love to their children unconditionally. Right, they use their love as a manipulative tool. And I find that to be just heart wrenching, because a lot of parents just don't understand. And look, every parent does the best they can at the time, I clearly believe that I wish we could do it differently at times, right? If they could do it, I could have done it differently they would have. So I don't think I don't think it's healthy for children to hold grudges against their parents, right, they have to accept that they did the best they could but back to the love is that the world will beat your children up. You know, your unconditional love is their safe there their port in the storm. And the more you beat your children up, the further away, you're going to push them. And quite frankly, it's the same thing with employees, right? You, the more you provide them with love and support and kindness in my, in my class, we talk about an organization chart from the bottom up, leaders really work from the bottom. And the reason you can prove that is that if you take any organization chart, you're probably not going to find customers in the chart. But if you and that's why you have leaders at the top and your employees at the bottom, but if you add customers to that chart, it would be fundamentally unworkable, because you would never put your customers at the bottom, you would never do that. And yet, when you have this top down organizational style, the hierarchal style of authority rather than love you know, that's exactly true. You're putting your customers at the bottom your employees at the bottom and you're just squashing them. You flip that upside down your leaders now are the foundation just like the foundation of a building the strength the experiences support, well, then you have your employees at the top right and you're there to support them with love kindness you know all the other things that I'm sure you guys talk about praise, recognition, etc. Like the carrot prints. So I'm sorry I went a

Mohammad Anwar
little long there. No, not at all. No, that was that was helpful and I appreciate it and I would agree. Like it starts at home. But for people who have already moved out of home the next best place is the workplace. do our job to show compassion and love so yeah, and and you know everything you described up to the point Why lawyers are the way they are or certain professions the way they are. If you think about it, they've been conditioned that way. And they probably got conditioned their adulthood, even though it could be influenced from home. So I think there's an opportunity for us to condition them at the workplace, to behave with the behaviors that we need for today's society. And I think the corporate environment, and the workplace where we spend most of our awake hours is the best place to help condition humans to go back to the roots of being human and, and bring that back. So I'm, I agree with you, I'm totally aligned to that. So thank you for that.

Stephen Barth
Absolutely. Just the final thought is parents cannot parent today the way that they were raised, it does not work. Employers cannot manage people the way they were managed even 15-20 years ago. It does not work. Thanks for having me on, guys.

Jeff Ma
I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Stephen, amazing conversation. I really, really appreciate it. Anything you can leave our audience for if they want to learn more from you if they want to? If they want to hear more from you? Where can they? Where can they find that?

Stephen Barth
Let's see StephenBarth.com. Stephen with a pH. We'll probably get you or you can just google me unfortunately, I show up. A lot. So they'll be able to find me for sure. But I have one thing that's very interesting. I might pitch it. It's called TobaccoFree@33 on Instagram. It's my grandson, my little my daughter's French Bulldog. His name's Frank, Frank, the French and we, Frank in all our memes trying to educate people about when they smoke or vape the negative consequences it has for other people. So if, if you're your audience might take a look at that. You'll laugh I promise it Frank and you'll fall in love. But if we could spread that word, it would be I think, save a lot of people. Some challenging health problems in their future,

Jeff Ma
for sure. Thank you for that. Awesome, awesome. Yeah. Uh, finally, thank you to the listeners. Of course. I hope you enjoyed the episode. As always, please continue tuning in. We put out new episodes every Wednesday and we all as always we have the book Love as a Business Strategy, check it out if you haven't. And always, always, please comment, send us a note, rate, subscribe, all the good things that you would for the podcast and tell a friend. And with that. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, Mohammad. we'll see everybody next week.