After the Webinar: EQ and You. Q&A with Thom Dworak

Webinar presenter Thom Dworak answered a number of your questions after his presentation, EQ and You: Developing Your Emotional Intelligence…a Deep Dive. Here are just a few of his responses.

Audience Question: Do you know if EQ has been taught to criminal offenders in any kind of structured systematic way and if so, have you heard of any studies?

Thom Dworak: I’m going to say no. I’m not aware of it. I’m sure if it has been done. The focus that I look at from is usually primarily law enforcement standpoint but I’m sure there probably is something that I will go and look for cause I’m going to write it down right now.

Audience Question: Keeping in mind that we all work in the justice profession, how do you strike a balance between open disclosure and sharing especially when we talk about our families and yet protecting our privacy with caution for security purposes?

Thom Dworak: That we talk a lot about in our live classes, and yeah, we do have to be guarded. Overall, if anybody were to find out where I live or anything about me if they type my name into a web search were pretty easy to find. I’m not saying that we’re going to have a heartfelt discussion about my family versus your family. But there have been times where I’d use it as a tool where we brought somebody in and they were particularly upset, either at the circumstances or maybe the officer that brought them in. Look at from the standpoint of, “Hey, you have kids?” kind of thing and “yeah I got two boys and do they ever make mistakes”. How do you handle that? I get the wanting to guard and protect. It’s really easy to find out who we are and where we are at so it doesn’t hurt us to be a little bit more normal. I’m not going to tell them where my granddaughter goes to school or where my kids live. But I can make it more human if it’s talking about relationships or somebody asking if you’re married and you say, “Yeah I’m married for a long time.” I’m not going to get where my wife works or that but it’s still becoming more human, it’s getting less robot right? We’re not dealing with “just give me the facts. You are the criminal, I’m the officer, you’re the inmate, I’m the corrections guard. I know from the corrections standpoint that there have been numerous incidents where the inmates were protecting a lone jail guards from stopping an attack from happening because of how that particular jail guard treated the inmates and they had said afterwards that “If it was this guy who treats us like crap, we’ll just let the inmate guy beat the crap out of him. This guy treats us with respect. He was concerned about us.” We can see how that becomes in the corrections environment an officer safety tool.

Audience Question: What is habit stacking?

Thom Dworak: Habit stacking is a way to take and put new habits into an existing routine. I used the example what my daily routine is when I get up in the morning and if I wanted to take and insert a new habit in there to begin a process right? Whether it’s exercise or meditation or some type of task, even reading where I will take and insert that into a particular routine to help develop that as a habit and it’s a fairly successful way to begin by taking small bites of developing a larger habit so if I’m going to have to exercise in a couple of years, I’m not going to go outside and run six miles. But I might start with what I told earlier. I’m going to take a short bit of time to do ten pushups, ten sit-ups, and ten air squats which probably takes forty-five seconds, maybe less. But then as that develops, we can add to those. I am a voracious reader. I read tons and tons and I spent upwards of anywhere from half an hour to an hour a day reading but that started out with reading a page and then reading two pages and then reading three pages. At some point, I had to move that out of whatever the routine I had to establish it in my own routine because it took too much time but it was interfering what the routine was and that’s what we do. So it helps establish a pattern and then once it becomes a habit, we can take it and move it out or even as part of the daily routine.

Audience Question: Are there any online tests or other tools that we can use to evaluate our level of EQ?

Thom Dworak: There are. Lolly Daskal, If you search her, she has an EQ generator. Travis Bradberry has one and it used to be free but now you have to buy his book. It’s EQ 2.0 and if you buy the book you can do it. You can take his online test. Goldman had one but the last time I went and searched for it, it was not there. Some of these can take upwards of an hour or two to take because they can get very detailed. From a source standpoint, a lot of the free ones are not gone. EQ is starting to get very monetized in terms of what people in terms of development especially in the private sector site. From a free standpoint, there’s not a lot that’s out there.

Audience Question: Denise asks whether or not you are familiar with any studies with law enforcement officers and level of EQ in the time of deadly use of force?

Thom Dworak: No. From that standpoint because it’s hard to break down that actual incident and you would have to track from the day of hire and then any changes that happen as it went through. It’s the same thing about officer’s suicide and in terms of look at it from the standpoint of officers who kill themselves whether it’s from acute stress or ongoing stress over time. The psychologist that I talked to talked about having to do a forensic autopsy to go in and look at where they were at spaced over time and you have to go all the way back to when they were hired. There’s not a specific study and those types of incidents or from a deadly-force standpoint.