Presence as Witness: The Quiet Power of Showing Up

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I remember the day my youngest child was born like a photograph in slow motion. It was 43 years ago, in a delivery room that smelled of antiseptic and hope. I promised myself I would be there — not because I thought I could do anything technical, but because something inside me insisted I needed to witness this threshold. What unfolded in those hours was not ordinary. It was raw, loud, fragile, triumphant. It was a miracle. And watching it changed me.

The delivery room was a small ecosystem of attention: my wife in the epicenter, midwives and doctors orbiting with focused calm, nurses moving with quiet purpose, machines humming like low prayers. My daughter arrived with a cry that sounded both new and ancient. As I watched, I wasn’t merely observing a birth. I was bearing witness — and that act of presence reshaped how I understood life, love, and what it means to simply be there for another human being.

What does it mean to “bear witness”? For me it meant surrendering the impulse to fix, comment, or perform. It meant holding a space with no agenda other than to attend. I saw my wife in ways I’d never seen before: fierce, vulnerable, triumphant. I saw my newborn, blinking and bewildered, entering a world I had only ever imagined for her. I saw the team at work, each person contributing a small essential piece to a profound whole. In the silence between contractions, in the quick exchanges of hands and glances, I learned something about the power of presence that has stayed with me for decades.

Bearing witness is not limited to dramatic life events like childbirth. It’s the practice of showing up when it matters: in grief, in joy, in mundane moments where another person might otherwise be alone in their experience. And you don’t need words to do it. Sometimes the most powerful language is the sturdy quiet of your attention. When you stand there and truly see what someone else is going through — without interrupting, diagnosing, or diverting — you give them something priceless: validation. You acknowledge their reality as worthy of being seen.

Why this matters now,

We live in a world of interruptions. Notifications, opinions, and obligations make us spectators to our own lives and to the lives of people around us. Bearing witness is an act of resistance against this fragmentation. It restores human connection. It heals small wounds before they become deep scars. It fosters trust and invites vulnerability. And it’s accessible: anyone can do it with a little intention and practice.

So instead of just talking at you I wanted to share two practical steps to start bearing witness today. They’re intentionally minimal so you can repeat them in any context — at home, at work, in a hospital waiting room, or on the street.

  1. The Two-Minute Presence Ritual
  • What to do: When someone begins to share something — good or bad — stop. Put down your phone, close your laptop, and face them. Take two full minutes of uninterrupted presence. Don’t plan a response; don’t analyze or advise. Let your eyes meet theirs, and if it feels natural, offer a soft touch: a hand on the shoulder or a brief squeeze of the hand.
  • Why it works: Two minutes is short enough to be manageable and long enough to break the loop of reactive listening. In those two minutes, you communicate that the person is important, that their experience matters. The ritual trains your nervous system to slow down, reducing the urge to interject or fix.
  • Where to use it: With a partner during a tough conversation, with a friend telling a story, with a colleague after a hard meeting, or even with a stranger who’s visibly distressed.
  1. The Question of Seeing
  • What to do: When someone describes an experience, ask one simple question: “What was that like for you?” Then pause and wait. Resist the urge to paraphrase right away. Allow silence to do some of the work. If the other person hesitates, follow up with: “I want to understand more. I’m here.”
  • Why it works: This question moves the focus away from facts and toward feeling. It invites deeper sharing and avoids the common trap of turning the conversation into a comparison or a problem-solving session. The follow-up line reaffirms your intent to be there for them without imposing your viewpoint.
  • Where to use it: In conversations about loss, transitions, parenting struggles, mental health, or moments of celebration where the other person wants to be witnessed rather than analyzed.

Stories that teach:

In that delivery room, I could have tried to make light of the pain to ease my wife’s tension, or I might have sought to take charge of logistics. Instead, I learned to breathe with her breath, to let my attention rest on the reality before me. Later, when friends and family told me about their own losses or breakthroughs, I found myself showing up differently — less eager to problem-solve and more willing to simply be present. Over time, the small acts of bearing witness built up a quiet network of care around the people I love.

People sometimes worry that bearing witness will overwhelm them, as though absorbing another person’s reality means carrying their whole burden. That’s not true. Bearing witness does not require you to fix anything. It asks only that you offer a portion of your attention and your heart. If emotions become too intense, honest boundaries are part of good witnessing: “I want to be here with you, and I also need a short break so I can come back present.” You can hold both care and self-preservation.

Who benefits? Everyone. The person being witnessed receives validation, validation that can transform isolation into connection. You, the witness, gain emotional fluency and deeper relationships. Communities become more resilient when people practice simple acts of presence. Teams at work perform better when members feel genuinely seen. Families heal faster when they adopt listening as an act of love.

A small practice, a big ripple:

The birth of my daughter taught me a simple truth: sometimes the most revolutionary act is to show up and stay present. You don’t need a certificate or training. You only need the willingness to slow down and give someone else a piece of your attention.

Call to action Try it this week. Choose one person — a partner, friend, coworker, or family member — and practice the Two-Minute Presence Ritual. Then, later in the week, use the question of seeing in a conversation where you usually would have jumped in to advise. Notice what changes: in the other person’s expression, in the flow of conversation, and in how you feel afterward. Share your experience with someone else or post a short note on social media about what you learned using #IWasThere. Invite a friend to try it with you.

If you want, tell me about your moment of bearing witness — what you saw, how it felt, and what changed. I’ll listen. No advice, no judgment. Just presence.

We don’t need words when bearing witness. We just need to be present. And in that simple presence, we can witness miracles — big and small — and be transformed by them.

Looking back on the birth of my daughter in that delivery room 43 years ago, everything contracted and expanded around a single point of arrival. My wife labored with a fierce determination I had never seen; her face was a map of pain and purpose. The medical team moved with practiced urgency, voices calm, hands steady. I stood at her side, breath matching hers, palms clammy but steady on her knee. There were moments of quiet concentration and moments of bright, startling noise — a mix of instructions, encouragement, and the rhythm of machines. Then the cry: a raw, immediate announcement that life had crossed the threshold. They placed my daughter on my wife’s chest and for a second the world narrowed to three breaths and the soft, wet weight of newness. Tears blurred everything; laughter and prayer braided together. In that instant I knew I had witnessed something holy — not because of drama, but because of the raw, shared humanness in that room. That witnessing changed me: it taught me the language of presence in a way no book ever could.

Hide-and-Seek of the Soul: Learning to Be Found…

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When I was a child, summer evenings meant the sweet, damp smell of grass and the soft thud of bare feet on the lawn as we played hide-and-seek until the light thinned to the color of my old side of our old house. I remember crouching behind brick walls in that ethnic area of Detroit called Hamtramck, my breath held, counting on my hands while my young friends scattered like leaves on the wind. The delight of being both pursued and hidden—of waiting in a secret pocket of the world until someone found me—stayed with me. That game was, in miniature, a schooling in the rhythms of life: the thrill of discovery, the quiet of waiting, the embarrassment and laughter when the hiding place failed. Beginning here, with that memory of hide-and-seek, helped me see how the hidden things of life are part of the same pattern we practiced as children.

One moment we are walking along, sure of our path, and the next moment something rises from below the surface—a memory, a grief, a joy so bright it takes our breath away. We jump, we scream, we wonder, we are grateful, sometimes all in the same moment. These small detonations and soft arrivals are reminders that we are alive. They are also invitations: invitations to pay attention, to name, to bear witness.

In spiritual direction, I have found that the time spent sitting with clients and listening to the story that unfolds usually brings about those hidden things that want to bubble to the surface. There is a kind of safety in the slow arc of attentive listening. As someone tells their story—staggering details together with ordinary moments, explanations scribbled in the margins—those tucked-away parts of experience begin to show themselves. A pause becomes pregnant with meaning. A stray tear draws out a knot of memory. An offhand joke reveals a wound. The directed space is not magic; it is relational and structured, and that structure matters. It offers permission to the hidden to be seen.

Why do hidden things remain hidden in the first place? Often because we have learned survival strategies that require us to ignore certain sensations or thoughts. We may have been taught that some feelings are inappropriate, unspiritual, or unwise to voice. We may fear the consequences of acknowledgement—shame, judgment, or a sense of being overwhelmed. Or we may be so immersed in the busyness of living—work, caretaking, the small daily duties—that we simply do not have the patience to notice the subtleties at work in our inner life. But life has a way of insisting. The hidden, like water, finds the path of least resistance. It leaks through in dreams, in somatic signals, in sudden irritations, in wonderings that won’t let us go.

When those pesky hidden things are asking to be seen, what do you normally do? Stuff them down, let them out, ignore them? That’s me, Ignore them! This simple question is an important litmus test for our way of managing interior life. Each of these options—suppressing, expressing, or ignoring—carries consequences.

Stuffing things down can be a short-term coping mechanism. It may allow us to function under pressure, to remain reliable for others, or to dodge the immediate pain of facing something difficult. But suppression is porous. Pain that is not metabolized finds another expression: chronic anxiety, irritability, sleep disturbances, or unexpected explosions of emotion. Over time, what we have buried can calcify, making it harder to access and integrate. Spiritually, suppression can feel like a closing off from the grace that often arrives when we name the truth of our condition. It can turn our inner landscape into a desert.

Letting things out—expressing raw emotion—can be liberating. A cry, a fierce conversation, an honest confession, a journal entry that spills secrets onto the page: these can unbind what was stuck. But unrestrained release without discernment can also cause harm. If the expression is directed at vulnerable others or enacted impulsively, it can fracture relationships and create new wounds. What helps is a tempered expression: naming what is present without launching it like a spear at someone else. Finding appropriate outlets—trusted friends, therapists, spiritual directors, creative acts—can channel release in healing ways.

Ignoring is its own form of avoidance, subtly different from stuffing. To ignore is too busy ourselves with neutral or distracting activities—scrolling, workaholism, noise—so that we do not have the space to meet whatever is asking for attention. Ignoring can feel safe because it delays the inevitable. Yet the hidden things have stamina. They may return more persistently or in altered forms. Ignoring is a passive collusion with fear.

So, what is the middle way? From the practice of spiritual direction and from the rhythms of contemplative life, a few patterns emerge that help make the hidden visible without being consumed by them.

  1. Cultivate a listening posture. Listening is not merely the absence of speaking; it is an orientation of attention. When you cultivate a listening posture toward yourself—pausing, closing the gap between stimulus and reaction—you give the hidden a chance to emerge. Practices that cultivate listening include silence, breath awareness, journaling, and prayerful attention. In a listening posture, you loosen the habit of immediate reactions and make space for discovery.
  1. Name gently. When something surfaces, name it as precisely as you can. “I am feeling afraid,” “I notice grief behind my anger,” “There is shame when I think about that conversation.” Naming is enacting a tiny liturgy of truth: you acknowledge a reality and thereby diminish its power to run you unconsciously. Naming need not be a full-blown analysis—often a brief, compassionate descriptor will do.
  1. Use trusted containers. Not every feeling needs to be told to everyone. Spiritual direction, therapy, close friendships, creative outlets, and ritual provide containers where the hidden can be explored safely. A good container holds both tenderness and truth. It helps you stay with a feeling long enough to learn from it without being overwhelmed.
  1. Practice curiosity, not judgment. Hidden things often come with a script—a voice that tells us we are broken, weak, or unworthy. Replace condemnation with curiosity. Ask, what is this wanting from me? How old is this pattern? Where did I first learn this response? Curiosity opens pathways of understanding that judgment seals shut.
  1. Attend to body and imagination. The hidden speaks not only through thought but through the body and imagination. An ache in the chest, a clenching in the jaw, a dream, an image that keeps returning—these are languages of the soul. Attend to them. They often carry the metaphorical shape of what’s needing attention. Let your imagination be a map, not a liar; test its images against gentle reality-checks. As an example, I tend to hold stress in my neck and at times becomes so painful that I cannot use one of my arms and when I check in with my body, I can usually find the reason.

When I think back to hide-and-seek on the lawn, I notice how the children’s version of the game allowed for a safe reveal. We knew, inherently, that being found wasn’t the end of the world—it was part of the play. That trust made hiding feel not like concealment but like a temporary, innocent withholding. In adult life we often forget that being found can be met with gentleness rather than punishment. Spiritual direction, friendships, and practices of presence restore that simple truth: the world, and the people we trust, can be safe places to be seen.

Reflections on life’s hiddenness inevitably led to paradox. The very things that surprise us—the sudden joy, the spontaneous grief—are both evidence of our vulnerability and of our depth. They remind us that life is not a list of accomplishments but a living relation. When we make room for these hidden things, they can become sacramental: ordinary moments that reveal deeper truth. A tear can be a doorway; an unexpected laugh can be grace.

In the end, how we respond to the hidden shapes the arc of our lives. Do we cultivate a posture of listening and curiosity, or do we keep building higher walls? Do we find companions who can sit with the messy reality of us, or do we continue a lonely performance? The invitation is simple and relentless: pay attention.

And so, I come back, as the sun sank on those summer evenings, to the hush of hiding and the laughter of being found. The child who crouched behind the hedge trusted that discovery would not be punishment but part of play; the adult who sits in a quiet room with a spiritual director or a friend can relearn that same trust. To let the hidden things surface is not to expose ourselves to harm but to return to a game we once knew well—the risky, delightful art of being seen. If we remember how play taught us that being found often brings relief, connection, and a burst of laughter, then perhaps we can meet our inner surprises with less dread and more curiosity. Hide-and-seek becomes a small theology: what is hidden will be found, and what is found can become fuel for deeper life. Trust the finding.

Eastertide: Living into Easter for Forty Days

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Today’s blog post is about Easter from a deeply methodist standpoint in the form of a sermon. As a spiritual director I felt with all that is going on in the world we could take a moment and breathe into a deeply felt practice. And yes, I know that some of my brothers and sisters do not practice this form of worship, thank you for reading, and, lastly for those of you that do not have an active faith, consider acts of kindness you can perform.

When I was a child, one of the greatest joys of Easter was not the church service—but the Cadbury chocolate bunny ears. I don’t know about you, but I could not wait for Easter morning: the thrill of hunting for hidden eggs, the bright colors winking from the grass, baskets overflowing with candy, and the small, necessary negotiations with my brother over the Peeps I didn’t like. It became a ritual I could not escape, one that shaped my expectations for finding hidden treasures. I learned to look for delight in the ordinary places; I learned that joy is often buried, waiting to be discovered.

For those of us who celebrate this holy week for a man called Jesus, and for brothers and sisters from other traditions who know how important this time is for Christians, I want to offer a few thoughts. Do you think we might have missed the point? We faithfully observe Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and finally Easter Sunday. We come to our respective places of worship, we sing the hymns, we share the sacrament, we kneel and we weep and we laugh. But then—when the baskets are put away until next year, and in my case the last of the chocolate bunny has met his end—what do we do with the days that follow?

Eastertide. The church calendar gives us a word for the season we so often forget: Eastertide, the fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost. Within that season is another mark: the forty days after Easter—the days in which the risen Christ we believe in continued to appear among his disciples, teaching, encouraging, healing, and preparing them. Luke, in Acts 1:3, tells us that Jesus “presented himself alive to them by many proofs” and “appeared to them for forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.” Forty days—long enough to be formative, not a mere moment but a way of life being reframed.

Think for a moment of the bunny ears. As a child I associated them with surprise and delight; they trained my eye to pay attention to the small, hidden places where joy could be found. But if Easter for us is only the morning we find the chocolate, if that joy is only the counter of an Easter Sunday, then we have turned a lifetime into a holiday. We have reduced a movement of God—into a seasonal confection. Jesus does not show up for one photograph and then leave. He walks with the disciples for forty days and more; he breaks bread, he opens scriptures, he commissions them to go out. This Easter life spills over into ordinary days.

This is the pastoral point I want to leave with you: Easter is not an event to be consumed. It is a reality to be inhabited. The forty days after Easter are practice sessions. They are an apprenticeship in what it means to live in the knowing of Christ. The early church did not celebrate Easter and then go back to business as usual. They kept the feast. They lingered in the light of Jesus until their habits, their affections, their deeds, were reshaped.

What does that reshaping look like? Allow me to name a few practices—simple, Methodist (me being Methodist), and practical—that can help us live Eastertide as more than memory.

  1. Keep the feast of the Jesus. The Wesleyan tradition talks about “means of grace”: prayer, scripture, the sacraments, fasting, and works of mercy. During the forty days, make a habit of coming to the table. Let the sacrament of Holy Communion remind you that resurrection is a feast to be shared.
  1. Read these Easter stories slowly. Don’t rush past the Easter narratives as if you know how they go. Re-read Luke 24, John 20–21 and Acts 1. Hear the bewilderment, the fear, the doubts of the disciples. Notice how often Jesus invites them into ordinary things: eating fish, walking on the road, opening scripture. We are invited into this relationship not as a leap into fantasy but as a transformation of the everyday.
  1. Practice visibility and testimony. The early disciples were given the task to witness. But witness is not merely verbal proof; it is a life that reflects the truth of the faith. This Eastertide season, decide on one way to make faith visible: meals with a neighbor, forgiveness offered where resentment lingered, a note to someone who is lonely, a visit to someone in prison, charity given without fanfare. Let your life be an Easter basket for others.
  1. Re-learn to look for hidden things. The chocolate bunny ear was hidden to be found—and that shaped my anticipation. Similarly, Jesus revealed that God hides grace in unlikely places: in failure, in loss, in hospital rooms, in apologies. Train your eyes to find the small, bright things of God. Keep a journal for forty days in which you note one “hidden treasure” you noticed each day—an unexpected kindness, a phrase of Scripture that struck you, a sunrise you had not seen before. By the end of forty days, your instincts will be reoriented toward noticing God.
  1. Tend to doubt honestly. Thomas’s doubt is part of the story (John 20:24–29). The forty days included questions and skepticism. Methodism, for all its joy, has room for honest uncertainty. Bring your questions to God. Bring them to your community. The Easter story is not weakened by doubt; it is made credible by a God big enough to meet us in our honest, messy searching.
  1. Remember the promise of mission. The forty days end in a commission. The Christ prepares his followers to be sent. The direction is outward. Our discipleship, formed in Eastertide, must lead us into the world with mercy, justice, and love. Easter is always an announcement that something new has begun; it calls the church to participate in God’s new creation.

And finally, let us talk for a minute about ritual and memory. The practice of an Easter egg hunt—hidden treasures, bright colors, baskets—wasn’t a failure as ritual. It taught me to expect joy. But if we do not let that expectation reach beyond candy, if we do not allow it to inform how we look at the poor, how we treat our spouse, how we speak to our children, then the ritual has become a trap. The chocolate bunny taught me how to search. The Christ teaches us where to look in the broken, the overlooked, the hurting—and in those places we find the glory of God waiting, like an egg, for discovery.

So, if you find yourself this week putting the baskets away and wondering what to do next, I invite you to spend these forty days as if your life depends on it—because it does. Begin with small things: a daily prayer of thanksgiving for one surprising thing you noticed; one act of mercy each week; one conversation about faith with someone who does not belong to the church; a regular reading of the Easter narratives. Practice being a people who not only celebrate an event but live a new life.

We believe that Christ is risen. This is not an idea to be tucked away in a corner like last year’s candy. It is the force that calls us out of the habit of fear, despair, and selfishness. It is the promise that our old life will not have the last word. And it is a call to spend the next forty days—and the next forty years—looking for and making visible the hidden treasure of God’s kingdom.

Jesus, you appeared to your disciples and walked with them in ordinary days. Walk with us these forty days. Open our eyes to the hidden places where you hide your grace. Teach us to feast, to witness, to forgive, and to love. Shape our expectations so that we look for you not only on high festival mornings but in the faces at our table, in the poor at our gate, in the breaking of bread each day. Send us forth with Easter joy, and fill us with the Spirit of surprising, steadfast love. Amen.

Go now my friends, with ears attuned to the small, bright things of God—and with baskets ready to give away what you have been given. Alleluia.

From EQ Theory to Heart: The Three Intentions Practice

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You’ve probably heard the phrase “emotional intelligence” thrown around in meetings, on LinkedIn posts, and in self-help emails. It’s become one of those buzzwords that can feel both promising and slippery — promising because it suggests we can get better at being human with each other, slippery because it can stay as a concept in our minds without ever changing how we live. Lynette and I learned this the hard way.

Years ago, when EQ still lived a bit on the edges of mainstream leadership development, we fell into it in a way that felt like fate. We trained with Six Seconds — the Emotional Intelligence Network — and with Josh Freedman, who was and is leading the organization. Back in those days Josh was able to be pretty much one on one with people that were interested in EQ, and we learned a lot from him. We didn’t just take a course or two; we drank deeply. We took every training Six Seconds had at the time and offered it through our company, Spirit of EQ. By learning the tools and the models, and eventually served as Regional Network Directors for North America we found out the meaning of a deeper walk with our emotions.And that meant we were surrounded by people who had a real heart for change: coaches, educators, leaders who wanted to bring more humanity into their work and lives.

But here’s a truth we discovered: no matter how many models you memorize, how many assessments you score, or how many workshops you deliver, moving emotional intelligence from the head into the heart — truly owning it — is harder than it looks. Intellectual understanding is tidy and safe. It sits in the mind, where ideas can be argued and adjusted. The heart, by contrast, is raw and messy. Owning EQ means translating insight into felt experience and consistent action. It means living it, not just thinking about it.

What we learned made the difference between clever jargon and more about structure, practice, and values. Their approach centers around three practical intentions that are easy to understand and hard to neglect: Know Yourself, Choose Yourself, Give Yourself. These are not slogans. They’re invitations to live differently.

Know Yourself This is the foundation. If you don’t know what’s living inside you — your triggers, your default reactions, your values and fears — you can’t intentionally choose how to respond. Six Seconds and its SEI tools support accurate self-assessment, and that’s a useful starting point. But assessment without felt reflection is like reading your own weather report without stepping outside. To own EQ in your heart, you must turn awareness into felt reality.

Practice:

  • Start small with regular check-ins: pause three times a day and name what you feel (not just what you think). Use simple language: “I feel anxious,” “I feel tired,” “I feel excited.” Naming an emotion moves it from automatic reactivity to conscious awareness.
  • Use a body scan: where do you feel that emotion? A tight chest, a knot in the stomach, a quickened heartbeat? Bringing attention to bodily sensations roots intellectual understanding in bodily truth.

Choose Yourself This is the hinge. Knowing yourself gives you options; choosing yourself means you act on them intentionally instead of re-acting. It’s about the space between stimulus and response that Viktor Frankl talked about — that space is where EQ lives.

Practice:

  • Identify one pattern that doesn’t serve you (e.g., snapping when stressed, avoiding tough conversations). Define a tiny alternative action you can take in moments of stress and practice it relentlessly.
  • Anchor to values. If kindness is important to you, pre-decide what a small kind action looks like when you feel defensive. That pre-decision helps you act from choice, not from old habit.

Give Yourself This is the outward expression. EQ is not an internal hobby; it’s a way of relating. When you give from a place of presence and purpose, the heart opens. Give Yourself also means self-compassion — you must offer yourself the same patience you give others while you’re learning.

Practice:

  • Practice small acts of service or connection that align with your values. These don’t have to be grand: a sincere thank-you note, a five-minute listening session with a colleague, or arriving ten minutes early to be fully present in a meeting.\
  • Build a ritual of self-forgiveness. When you fail (and you will), practice an internal script of learning rather than self-judgment: “I’m learning. What can I try differently next time?”

Bringing these three intentions into daily life is how EQ stops being a theory and becomes a way of living. But there are still practical obstacles: busyness, skepticism, and the defense mechanisms that keep us stuck in the head. Here are concrete ways we learned to bridge that gap — ways that helped the people we worked with when we were regional directors, and that helped us in our own lives.

And here is the part where I do a shameless self-promotion: we at Spirit of EQ can help you with these trainings.

  1. Use tiny experiments to build evidence

The brain cares about results. When you run small experiments — “Today I’ll breathe for 30 seconds before responding to criticism” — you gather evidence that different responses work. Accumulated evidence rewires expectation and hence behavior.

  1. Anchor learning in relationships EQ isn’t a solo sport.

Practice with a trusted person: share your intention (“I’m practicing listening without giving advice”), ask for feedback, and debrief what happened. Real relationships provide both safety and accountability.

  1. Move from intellectual insight to sensory experience.

 We often “know” something in our mind without sensing it in our body. Use approaches that require embodiment: role-plays, expressive movement, breath work, or even walking meetings where you name feelings aloud. The body remembers what the mind forgets.

  1. Create an identity shift– Tell a new story about yourself:

not “I’m someone who gets triggered,” but “I’m someone who notices when I’m triggered and pauses.” Identity influences action. The more you act from that story, the more the heart will follow. Reframe, reframe, reframe.

  1. Practice compassion rituals Moving from head to heart requires warmth toward yourself and others.

Start each day with a two-minute compassion practice: think of someone you care about and wish them well, then extend that same wish to yourself. Science and tradition both show compassion practices open the heart.

  1. Use measurement to fuel growth (wisely).

Six Seconds’ approach includes measurement tools like the SEI assessment to track progress. Measurement is useful when it’s used for learning, not judgment. Use data to celebrate growth and to identify patterns you want to shift — not to shame yourself.

  1. Connect purpose with practice

 People consistently embody EQ when their practices are connected to a larger purpose. Ask yourself: “Why do I want to get better at emotional intelligence? What would that allow me to bring to my family, team, or community?” When the head’s motivation aligns with heart-felt purpose, change accelerates.

A story that stays with me: we were running a regional workshop and one participant, a manager of a busy nonprofit team, was skeptical. He’d been to countless trainings and felt they were mostly fluff. Halfway through, during an exercise to name emotions and bodily sensations, he blurted out that he’d always been taught to “keep his face on.” The muscles around his eyes relaxed for the first time in the workshop. He admitted that for years he’d been protecting himself by staying emotionally flat. That admission was intellectual, but the group’s non-judgmental witnessing shifted something in him — his shoulders sagged, his voice softened — and for the first time in years he felt something like relief. He later told us that he didn’t become a different person overnight, but that one small felt moment made it possible for him to experiment with being authentic. He started a weekly habit of one minute of naming before staff meetings and eventually began to model vulnerability for his team.

That’s the turning point we saw again and again: an intellectual insight met with a felt experience, supported by practice and community. That’s how EQ moves from the head to the heart.

If you want to own EQ — not just understand it — begin where you are. Choose one small practice from above and make it non-negotiable for a week. Tell someone about what you’re trying. Measure nothing more than whether you did the practice. Notice the felt changes. Then expand.

The work of those many years showed us that emotional intelligence is less a destination and more a living skill — like learning a language or playing an instrument. You won’t master it in a weekend, but you can grow it every day. And when you do, something quietly powerful happens: your choices come from a place of alignment, your relationships deepen, and your life becomes an expression of the values you claim.

We’ve carried that lesson through our careers and into our everyday lives. We still study, we still measure, and yes, we still read the research. But what matters most is the slow, steady translation of insight into action — the felt practice of showing up differently. That’s how EQ stops being a buzzword and starts being a way of living from the heart.