Give a little flavor of your background, but most importantly, I wanna know what inspires you to do what you do as an executive leadership coach and this focus on emotional intelligence and the creation of EQWise?

Well, thank you for having me here today, Mick.

It's just, I love all things emotional intelligence, so when I get to share it with someone and have conversations, it just gets me so excited.

So thank you.

Well, what really started me on my path was I grew up in rural poverty with abusive parents, learning disabilities that were undiagnosed, and undiagnosed epilepsy that presented as staring spells.

And so I got very negative messages all my life, including, uh, a guidance counselor who said, "Oh, honey, you're never gonna go to college." So I had this idea of myself that was pretty deeply ingrained, and I worked through some of that in my 20s.

But on Christmas Day when I was 30 years old, there was a book there that inspired me.

So where does this learning and growth come into how we can show up and be the best version of ourselves and connected to the ecosystem and the organism that's around us, Monique?

And then we'll chat about it.

Okay, well, thank you.

First of all, I'm happy to be here, so thank you for having me.

So my journey is I grew up, and as a teacher, you may really understand this, that I grew up with undiagnosed learning disabilities, short-term working memory, which made math and any kind of memorization work very challenging, as well as undiagnosed epilepsy that presented as staring spells.

So growing up, you know, you're a daydreamer, you're not smart to get organized, you must be lazy, all these things, and certainly having a very negative sense of self that followed me into my adult life.

In junior high, when I was filling out my schedule, I got called to the office and the guidance counselor said, you don't have to worry about taking a foreign language, you're not going to college, honey.

So, you know, that really kind of set the pace for me.

RTT, tell me a little bit about the RTT you do.

Mm-hmm.

And then growing up feeling responsible for my parents and not feeling safe really it did shape me in how... what I thought about myself and what was possible.

I grew up second generation from immigrants, for example, and the thing that was common is people like us.

So people like us have to struggle to make money.

People like us don't know the right people.

People like us don't fly to go on vacation.

There were a lot of things that people like us just didn't have access to, and I really bought into that.

In the case of those scenarios that you mentioned, the failure to launch, the people with low EQ, what could we do as parents?

And as we get into that, I'm curious how your own experience as a mother and watching other young adults enter the workforce helped shape what you've built with EQIs.

Well, the idea of EQYs actually happened the weekend of, I have 24-year-old twins.

And last year, the first twin graduated.

And it was his graduation party weekend.

And there were 11 young guys standing in the kitchen as I'm making spicy pasta, right? And two of them had jobs, only two of them.

One had had a great offer and was told that they would have the job on the start date.

And then the offer got rescinded.

Can you unpack that for listeners now?

So how does all of that play into this?

Well, Gen Z in general is struggling with the unemployment rate, twice that of the national average, and just a lot of it is AI, you know, the phones.

There's a lot of factors.

But I think that people need to understand that the statistics don't lie.

Right.

You can believe it or not, but the facts say what it is.

Right.

Sooner or later, this generation, and either heavy-handed being some tough love or some successes, they're going to need to jump into the workforce and be productive.

Where does EQ fit into this? Where does emotional intelligence fit in? And do you think that the definition of success is evolving?

Well, first I want to say a little bit about your transactional skills, right? Of certifications and training in that way, because everything's moving so quickly.

Training that you have today may be obsolete in two years, maybe like Nobody even knows what you're talking about in five years, right? That stuff is transactional.

It can be very fleeting.

Also, a lot of these skills are things that I don't want to minimize them, but a lot of people can have the ability to do that either through their training or through their education or just they got a thing for technology, right? And they pick up on it quickly.

where transformation and transformational relationships and behaviors, they hold through your whole life.

I like to say everywhere you go, there you are.

So there are those kinds of things that I'm wondering if we consider them as a whole and how that would change anything.

I can't think of tons of companies that have had curriculum on emotional intelligence here and there, but not sustained curriculum, right? So what made it something for you where you thought, hey, this is something I'm good at and maybe something I want to make a career out of?

Well, I guess it requires a little bit of background on me.

I was born in rural poverty with two parents who were mentally ill, doing the best that they could.

I had undiagnosed learning disorders and my disorders were in short-term working memory and spatial.

And so I was always the kid who was like trying to get it together, who was not getting it together very well.

I also had undiagnosed epilepsy, which presented as staring spells.

So all my life, I heard, you know, you're lazy.

family around them loving them and things like that like the money wasn't necessarily the key to happiness but for you maybe they're just do you feel like that that you were trying you were in search for that emotional connection and that's what what made the change what do you I always like to to know like what what do you think that was there like a moment that was the catalyst for your change or have you ever thought about that over the years

when they were going through that process?

No, unfortunately.

I think there's been so much focus on technical skills that we have lost the ability for the soft skills.

For example, in elementary schools, they quit teaching, um, cursive, because now they're teaching keyboard, and we know that cursive helps young brains develop.

So I think this focus on that.

I also think as a society, the standards have been lowered.

I was at a steakhouse recently where people are coming in with baseball caps on.

To me, that seems like a, you know, almost an unreasonable expectation.

And that's not a switch that's flipped overnight, right? I mean, that takes some practice.

It does, but at EQwise.com, we offer easy to learn, easy to use, immediately relevant tools, techniques, and education in courses that are internationally accredited.

And typically, each course takes 90 minutes or less.

And upon completion and the testing, which isn't that difficult and you can take the test as many times as you want, then you list your certification like you would on any resume, whether it were Microsoft or Google or for critical thinking or effective communication, for example.

And that's what employers are looking for.

They're saying that Gen Z, 94% of HR managers are saying Gen Z needs emotional training skills.

How much of a role did COVID play in this lack of skills environment?

Well, it played a big factor because, for example, of etiquette, knowing how to dress, right? Being able to have difficult conversations, thinking that engagement and let's face it, all the apps and the technology, their core reason for being there is to have you engage, to addict you to the technology, for example.