Kay:

Hello there, Questers, welcome back. Today is September 9th. It is episode 439 and we have a Drake quote for you today. If you listen to yesterday’s episode, the answer is yes, we did get inspired by Drake and had to pull a Drake quote for today. So, the quote for you is, “Never let your emotions overpower your intelligence.”

Shi:

Okay. This one just hits so deep right now, and it is really some excellent advice that I know many of us sometimes struggle to master.

Kay:

He actually also says this line in the video where he’s talking about his success and never giving up. But we really love that this is something that Drake brings forward because he’s the, in the feelings guy. Drake talks about his feelings quite a bit through his music so it means that they play a role in his life but not allowing them to overpower your intelligence in the moment because as a rapper and a producer or a business leader or a mother, oftentimes you have to make decisions based off of your intellect and not out of your emotions or else things get a little hairy.

Shi:

Well, you didn’t mention the hardest part. You have to make them in extremely emotionally challenging environments a lot of the time. That’s why this advice is so valuable. Raise your hand. If you ever got heated by emotion and later after you cooled down, your intelligence started to tell you, you could have handled that way differently and gotten the result that you were looking for. That’s the beauty of intelligence. It’s not about just controlling your emotions, so you have control. It’s not about that at all. It’s about if you’re designing the life that you want to live and that you love, it means intelligence is in the driver’s seat when you need to make those decisions, intelligence plus intuition. But guess who also gets drowned out by loud emotions, that intuition piece as well. So, it’s such good advice and it’s so hard to follow when you are in the emotional throes of a major challenge.

Kay:

Look, recently Shila and I received a business communication that flew us into a very emotional tailspin.

Shi:

Yes.

Kay:

But we have learned the lesson the hard way, time and time again in which we allowed our emotions to dictate our response to the situation. This time, what we did was Shila, you actually texted me and you said we need to take a few hours before we can respond. Because if we respond in this state, we won’t be proud of the way that we do this, and I just thought that was so profound.

Shi:

Well, what I was so proud of is what you did when you crafted our response back. Shila wrote it the way we both wanted to write it and then let intelligence get in the driver’s seat and take out the emotional charges and the pieces that weren’t constructive for the goals. Not about what’s right, not about defending yourself, what’s constructive for the goals, and what we know will move and advance us forward. So, by being able to go through it and take those parts out, we were able to achieve the goal we wanted and got to move the business transaction along in a way that was far more productive.

Kay:

And far less painful because we’ve experienced this pain before. We’re not newbies to the pain of making emotional mistakes and so it was neat to see the way that lesson had compounded. We’d gotten hit by the pain enough times. I had to say, maybe we should take a different approach.

Shi:

Let me tell you about a time that pain hit, and it’s been almost 10 years since this happened, but there was a local bank that was running a contest for raising $10,000 for local businesses. You had to make a video and submit it, and then mobilize your audience, your list, your database, your social media to vote for your video and the video with the most votes would win the $10,000. So, we entered, we hired our videographer, we got the thing together, we mobilized our people. We sent out big calls to action emails to tens of thousands of people posted all over the thing. There was a glitch in the voting system and what the bank decided to do was take down the contest and start it all over from scratch.

Now, if you know anything about gathering and mobilizing a list, you can’t just call on them and get the same results every time. So, we had already thrown in our whole effort behind this and now we were going to have to do it again and I was livid. I was enraged that they were starting everyone at zero. I wrote a really nasty, very emotional email, demanding a meeting with the president and asking to get in front of the high level of people. They said, yes, but when I cooled down, I was so embarrassed. I ended up apologizing, telling them that I was too heated to have sent that communication, and I’ve been embarrassed of that ever since, but it was a great lesson and a good story to demonstrate, letting emotion overpower intelligence.

Kay:

Let’s just take it back to that incredible quote that we have here. “Never let your emotions overpower your intelligence.”

Shi:

Alright, it’s a Thoughtful Thursday Quest today. Think on a time in your life like maybe I just did of a time where you let your emotions overpower your intelligence. But then also think of a time in your life where you let intelligence guide you and celebrate that win and practice being in that mode more often. Are you ready? Say it with us now.

Kay & Shi:

Let’s quest!