Life Intended

From Reacting to Reflecting: Building Emotional Intelligence for Self-Leadership

Kelly Berry & Sadie Wackett Season 2 Episode 44

Full Episode Page:
From Reacting to Reflecting: Building Emotional Intelligence for Self-Leadership

Co-Hosts Kelly Berry and Sadie Wackett sit down together to decode emotional intelligence. Through vivid stories and brain-science insights, they reveal quick practices that shift you from knee-jerk reactions to calm, values-driven responses. Walk away with a toolkit for stronger self-leadership, richer relationships and an intentional life guided by clarity.

Find Out

  • How Emotional Intelligence deepens leadership and relationships
  • Daily habits that quietly expand emotional awareness
  • Why self-awareness is the launchpad for every Emotional Intelligence skill
  • Best tactics to regulate emotions in real time
  • How Emotional Intelligence fuels intentional living and lasting resilience

Links

Chapters
00:00 Intro to Emotional Intelligence: Learning Your Emotional Language
09:52 The Science Behind Emotional Awareness and Regulation
18:21 Everyday Tools to Build Emotional Intelligence
28:39 From Triggered to Thoughtful: Practicing Emotional Intelligence
31:09 Welcome to Life Intended: Intentional Living Through Emotional Awareness
31:09 Mission Revealed: Emotional Wellness & Leadership for Women

Life Intended is a podcast and coaching platform for women who are ready to stop waiting and start leading. Co-hosted by Kelly Berry and Sadie Wackett, each episode explores self-leadership, identity, emotional wellness, and living with intention.

About Kelly Berry
Kelly Berry is a strategic business leader, coach, and founder of Life Intended. She helps women build clarity, confidence, and alignment in life and work. She enjoys spending quality time with her husband American entrepreneur Nick Berry and daughter Vivienne. Her life is a testament to the power of resilience and intention.
🔗 kellyberry.info | @lifeintendedpodcast

About Sadie Wackett
Sadie Wackett is a C-suite HR executive, certified coach, and co-founder of Life Intended. She supports women through leadership transitions, self-trust, and personal transformation. Sadie is originally from the UK and now lives in South Florida with her husband, daughter and dog, Pickles.
🔗 sadiewackett.com | LinkedIn

Life Intended is published in partnership with FCG...


00:00 Intro to Emotional Intelligence: Learning Your Emotional Language
09:52 The Science Behind Emotional Awareness and Regulation
18:21 Everyday Tools to Build Emotional Intelligence
28:39 From Triggered to Thoughtful: Practicing Emotional Intelligence
31:09 Welcome to Life Intended: Intentional Living Through Emotional Awareness
31:09 Mission Revealed: Emotional Wellness & Leadership for Women

Kelly Berry (01:05)
Hi everyone, we are back again. Sadie is here with me and we are excited to have another great conversation about a topic say trending topic of conversation that we've had recently, emotions.

Sadie Wackett (01:23)
I'm doing well actually I'd say my emotional place right now is calm, peaceful and optimistic so yeah I'm kind of expanding my emotional vocabulary at the moment wanting to avoid the kind of yeah I'm fine I'm good and actually use something that's a bit more just a bit more

Kelly Berry (01:23)
Hi Sadie, how are you?

Yeah.

Sadie Wackett (01:47)
thought through, felt through. So, yeah, this is a really interesting topic and it's come up so much lately in conversations I've had with people, so much so that, you know, we decided to run a workshop on this recently, which was really, think, pretty impactful for the people that joined.

Kelly Berry (01:48)
Yeah.

Sadie Wackett (02:06)
And so I wanted to start off. So this is a, this is going to be a conversation on the topic of emotional literacy, emotional mastery and really kind of emotional adulthood. And I'll explain a bit about what I mean by that. But

This is really a chance for people who have and are aware of their emotional reactions, how they can use their emotions to help them lead through their lives, their decisions, their reactions, and much more consciously than they currently are and the impact that that then can have on their relationships, the...

kind of results they create in their life and how they can apply these things daily to help just feel a lot more in control of the way they show And I'll start just by sharing a little story because this happened to me recently and it was really a, it was a bit of an epiphany for me. It was like a big flag saying pay attention. So,

It was a few weeks ago now, I was in the car driving back from the gym with my husband and I'd left my sunglasses at the gym. Not necessarily a big deal, right? And I said, I've left my sunglasses at the gym and my husband was driving and he started saying, you know, can't believe you left them at the gym. That means we've got to go back and get them. It's going to take us ages, blah, blah, blah, blah. And

I lost it. mean, I was so angry, so angry, it escalated to a point that was way beyond the presenting issue, which was me leaving my sunglasses at the gym. was feeling angry at the way I'd been spoken to, angrier, you know, the fact that I was being what I felt was I judged for making a mistake. And it escalated into something way bigger. And you know, it's no joke to say that

there were tears, were slam doors, and it was something that made me just stop and say, why did something so innocuous have this level of an impact on me? What is going on? And so I'm going to go through some, just some information, some tools here, which, and I'll use, I'll come back to this story so that you can, I can share and people can relate hopefully to.

what it means to have these kind of reactions and what we can do to manage them a bit better. So to begin.

Kelly Berry (04:37)
Yeah, I'm already relating. know, I

mean, when I think about it, my experience in marriage and motherhood, you know, it is it's a lot more often than I would probably like to admit where I feel like, you know, to use a phrase, the punishment doesn't fit the crime. You know, it's like, why is my reaction to this little thing so big? So, yeah, so so relatable.

Sadie Wackett (05:01)
big, so big. And then that,

you know, the trickle down effect of that when you've had that reaction is usually, my god, why did I do that? There's something wrong with me. I feel like guilty about this. And it spirals. So thankfully, there are some tools and some ways in which we can we can be a bit more responsive to these emotional reactions rather than reacting in the moment in the heat of the moment.

Kelly Berry (05:11)
Mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (05:30)
So I'm going to just share some information and you jump in if there's any questions, if you think I need to clarify something a bit better. But first of all, what are emotions and why do we have them? So I like to think about emotions that your internal GPS, they are trying to tell you something important, but many of us were taught to ignore them or suppress them or fear them. And really what they can be to us is

allies. But before we can do any work with our emotions, we really need to understand what they actually are and what they're trying to do for us because their data, they're telling us something, they're messengers from our nervous system and our brain and they're giving us feedback on what matters to us. And generally it's around things like our needs, our values, sense of safety, our sense of connection. And when those are being, you know, breached or

damaged in some way, we have an emotional response to them. that's the first message is that these are really trying to tell us something. So paying attention to them will be very helpful. They're also like an inner compass. So they let us know if something's aligned or not. So if we feel misaligned, you know, expectations about something are not what are not being met. Or if we have an expectation of somebody else that's, that's off,

Or maybe we need to set a boundary about something. We need to speak up. We want to slow down or we want to connect at a deeper level. These, our emotions are letting us know that something's off in that area or something's very on track. If we're feeling a high sense of joy or, you know, gratitude or comfort around something. But the, you know, if we ignore them or suppress them and we miss their message, then as my

story will play out, I was missing what I could have been paying better attention to and so it was growing louder and louder and louder and it leaked out in a way that wasn't particularly helpful to anybody. There's a little bit about the brain that I wanted to touch on as well so you know that we have our

primitive brain, is the brain that's evolved with us as human beings since we evolved as homeosapiens. And that's the amygdala and the brain stem. And this part of our brain is designed basically to keep us alive. It's very fast reacting. It scans our environment for danger or threat or anything that's unfamiliar to us. And it triggers that fight, flight or freeze response when it senses something's off. So...

it happens very instantaneously. what historically may have been a tiger outside of a cave, we now could get the same reaction coming from a rude email from our boss, a phone call we didn't want to receive or, or something, you know, as innocuous as that again, which triggers the same stress response, even though our lives are no longer in danger. We aren't going to die from a bad email.

from our boss. And then we have the more evolved part of our brain, which is the prefrontal cortex at the front, which really separates us out from other mammals. And this is the part of the brain which we can use to really help us pause, reflect, problem solve. We can use it for much more sort of high functioning capabilities like empathy and making like values based decisions.

And it allows us to inquire about how we're feeling. Like I feel anxious right now, but actually I'm safe. know, my body, my life is not in danger, so I can choose therefore how I want to respond. So, you know, when the emotions hit our survival brain and we react really quickly,

If we can connect with this more mature, the wiser part of our brain, can help us respond to situations, emotional triggers with a lot more consideration and a lot more intention. so, you know, that's really what we wanted to cover how to do that in this session. I'm just going pause there, Kelly, and just see what

Kelly Berry (09:49)
Yeah.

Sadie Wackett (09:52)
Great question there you go.

Kelly Berry (09:52)
Yeah.

Well, a couple of things that, you know, just kind of reminded me of in a couple of weeks ago, we had, Dr. Gabby Pellici on the podcast and she talked about, anxiety and being able to use anxiety to tell you something. And so her example was, and I think this is so spot on with emotions because of

how we've been taught to suppress them or how we are just so conditioned to not pay attention to them. She referenced the fire alarm analogy is what she said. If you're having anxiety, it's like a fire alarm going off. When a fire alarm goes off in your house, unless it's going off because like your bacon was smoky, you're thankful that this alarm went off because it's trying to tell you something. You're not mad.

that the fire alarm is going off. Like we get about our emotions sometimes, you know, and I'm, I have been very guilty of that. Like if I feel a big, strong emotion, I'm mad about it. Like, I don't want this getting in my way or, you know, I'm a, I've said this before, but I am an angry crier. So when I get angry, I cry and that makes me angrier because I do not want to be crying, you know? And so we get, I think so caught up in the...

Sadie Wackett (10:52)
Yeah.

Kelly Berry (11:10)
trying to push them aside that we don't stop to really like sit with them or listen to them or try to figure out what it is that they're telling us. And so then I think we get in that situation that you're talking about where we've had emotions speaking to us and trying to get our attention, but we haven't been. So then this little thing happens and we're at our breaking point and it becomes a big thing when it doesn't have to.

Sadie Wackett (11:38)
Yeah. And the impact then on not only you or one, but the people around you, whether it's kids, whether it's partner, whether it's coworkers, you know, the impact's far reaching potentially, and it can be quite destructive to you or others. And I think, you know, just, I really think it's an important message to sort of send home is this.

Kelly Berry (11:39)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (12:03)
our emotions are here to tell us something and let's be real that emotional suppression or inhibition is normal and it's normalized in society and it's become a bit of a necessity because we are told that you know it's not good to be too emotional and being angry too angry isn't acceptable except you know in some

rare circumstances, know, shouting out with anger is frowned upon. Yet most people don't have the tools or the confidence to apply their emotions in a different way. you know, modern society expects us to cope with emotions and coping generally means suppressing them and

are expected not to go into the workplace and cry if they feel sad. It's just not an accepted condition. So we conform, you know, we're well, especially, I mean, I'm English and one of well-known phrases in England is, you know, just keep a stiff upper lip.

don't let anything bother you. And that's a sign, that's meant to be a sign of strength. But you know, all too often we've seen that you keep the stiff upper lip and things get repressed and then the explosions happen. I think it also, you know, when we don't suppress, sorry, we don't express them, it leads to other forms of distracting ourselves from them. So if you've got, or if, you know,

Kelly Berry (13:11)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Sadie Wackett (13:34)
In the example I just gave, was pretty quick explosion. But if I've had an uncomfortable conversation with someone and I'm feeling maybe undervalued or overlooked or something like that, I don't want to feel that way. So I'm going to go distract myself from the feeling and I might go and...

open the fridge and eat, or I might open a bottle of wine and have a drink, or I might just go and binge on Netflix or whatever's closest on TV or scroll on social media. So many ways that we can just go and distract ourselves from it, which again is normal. And but it can if it's not controlled lead to extremes of, you know, overeating, over drinking. or

Kelly Berry (14:16)
Yeah, like disassociation,

know, being, yeah, trying to disassociate from your, from your feelings. Yeah. Or emotions. Yeah.

Sadie Wackett (14:18)
Yeah, yeah, trying to just escape from it.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. So what can we do about this? Well, there is a really simple and very helpful tool that hopefully we can provide to anyone who wants to access this. It's called the Emotion Wheel and I'm gonna talk through it. It's really a very helpful tool to help us build

Kelly Berry (14:39)
Mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (14:49)
a language, a vocabulary around emotions and how we can go beyond what we're currently taught about feelings, which is generally, you know, I'm fine, I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm angry, I'm overwhelmed, you know, they're very surface level emotions and the wheel helps us expand our vocabulary by giving things

a much more specific name and a lot more nuance around how we can describe how we're feeling. And the importance of this is when you've got the words to label what you're feeling, it takes it out of your emotional brain and into your logical brain. So you can do something with it then. So rather than it driving you, you can then be the driver of it and say, okay, so I've got

I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling depressed. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I now can articulate that as an emotion. What do I want to do with that? And, and I think that's one of the valuable, offerings of this tool is that it can help us give a name. Somebody, said, you know, name it to tame it. If you can name it.

you can bring it out of your kind of subconscious into your conscious awareness and you can start to really deal with that in a very compassionate way. So just to describe the wheel really quickly. So it has three circles. The inner circle is what we call your primary emotions. And they are emotions like happiness, sadness, anger, fear.

Kelly Berry (16:03)
Mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (16:19)
And they're kind of the fundamental building blocks. they're like, you if you ask a seven year old, I've got a seven year old daughter, how are you feeling today? She'll probably use one of those words to describe how she's feeling. But the secondary emotions as you go into the second layer of the wheel, this introduces called secondary emotions, which are more nuanced understanding of our feelings. And they...

For example, if you start with anger, you can move on to the second wheel, which gives you words like frustration, annoyance, resentment. And so that starts to help us to think that emotions aren't just singular, they're complex. And then the third, the outer wheel, the outermost layer, unveils some even...

further more nuanced emotions and so underneath anger, you might find emotions like impatience or exasperation or agitation. So if I think back to the example I was using earlier about me and my husband, when I actually was able to pause and think about how I was feeling after the tears had stopped and the doors had stopped slamming.

I was able to like really bring to my mind, well, I feel disrespected and I feel hurt and I feel this resentment and this resentment isn't actually towards you. It's actually something that I've been carrying around with me for a while now, not because of how I feel I've been treated by you per se, but certainly how I feel around I've been treated in relation.

other areas of my life and it's just come to the forefront but I'd never dealt with that. I'd never really acknowledged that I was feeling, you know, overlooked, undervalued and like the resentment that that built in me. And so being able to name them, I could express to him a lot more concretely how I was feeling and why I had this explosion and it just gave us a much clearer connection point on which to have a conversation there.

Kelly Berry (18:21)
Mm-hmm Yeah, let yeah, let me stop you here because you know, then my question is The thing that people are running into is that they're not allowing the emotions to come out. They're not expressing them or Identifying them so they really understand them. So can you talk for a minute about like how different it is?

Sadie Wackett (18:21)
once the heat has gone out.

Kelly Berry (18:43)
to live life from a place or I guess like experience something like this from a place where you have actually processed the emotion. You've let it like move through you, you've talked about it, you've had a conversation with the person that it affected. How much different does that make you feel? How does it help you show up differently in other areas of your life?

Sadie Wackett (19:04)
I can give you some personal examples of how it's helped me and then maybe you can offer a couple as well. I can think of myself in three different areas. One as a mother. So I have, like I said, a seven-year-old. in that area of my life, so there are...

definitely plenty of triggers that come with being a mom and having a kid that doesn't follow your instructions, who doesn't want to listen, who has their own attitudes, behaviors and desires about things. And, you know, let's take doing homework. I remember

you know coming home from work which would be a typical scenario having to get dinner ready and then having to sit down and do homework and by this time she's tired i'm tired and i'm hot and i'm hungry because we haven't yet eaten so i'm feeling you know not my best self

And she's making a fuss about not doing her homework. And there have been many times when all I wanted to do is just, you know, pick up the homework paper and just throw it across the other side of the room. But taking a beat, like breathing, connecting with myself and recognizing how impatient I'm feeling, how angry I'm feeling, how frustrated I am because she won't listen to me. And then thinking, oh, hang on a minute.

If I continue down this path, it's only going to end up in one place, which is going to like the homework is definitely not going to get done then. So taking a B and allowing myself some space and just literally taking a break from that whole conversation and coming back to it. I may need to give myself some food. I may need to go and take a moment in the bathroom, whatever it is, but I need to get out. I need to put a break between.

like the pattern that's being created there. The other example I'd use is as a leader. So I was leading a very large team and people would always come to me with their issues, their problems, they wanted me to solve them. And then oftentimes I was so maxed out myself with my own, like the pressure that was being put on me, that if somebody came to me with something that I was annoyed about, I could have easily just

flipped at them. Rarely, rarely did it happen. And I would say the reason it didn't happen and the reason that my, I would say my team felt that I was a very balanced leader was because of the like emotional regulation that I was able to practice with them. I had to take a lot and it built, it allowed me to build the capacity to know how much I could take before I was going to flip and

Kelly Berry (21:34)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (21:47)
make sure that I stopped anything before that happening so I could constantly check in with myself. How am I doing? You know, how close am I on a scale of one to 10 to, you know, that flipping point and what do I need to address within me first of all to make sure I'm okay before I can really engage with any members of my team. And it might sound, I'll just say this then I'll hand it back over to you, it might sound like this takes a lot of time.

Like I need to go and sit with my legs crossed for 10 minutes, but it doesn't. It's very immediate. It's a very quick catching and acknowledgement and calling it out. And then that's all it takes is seconds to be able to acknowledge it and then choose how to respond differently.

Kelly Berry (22:37)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, those are great examples. You said emotional literacy earlier when you were talking about it and I really like that because it is something to your point. It's something like you have to spend a little bit of time learning how to read emotions to become literate in it so that you can name them so you can identify them.

that point, once you do that, it's just like reading, it's just like writing, it's just like speaking, it becomes second nature, it becomes faster, and it isn't this big other thing that you have to learn and do. It becomes part of who you are and how you operate. But I would say, you know, like the way that I feel when I'm in like a healthy place where I can name my emotions and kind of like let them come and go and

and deal with them is like, just feel lighter. I feel like I can breathe better. I feel like I am, you know, in your leadership example, that I am better able to be there for the people who need me rather than, you know, irritable is a word that I think of all the time, you know, as a mother of a toddler, you know, I can get very irritable when things get

just being able to stop and take a breath and realize, I'm being a little unreasonable here with my expectations out of this little person to do things, in the way that I want them to be done. And it does make you feel like, okay, I can take a breath. can, I just feel like less tense and I can move through this or we can move through it together.

So that's a big one. The other thing is, is when I do this well, I feel like I'm, understanding myself better. And I think that's a big key as well, because when you suppress emotions, said it before, I'm a big like recovering, I'm fine person. Never really stopping to think about how I felt or never wanting to be vulnerable and sharing how I felt with anybody.

But the more I do it, more, just better I know myself. And I think that's huge.

Sadie Wackett (24:48)
It really, it's priceless. I have to say, I mean, I was speaking to somebody just yesterday and of an organization. She runs her own business and we were talking about...

Kelly Berry (24:50)
Mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (25:01)
and just challenges she's facing in her leadership team and, know, kind of culturally across the organization. And this came up and she said, you know, I think everybody needs to learn this. I said, I think you're right. You know, I think the world would be a different place if we all had a little more like self awareness. So we are.

aware of what's going on inside us, what's directing us, what's kind of pushing us in certain directions. And also curiosity about that as well without judgment like, you know, can't believe I behaved that way. I'm so, you know, I'm so wrong. I'm so bad. They're so wrong. They're so bad. You know, just removing all of that judgment. And this is just, you know, it's a chemical reaction in our body and emotion.

Kelly Berry (25:37)
Mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (25:49)
which is created as a result of the thoughts that we have. There are dictionaries with the number of emotional feelings we can experience. There are pages and pages and pages of it. We are very complex and the more we can become familiar with that and know how to treat ourselves, what we need when we feel those emotions,

then that is really where you can have such a huge impact on your relationships, on the results you create in your life, on the experience you have as an individual living your life. You'll find that you're saying things like peace, joy, and contentment a lot more frequently than you are anxiety and depression and other words like that. And I think it's so helpful for us to inquire.

Kelly Berry (26:31)
Hmm.

Absolutely.

Sadie Wackett (26:39)
Like what was the situation that just happened? What did that make me feel? How did I respond in that moment? And what was the result of that? And what did I need that I didn't get that created that result? So you start to find out like what's triggering these emotions, what it is that you need from yourself or from others to help you in those situations.

Kelly Berry (27:01)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah and that curiosity that you're talking about I think that's a muscle and I think for a lot of us I'll say a lot of people like me who have spent a lot of time or a lot of years suppressing emotions or Just not taking the time to get curious. It is something that it doesn't just come back Supernaturally, so you have to like take a little time

ask the questions, ponder them, but once you do, it's like you're talking about the frequency, the speed, all of that. It happens more instantaneously than having to stop and be extremely deliberate about it.

Sadie Wackett (27:30)
Yeah.

And I think for women as well, I did mention this just a minute ago, but it is important to really remove the judgment about how we're feeling. Because I think that's a preventative. That stops us from inquiring because then we go into judgment about that feeling. So I'm anxious. I wish I wasn't. So I'm going to stop this curiosity because being anxious is problematic.

Kelly Berry (27:59)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (28:09)
Well, if we can just pause with the judgment and just treat it with curiosity and no judgment, then it frees us up to start to ask the questions a bit more and meet ourselves with a little more compassion and, you know, a little like lower expectations of ourselves.

Kelly Berry (28:29)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, don't be mad the smoke alarms going off Find out why why is it what what's on fire? Mm-hmm

Sadie Wackett (28:34)
No, just yeah. ⁓

Otherwise you'll end up in tears because you've left your sunglasses at the gym for something that did not matter at all.

Kelly Berry (28:45)
Yeah.

Yes. Mm-hmm.

Not alone. Yeah.

Sadie Wackett (28:52)
Yeah.

So I guess just to say like the emotion was a great tool. The, you know, name it, to tame it. That's like being able to articulate the actual feeling, pausing and taking those moments to pay attention to what it is you're feeling. And then choosing, I think this is the last thing to say, choose.

choose the emotion you would like to feel in that moment. So I don't want to feel angry anymore. I want to feel calm and see how far you can go on making a transition from angry to calm and take the time that you need to do that.

Kelly Berry (29:34)
Yeah, that's great advice. Because the great part about all of this is that when you're more aware and you're, you you can make the choice instead of having the choice made for you. mm-hmm.

Sadie Wackett (29:50)
Yeah,

you really are in the driver's seat then. And the impact you can have is just, it becomes very noticeable quite quickly. ⁓

Kelly Berry (29:57)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Like

you can you can change the experience of your life by changing how you feel in the moment and you can change how you feel in the moment by doing all the things you just talked about so Mm-hmm

Sadie Wackett (30:11)
Yeah, yeah.

And there's way more we could go into on the how-to's and practical application of this. And that's the kind of work that we do together, Kelly, in our programs and our offerings for folks. So I guess if people are interested in learning more, they can get in touch.

Kelly Berry (30:34)
Yes, reach out, join us at a reset, come to a master class, join a program. We've got all kinds of ways that we can help you understand these things. And, you know, what Sadie and I are all about is understanding and using them, you know, using these tools, embodying the work so that you do feel better.

We can help you. Thanks, Sadie. Yeah. Thanks for all of that and your examples. And this was great. So we'll talk again soon. Yeah. Bye.

Sadie Wackett (30:56)
looking forward to it. Thanks Kelly.

See you on the next one.

Bye.

Kelly Berry (31:09)
Thanks for listening to Life Intended.

Sadie Wackett (31:12)
If something from this episode landed with you, stirred something up or gave you a new perspective, share it. Tag us, leave a review. That's how this work reaches more women who really need it.

Kelly Berry (31:25)
Life Intended is more than just a podcast. It's a movement back to self-trust, personal power, and living with intention.

Sadie Wackett (31:33)
and we're just getting started.

Kelly Berry (31:36)
So keep showing up, keep tuning in. If you're ready for more support on your path, head to LifeIntended.co. We've got tools, community, and programs to meet you where you are. Until next time.

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