Fully Human

Book excerpt: HGTV cofounder Susan Packard launches the next chapter in emotional intelligence (EQ), and shows you how to increase your personal satisfaction and productivity--in work and life--via her three-step path toward EQ Fitness. Emotions can sink us, or they can power us like fuel to succeed. Many of us show up for work, and life, feeling lonely even in a room full of people, or bringing unproductive emotions into work, like anger or fear. You don't have to feel this way. Susan Packard offers an accessible new guidebook to grow your emotional fitness, and it's arrived just in time, as technology is quickly becoming our main interface for communication. No matter where you are in your career, success is an inside job. Packard lays out how to develop interdependent work relationships, and for leaders, how to build healthy company cultures. Packard introduces us to successful people, and companies, that are rich with 'connector' emotions like hope, empathy and trust-building. She tackles unconventional topics, like how workaholism keeps us emotionally adolescent, and how forgiveness belongs in the workplace too. Packard shares her EQ Fit-catalyzed success at HGTV and the stories of the executives she coaches in mindfulness and other emerging techniques, and she teaches an 'inside out' practice of self-discovery, which helps you uncover unproductive emotions, and dispel them. The best leaders balance power and grace, and everyone can effectively use resilience--an ability to endure tough situations and make tough decisions, and vulnerability, a willingness to open up, change, and admit when we need help. She offers new tools to bring our strongest emotional selves to work each day.