Ideas in the Wild: Dr. Tomi White Bryan is Teaching Us How to Stop Playing Small
Every human being is born with unlimited creative energy — then life marks them up with red ink, teaching them who they’re supposed to be instead of who they really are. Soon, their greatest birthright has been crossed out, leaving most people believing, “It’s not safe to be who I am.”
But living your life by that lie won’t help anyone reach their dreams. Instead, it keeps them playing small in a really big universe. That must stop.
Emotional Intelligence 3.0 offers a time-tested, proven method for reclaiming the unlimited power of creation. Readers will learn step by step how to reawaken their magic, discover how far they’ve already come, and accelerate their journey with purpose and intention. I recently caught up with Dr. Tomi White Bryan to learn more about why she wrote the book and the ideas she shares with readers.
Why did you write this book?
When I began researching emotional intelligence, I noticed that leadership, self-help, and emotional intelligence development approaches usually focus on behavioral outputs: Am I happy? Am I a positive person? Am I good at social relationships? Am I trustworthy? I observed that simply coaching someone on outputs was not the most effective, long-term solution for excelling. That type of coaching doesn’t consider the powerful force behind our actions and related feelings: our unprocessed emotional experiences.
Like many of my readers, the unconscious emotional layers that limited my ability to tap into all my potential are rooted in my childhood experiences. I don’t blame my parents; they were good people who were not in emotional balance. I followed in their footsteps and became a good person who was not in emotional balance, either. It took, and continues to take, a substantial amount of work to discover the space of emotional balance, where my feelings are guides and not guards. That’s why I wrote this book — to help guide others down this path of Emotional Intelligence 3.0.
Your journey to emotional balance will be different from mine, but as I captured what I saw along my journey, I realized I was building a map that could help guide others. This map is the key to the land I call Emotional Intelligence 3.0 (EI3.0). It is the next leap in the evolution of emotional intelligence, and it targets the sources of our emotional imbalances.
Many of us live by the unwritten rule of life that it’s not safe to be who I am (so I must be something else, and the system will dictate what that is). Bumping up against the limits of this rule creates the two bruised emotional imprints of I am not lovable as I am and I am not powerful as I am. These bruised emotional imprints guard us and mask that we are magical, creative balls of energy with infinite possibilities.
Redesigning how we develop and mature emotional intelligence is the antidote to some of the current disempowering and hurtful cultural trends and our limiting emotional imprints. EI3.0 provides a map for the road home to emotional balance. The gift of achieving emotional balance is the ability to operate from true nature — the sacred space of effortless joy, unlimited abundance, and good health.
What’s an idea you share that really excites you?
There are nine indicators of emotional balance: love, anger, release, power, resistance, individuality, energy, awareness, and language. Each indicator’s organic development path is a sequence along a continuum from imbalance to balance. I developed an assessment called The Emotional State Indicator (ESI) that measures an individual’s maturity level on these nine continuums. The more we mature along the path to balance for each of these indicators, the closer we become to our true natures.
While each indicator is significant, I reiterate that people are never just one-dimensional. We want to capture an emotional snapshot of the entire person. As I explain in the book, collectively, the maturity level of these nine indicators reveals an emotional state. That is why the ESI measures the maturity of all indicators. Accordingly, I advise you to use as many indicators as possible to decide about emotional balance. You can leverage the information you uncover to create meaningful and appropriate growth opportunities for you and your clients.
Once you locate yourself after the assessment, you can easily see areas where you would benefit from growth. You know what the map and your next steps look like because you can see the order in which events unfold. The more you know, the better you can do. The better you do, the more you inspire others to do the same.
Those are not just pretty words — I have experienced some beautiful halo effects from my efforts to develop emotional balance. As I gained insights into myself, I applied those insights to others. It changed how I interacted with them, and allowed compassion, empathy, grace, forgiveness, and optimism to develop naturally. EI3.0 doesn’t focus on the specific elements of emotional intelligence for just this reason — those outcomes naturally occur as one matures emotionally. And because you can more readily offer others what you have for yourself and give to yourself, you can pass these gifts on to others.
How will implementing your idea improve your readers’ lives?
If you had asked me when I started my journey if I believed that I was entitled to a life filled with effortless joy, unlimited abundance, and good health, I would have emphatically replied no with some other spicy words thrown in for style points. I was deeply committed to pretending I was not a magical, creative ball of energy.
Yet, speaking from experience, I can assure you that effortless joy, unlimited abundance, and good health are part of the inheritance of emotional balance. EI3.0 reveals the path to that magical place where the emotionally balanced life of your dreams awaits you. Walking that path allows you to learn a new and proven method for increasing your emotional intelligence. Walking the path also counters the increasing number of people whose emotional imbalance contributes to rising violence, cyberbullying, cancel culture, and other negative social trends.
EI3.0 helps us see the possibilities. It disassembles and plumbs the depths of emotional intelligence and EQ. It allows us to leverage other influences for meaningful and effective growth and transformation. Thus, instead of improving emotional intelligence outcomes, my method engages the dynamics that create those outcomes.
The power of EI3.0 is that it addresses the underlying, root cause of low emotional intelligence: emotional imbalance created by the invisible yet controlling, out-of-balance, bruised emotional imprints that dictate who and what we are and how we show up in the world. We can finally see those deep currents that lead us astray and hold us back. EI3.0 redefines, reconfigures, and improves the way we engage the bruised emotional imprints at the root of our emotional imbalance, paving the way for us to be who we came here to be. Not only do we stop pretending we aren’t a magical, creative ball of energy with infinite possibilities, we fully embrace being that.
