Building Emotional Intelligence through the Power of Neurocoaching with Dr. Dan Docherty

Ashish Kothari:

Hi, dear Dan, it is so lovely to have you here with us on the Happiness Squad Podcast. Thank you for joining and sharing the unbelievable work you've been doing in the world.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Thank you, Ashish. I'm honored to be here. Thank you for having me.

Ashish Kothari:

There are so many places, Dan, that we could go. You are a neuro coach. You do a lot of work around neuro-based selling. You do tons around emotional intelligence—that's kind of how we initially met.

Maybe we start with emotional intelligence. Tell us about what you are working on. You have a new book coming out, so I want to delve into that topic a little bit with you.

But let's start with a little bit of a story. Give us your origin story that has gotten you to the kind of work you're doing now.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'll start with this because I'll make the origin story kind of short, and I'm going to angle it on a pivot point.

I think anyone listening to us knows that there are these pivot points you have in life. Some people call them tipping points. I had one of those tipping points that I like to share in these types of venues.

At 47 years old, Ashish, I was running down the C-suite track and the private equity track. After some success and some failures in that domain, the reality was the stress was literally going to kill me—with chest pains, not sleeping well, and all that good stuff.

I realized there was a different path for me. I didn't know what that looked like. Hopefully, people listening might be at a stage where they're not really sure what the plan is or the path, but they know something needs to be different.

I was very fortunate to be in life sciences and grow up in neuroscience. I want to make sure I'm always clear with this: I'm not a bench neuroscientist. There's a big difference. I've worked with amazing bench neuroscientists, but for me, this is about applied neuroscience.

Similar to emotional intelligence: there's the research behind it, and then there's the application behind it. We try to really focus our efforts on taking the complex and making it digestible—but more importantly, activating it.

Going through this journey, when I was under all that stress, I took a hard turn and decided to go back to school while I had two kids in private college. That was against everybody's advice—everybody told me, "No, don't do it." But I did it.

Here's where I think our worlds collided a little bit. I was very fortunate to go to Case Western Reserve University. I was interested in going to an R1 school. I had the chance to meet—and to have as my dissertation chair—Richard Boyatzis, who wrote Primal Leadership, Helping People Change, and recently The Science of Change.

I saw neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and leadership collide like I had never seen before. I thought, "That is why I'm here."

That took me down an incredibly scary but also amazing path, Ashish, where I realized there’s a way I can help—not only myself but the people I'm around—have more impact.

I know you have a similar mission and vision for what you're doing. We were talking about this before the show: making an impact.

If we make an impact, there's still a lot of things people know theoretically, but certain things aren't changing. Engagement levels aren't really changing. Turnover rates are flipping faster. We've got multiple generations in the workforce. People are still leaving because of their leader.

There’s a problem of practice, and I think you and I align on a path that there might be some ways we can activate these amazing concepts—not only more efficiently but more continuously and intentionally.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. Absolutely. After my 17 years at McKinsey, I started the Happiness Squad. It was all about the concept of democratizing flourishing.

Flourishing, I define as—I use it a little bit synonymously, much to the disdain of researchers, with wellbeing. They’ll say, I use it synonymously with wellbeing. I use it synonymously with happiness—not as an emotion, but as a state.

Yes, there are different constructs, but I always say, listen, when it comes to practice, they share so much of the same things. Does it really matter? Given that 70% of people are not engaged, meaning is such a big part of it, 40–60% experience stress, and so many people are lonely.

I'm like, it doesn’t matter. To me, I focus on the practice. And when I started Happiness Squad, really, it was all about bridging the gap between knowing and doing.

Most of the things we know that can help us flourish individually—and help get the most out of our organizations—we know what they are. Most of them, by the way, are common sense.

Completely uncommon practice.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Yeah. That's it.

That's exactly it. I talk about this a lot. That was one of the things that Dr. Boyatzis and I discussed when I was defending my dissertation at that stage of the journey.

I said, a lot of this is common sense. And I think it was actually in my final dissertation deck. He very adamantly said to me, we need to carry this message forward.

You’ve chosen to be around this environment, including Chris Laszlo’s work at Case Western on sustainability and flourishing. You've also got David Cooperrider, who came out of that tree relative to appreciative inquiry and all these amazing things.

He said, we have to be the carriers of this because, as you said, Ashish, what is common sense isn't common practice.

I think we align on that platform for sure.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. So that's what we do. That’s what I'm excited about.

Let's delve into that realm a bit and start with emotional intelligence. Break it down for me. From your perspective, what is emotional intelligence, and what does the research say are the ingredients?

Let’s start from there and then talk about how we get it into practice.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Yeah. It's interesting. I've been doing this type of work for almost seven years now.

I'll have leader after leader—and I bet you’ve seen this both at McKinsey and beyond—if I stand up a hundred people and just say, "Hey, define emotional intelligence. Talk me through the four major domains and then the twelve competencies, and how those competencies actually link to the competencies that are important for your job, can you do that?" I'll get crickets.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah, I remember that.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Yeah. If you look from Daniel Goleman's perspective—and I'm a big fan of Daniel Goleman's work—he and Richard Boyatzis have worked together for decades. Travis Bradberry has also done some amazing work.

They talk about emotional intelligence being this capacity. I love the word "capacity" because you have to have room for it. Like, you talk about happiness, for the recognition of not only our own feelings and emotions, but also those of others.

How does that intrinsically motivate us? How do we manage those emotions effectively, not only in ourselves?

That's kind of the first side of it. That's why I love self-awareness and self-management of emotion. The heartbeat—and again, people will call them different things—but you and I both know that on the sell side, if we don't have awareness of those things that impact our performance, the way we communicate, the way we show up, then we might as well be like a horse in the stall.

We've got the blinders on, and we don't see it. We can only be fortunate enough to have other people say, "Hmm, you might not be aware of how anger or frustration or that emotion is showing up." You're very fortunate if you have those people in your corner.

The higher you increase your self-awareness, then we can get into self-management before we start talking about how it impacts others. I always tell people, just think "self" first. We're biologically wired with that anyway.

Self-awareness, self-management, and then crossing over to social awareness. When I say to people, "Talk to me about emotional intelligence," the word that will come out of their mouth is "empathy." I'm like, okay, cool. Empathy is actually a competency of emotional intelligence, but where does it fit?

It fits in the impact of others—being able to feel what others feel and having empathy. Ultimately, as you and I know, the next level beyond that is compassion, in order to inform what we do.

If you're drawing a line down, when you think about the impact of others, what does it solve at the bottom quadrant? It's all about relationship management.

You might say there's so much in relationship management, but if we could just say, "Wow, you want practical tips? Journal your emotions." Our Apple Watches now are set up so you can log your emotions at different intervals of the day. They built it into the health app. It has to mean something.

How are we feeling in those moments? To your point on happiness, happiness is awesome—but not just happiness. What’s the intensity of happiness, and how is that intensity aligned to the situation? The more we get our arms around that, the better we are.

I'll end this part before we get into competencies and things. There’s a lot of research that supports this. All you have to do is walk through an airport nowadays or be in your car and ask: "Is IQ going up?" Generally speaking, IQ has been going up over the years. That's great. But we kind of got what we got.

When it comes to emotional intelligence, a lot of experts believe it's not actually improving—it's actually going the other direction. Which means we've got a lot of work to do for the sages who did all the work in this space for decades and decades.

The last thing I'll say is I really believe it's time to put a flag in the ground and stop calling these things "soft skills." I don’t get it. I don't like it. We are built as humans, and we are complex systems. Because we're complex systems, the reality is, these are the real skills.

They are going to keep you at the table and, oftentimes, they are what derail other leaders. And I'll say this for myself: I've had those moments. I had one where I couldn't control my emotions very well just this past week.

It’s never done. We are all a constant work in motion.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. There’s so much to unpack there, but I love the story you started with—the horse and the blinders.

I'm reminded of an ancient Zen Buddhist monk story. These concepts go back thousands of years. There's a story of a man tearing down this road on a horse. The road is crowded—it’s in India—there are always people on the road.

People are ducking left and right to escape this galloping horse. As one man ducks out of the way, he says, "Hey, where are you going?" And the person says, "Don't ask me. Ask the horse."

Dr. Dan Docherty:

 Yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

Our emotions are like that. They originate from the limbic part of the brain. At that moment, we lose our cognitive ability significantly. Anger is like that. Frustration, sadness—we become, instead of the rider that can guide the horse to get where we need to or even use that powerful emotion for impact, we are the one who gets carried and ends up doing things we regret later.

This notion of "notice"—that’s why, in our nine-part framework, I put awareness at the heart of the sunflower. You can't master your emotions unless you are aware.

First noticing that this thing is coming on. Over time, exploring: where does the source of this lie, rather than the external world you might think is to blame for your emotion?

Then being able to work with it. I love that you started from the research too: it’s first about knowing, then about self-regulating. From that place, recognizing the other—what’s the social awareness, what’s happening, how are you perceived by others?

And then through that, activating many other pieces. Again, something we’ve known for thousands of years. Something that’s been researched extensively—and now forgotten as we move on to other things. We know these things work.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Yeah. Real quick there. There's an amazing quote to your point about how we've known this for thousands of years. Aristotle talked about being angry—that’s easy. But to be angry with the right person, at the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy.

To your point, Ashish, we’ve been talking about this forever. It's interesting that with leaders today, I’ll mention emotional intelligence, and they'll say, "Wow, I don't really have my hands around it. It's still kind of new."

I'm like, no. What you’re talking about—self-regulation and self-management of emotions—has been around forever and it's never going away.

The other part I want to build upon for people listening is what you talked about regarding the limbic center. I don't know that most leaders fully appreciate the power of what you just said. Because if you really think about it, that is what activates decision-making.

Then we rationalize it or justify it based on the neocortex—or however you want to talk about our brain's processor. But emotions sit at the center. Our whole fight-or-flight mechanism, our whole processing of emotions—it's all there.

When you dig into the practicality of this, and I know some people don't like the word "trigger," but it's still important. If we don't think about what is inside that situation, we can’t achieve fluency. And fluency means movement—the movement of our emotions.

Fluency means I can either predict that it’s going to come, or I know myself so well that when it starts to come, I'm going to manage it.

Today, we have so many modes of communication. It's not just Dan and Ashish having a conversation across a coffee table. It's how we display those emotions and feelings in emails, text messages, virtual calls, live calls.

AI is not going to fix it all by simply suggesting a tone for your email. We still have to connect and communicate as humans.

The work you and I both do is so paramount. We have to think about how we are showing up in our text messages, in our emails, in our one-on-one conversations, on virtual calls, on live calls. Information is flowing so fast. This is a non-negotiable.

Ashish Kothari:

It's a non-negotiable. It's timeless, and it is ever more needed. That was the other thing you mentioned. If you go through an airport, if you sit in your car, you hear about this notion that we are actually losing our ability here.

I completely agree with you. I think we are more emotionally dysregulated today. Every generation is becoming more so, but particularly all of us over the last 20 years. We are more emotionally dysregulated.

In the research I was doing when I was at McKinsey, and in my readings, I pointed to two big things.

First, even in the last three months, friends, the level of volatility, uncertainty, and complexity has gone—not just 10x—but exponentially higher. In three days, many people's 401(k)s became 301(k)s with Liberation Day.

Constant change. Whether you look at tariffs, are they coming, are they not coming—we launched a whole offering around this in a week because we knew how much of a shock it was to people's systems.

Externally, when volatility changes, we experience that as psychological threats. Our bodies and brains respond the same way.

So, number one, I think people are running on adrenaline and cortisol. Our limbic regions have never been more on fire.

In the research, when we looked at leaders, given the amount of information and complexity, 70% to 80% of the time, people are running on their sympathetic nervous system. At that moment, we have less ability to regulate emotions because we don't even recognize it.

It's back-to-back-to-back meetings. Exhausted. Drained.

And then to further compound it, we are sleeping less and less. And the quality of sleep is worse because along the way we are numbing ourselves with alcohol, with TV. We've built all these habits.

Sleep, which is one of the big circuit breakers for getting more regulated through the parasympathetic rest-recovery-digest system, is getting compromised.

When we looked at the research, I could clearly see: if you observe more bad behavior, more toxic behavior, more reactive behavior in organizations, you can directly correlate it with how many hours people are sleeping.

You can very clearly see, the less sleep, the more reactivity you see.

It's almost like we've created the perfect storm. We run all day because of the external environment putting our limbic system into overdrive—and then we don't recover enough at night. It's a never-ending cycle.

I think that’s my hypothesis for why we are getting more dysregulated.

As a result, it's even more important to lean into this. Because if you don't work on this, all the decisions we make are suboptimal.

I would love your perspectives on that.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

 Well, first of all, I think you're right. And to anybody listening to us, it’s not just our opinion. If you go to the National Institutes of Health, you’ll find this cascade—exactly what you just described, Ashish—beautifully, actually.

When we’re running on this treadmill or hamster wheel continuously, it's almost like a car running its RPM so hot that eventually you're going to burn the engine out. There’s no difference in the workforce with burnout, especially in Western culture.

When you think about what a situation evokes—hope, care, wellbeing, or stress—you nailed it. I really encourage anyone, go to the NIH. You’ll see exactly what you described: that sympathetic nervous system pathway, especially with adrenaline and cortisol, drives your heart rate up, your blood pressure up, and worsens your sleep patterns when you stay in it.

I think the misnomer is that we fool ourselves into thinking that this only impacts us at work, and we can magically shut it down when we go home. It's a myth. It's a lie.

Just watch people when they go on vacation. When they start to slow down, their bodies go on high alert. They get sick.

We constantly say we want people to be more open, creative, and innovative. But when you trigger the sympathetic nervous system and overdrive it, you shut all those mechanisms down.

It’s a vicious cycle.

Now, you flip it the other way and lean into the parasympathetic nervous system, then our friends—like oxytocin and dopamine—come into the game.

When they come in, they trigger more care, hope, wellbeing, happiness, creativity, innovation. It creates a positive cycle.

What I always tell leaders is it’s not that the sympathetic cycle is bad and should never happen. No. Cortisol helps us focus. It's not the enemy. It becomes the enemy when it puts us into distress, overdrives the system, and we can't control it.

Then it impacts sleep habits. Then it impacts performance.

It’s about navigating these cycles. We kind of call it the "emotion coaster" for fun, but you have to navigate these pathways.

When I speak to leaders, some of them intuitively know this. They're just really good at it. But even for me, I'm an addict when it comes to busyness. I teach this stuff, and I still fall into it.

We're doing this on a Saturday, after all. I'm a little bit of my own enemy.

Because of that, it’s increased my awareness that there are other people like me. Even if you think you're good at this intuitively, can we make it more intentional?

The only way to do that is to increase awareness—to your point, Ashish—around that heartbeat. Awareness has to go up.

I tell people, if you want a practical tip, journal your emotions over a consistent period of time.

My MBA students, if any of them are listening, they don't like it when I have them do it, but it’s usually the thing that comes back later and they say, "Wow, that was really insightful."

They notice certain behaviors, certain habits at specific times of the day—how they schedule meetings, how they show up, how they take productivity breaks.

In Western culture, breaks are frowned upon. But you need to take them. It doesn’t take long to reset your neural networks.

You don't need hours. Just two or three microbreaks during the day can make a difference. People say, "I'm so busy, Dan, I can't put 2-3 microbreaks during the day." I’m like, yes, you can.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. In fact, that’s usually the third practice as part of the Rewire program we’ve designed, which is all around habit formation for high performance.

I ask people to take one five-minute break between 8 AM to 12 PM. Choose somewhere between 10 and 11.

Take one five-minute break between 1 PM to 5 PM.

Take a ten-minute break between 12 PM to 1 PM—have lunch, go for a walk, be outside in the sun—and then just notice how those 20 minutes leave you at the end of the day. Look at your baseline energy and your end-of-day energy. Then do this practice and see what shifts for you.

You’ll notice you have more energy when you go home—to be with your kids, with your family—things that everybody says they prioritize over work.

Yet, we show up and actually don’t. That's so sad for me because almost everybody I talk to says they prioritize family over work. But we give the best part of ourselves—from morning 9 to 5—to work.

So, yes, you say you prioritize family, but you’re not leaving the best of you for them. You’re leaving the best of you for work—and actually showing up to your family emotionally dysregulated, stressed, anxious, frustrated.

Our workplaces have become places of suffering, not places of flourishing.

We want to create workplaces where people leave more energized, more excited, talking about the impact they made, the relationships they built, the work they did to be proud of. But our kids don’t hear that.

They hear about, "This guy did this," and "I'm so tired." That’s what they hear. It’s a big part of why I do the work I do—and why you do the work you do, Dan.

So, talk to me a little bit about—

You've been doing this work for a while. Bring it to life for me with a story of a client. It could be a company or an individual you really helped—not just teach this to—but helped practice it so they became more emotionally intelligent.

What was that process like, and what became possible through that?

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Yeah. Let me backup a little bit and get there. I'll do it from a client’s perspective.

We had a client call us a couple of years ago, Ashish. If you would’ve told me ten years ago that I would be consulting and teaching at a university, I would have said, "You're crazy." I was a C-Suite person, and that’s what I did.

But as you and I both know, when you find a passion for something—and mine, and our team at Braintrust, sits at the higher umbrella of impact and communication—it changes everything.

This company called us and said, "We have a turnover issue with our managers and downstream with their direct reports. We just don't feel like they’re having conversations that have the impact we need, day in and day out, to run this relatively large organization."

Ironically, they were in the CNS field—psychiatry—so I thought, "If anybody’s going to call BS on the science, it’s going to be this place."

The journey we took them on was a lot like what you do, Ashish—bringing neuroscience and behavioral psychology into the conversation. It's the why behind emotional intelligence and communication—the order of how we communicate matters.

I was amazed recently reading research from Grammarly and Harris Poll. They dollarized the impact of pervasive communication problems at about $1.2 trillion. Eight out of ten leaders want better communication tools.

This company was telling us, "We've got an engagement issue, a productivity issue. Maybe a lack of emotional intelligence. But it’s really showing up through poor communication."

We're not a strategic consulting house. We're a skill-based consulting firm. We took them on a journey built on three big building blocks, which are also the foundation of what we call neurocoaching—an approach to communication. I was really interested in the dyadic level—the leader-team member dynamic—which then impacts the team level.

We leaned heavily into the power of shared vision and how it affects relational climate. That theme was critical in my doctoral research and in 20+ years of broader research. Shared vision isn’t new, but its impact through values and vision is often overlooked.

We had them focus not just on the organizational vision and values—which, let’s be honest, every company displays on their website—but also at the leader-to-team-member level.

We equipped leaders to first understand their own vision and values, and then help every team member articulate theirs. That was the foundation.

Inside that, we moved them to aligning on the mission—where they are going. You can’t ignore strategy and standards. People want standards and accountability. They crave it. That's not new.

Then, being a huge strengths-based coach (I’m certified by Gallup), we had them look at strengths relative to skills—the "three S’s": Strengths, Strategy, and Standards.

The third leg of the journey—and really the heart of our work—was situational conversations of impact, built on emotional intelligence.

We use the six Ps, maybe because we're not that creative, but simple is powerful.

Purpose

Perspective

Plan

Path

Progress

Problems

Perspective, in particular, is about social awareness. I fundamentally believe if we could train ourselves to think of someone else's perspective before our own, the world would be a better place.

All of that builds up to measurable progress. We help leaders move from goal coaching to plan coaching.

Because when you’re under stress—an emotion—if you have a plan, you can focus on it rather than being overwhelmed by emotion.

I tell them: Stop coaching goals. Goals are outcomes. Coach the plan—aligned with purpose, perspective, and vision.

It's not rocket science. These aren't new words.

What happens when you get it right? Shared vision, aligned mission, situational conversations of impact—all add up to creating a coaching climate where people can flourish and grow.

I’m adamant about this:

People think relational coaching means soft coaching. It doesn't. Relational coaching simply allows you to open the lens so that you can coach someone transactionally when needed—but within a structured, relationship-driven environment.

Without the relationship, good luck. Especially with younger generations. They’ll leave in less than three years according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

So, if you're wondering whether any of this is relevant—Ashish and I would say, absolutely.

They’re not staying for 40 years anymore. They’re going to leave.

Ashish Kothari:

 Yeah.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

And the outcome of this work? They stayed with us for two to three years. Their turnover rate dropped from 25% to 4%. It wasn’t because we were brilliant. It was because they became brilliant.

Now, that's a moment in time. I'd love to tell you it’s been sustained for years, but I don’t know. It takes continuous effort. As you know through your work, Ashish, when you think about habits—you need awareness to understand the behaviors that form habits. Habits are hard to break.

But thank goodness for neuroplasticity, right?

Ashish Kothari:

I love that story for a couple of reasons. Usually when you have an attrition problem, people go to the classic response: "Maybe we're not paying them enough," or, "Maybe it's an environmental issue," or, "It's a skills issue—we just need to help them set better goals."

What I really love is where you went instead. You started with mission, vision, and values—not just at the organizational level, but at the individual level.

What are your values as a leader? How do you lead authentically with those? And how do you connect those values with your team? That alignment is so important.

You also emphasized conversations. We want to improve the quality of conversations. I just had a podcast with Julien Mirivel, whose work is all about positive communication. He defines six behaviors that help us.

But you're absolutely right—conversations of impact, when not had in the right emotional and relational field, aren't conversations of impact.

They're more like feedback hitting a wall. It isn’t received, reflected on, or acted upon. Enough of that, and people get frustrated and leave.

You took them on a journey—starting with awareness and leading from that place, but then really building the skills and investing in them.

And yes, it took time. It wasn’t a one-hour workshop.

That's another thing so many companies do: “Hey Dan, can you do a one-hour workshop on emotional intelligence because our people need it right now?”

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Yeah. You and I both know this. It’s an important point, and I’d say this to anyone listening:

Behavioral change doesn’t happen overnight. Depending on the source, there’s $50 billion a year spent in North America on leadership development.

You and I come from those worlds. We've seen millions of dollars poured into leadership programs.

But real behavioral change—what we do in our company—we mandate a minimum of three to six months of reinforcement coaching.

We need to get to the one-on-one level to meet people where they are. Otherwise, they leave thinking, "Oh, that was interesting," but nothing changes.

I'd tell L&D leaders and C-suite executives: you're wasting a lot of money on one-off programs.

You might get some immediate benefit, but if you want sustained change, you’ve got to stick with it.

The other thing you said that’s brilliant—when you talked about positivity.

When you go beyond the four domains of emotional intelligence, depending on the tool you're using, a positive outlook is one of the 12 core competencies.

I’m a fan of the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI), now under Korn Ferry. It was developed by Dr. Boyatzis and Dr. Goleman.

Positive outlook sits under self-management.

How you internally visualize a situation—your outlook—triggers something called emotional contagion.

It’s powerful. You can bring a team up or down very quickly. If you know what you’re doing, you can shift energy fast.

It’s not manipulation—it’s about modulating neurochemistry in every conversation.

Positivity isn’t warm and fuzzy. It’s about outlook. It’s about anchoring emotional contagion before you move into social awareness and relationship management.

You used the word "positivity," and I don’t want people to overlook that. It’s a critical self-management competency. And competencies can be learned.

Ashish Kothari:

It can be learned, and it's the foundation on which anything else gets built.

And it's not toxic. It's not about ignoring the hard conversations we need to have. But if we create the foundation of what's good, we're actually basing it on something that can hold. You can't build a house on a weak foundational structure—you just cannot.

So, talk to me a little bit. I want to switch from emotional intelligence to neurocoaching—and your new book that's coming out.

You touched on it through the client case study, but break it down for me. How is neurocoaching different from the regular coaching that many people do? What are some of the key underlying tenets?

Dr. Dan Docherty:

 You said something really key early on. If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be writing a book, co-authoring and co-creating neurocoaching with Jeff Bloomfield—my partner here at Braintrust—I would have laughed.

In my doctoral work, we’re trained to ask: is there a problem of practice? If so, what are the research questions? Then you dive into the field and ask: what already exists, and what can we add to the journey?

What we realized in our approach—and you nailed it with the house metaphor—is that at the foundation of neurocoaching is the power of shared vision.

I’ve worked with thousands of leaders over the past seven years. I’ll ask them, “If I lined up your 8 or 10 direct reports, could you tell me their top five values and the story behind them?”

Crickets.

I tell them honestly: “Before I went down this path, I didn’t know my team’s values either. And I’m embarrassed about that.”

If we leave them with nothing else, it’s this: go understand the values and the story behind them. That’s not new to me, to you, or to the world. But it’s the practical tip, the intentionality, that matters.

There are plenty of books—including mine—with value lists. But don’t just read them. Go do it. First: self-awareness. Understand your own values. Then go get your team’s.

Watch the amazing conversations that follow. That becomes a non-negotiable.

Now let’s talk about the aligned mission piece. You’d know this from McKinsey better than I did. We actually added an aligned mission as the second building block about two and a half years after shared vision and situational conversation.

I never thought anyone would want me to workshop standards and accountability. Then one of our clients grabbed me after a training and said, “I run a $2 billion business unit—and our standards aren’t clear.”

So I asked him, “What’s a standard?”

Mike Tomlin says, “The standard is the standard.” He hasn’t had a losing season. Mike Krzyzewski says, “Standards are non-negotiable—and they have to be lived.”

I didn’t think people would want to talk about strategy, standards, or strengths. I assumed they already knew. But they didn’t.

Now imagine this: you and I are in the Happiness Squad. We’re partners. We come from different cultures, different places.

We understand each other’s stories and values. We align ourselves to a standard of excellence for making an impact. Then we add in the fluency of situational conversations of impact.

One thing drilled into me through training and life experience is this: most leaders don’t have an intentional way of having a conversation. Yet we say, “Go have great one-on-ones.” Just go do it. But how do you navigate those one-on-ones?

At this stage in my life, I say: if you have a framework, great—go use it. You don’t have to use mine. I just care that you use something.

Think proactively. Start with clarity of purpose and values. What are we talking about? Then move into perspective, planning, staying on or off the path, measuring progress, aligning problems, and tracking performance.

If you can do that quickly, you’re like a quarterback who knows the playbook. You step to the line, read the defense, and audible based on what you see. That’s situational fluency. You’ve run that play so many times that the adjustment becomes second nature.

And I’ll say this—without offending anyone: leaders and coaches often get so busy, or hide behind busyness, that they get lazy.

They don’t have a structured way to navigate conversations. But in athletics or the arts—where I also work, directing children’s theater—it’s different.

To help 8- to 18-year-olds get on stage, you need the right vision, the right conversations, and a climate where they feel they can flourish. They’re scared to death.

That’s really what neurocoaching is.

We didn’t want to boil the ocean. We just wanted to make our contribution—our little slice of the world—to help leaders have situational conversations with more consistency, more intentionality, and a framework that fuels their race car and helps create a flourishing coaching climate.

That’s the game.

And emotional intelligence? It’s an amplifier or dampener of that entire continuum.

Ashish Kothari:

It's a key ingredient to be able to do it. It’s beautiful that you came from that space and built on it. You said many people don’t have intentionality—or even if they do, they might lack the skills.

I would actually add one more element, and I’m sure you see it all the time: even if you have the intentionality and the skills, do you have the space and the time? Are you creating the space and time, with skill and intention, to help the other person become the best version of themselves?

Dr. Dan Docherty:

 Yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

Not as a way to be frustrated and lay blame like, “You didn’t do X, you didn’t do Y.” But from a place of helping them see something they hadn’t seen before.

To be able, with intention, to understand from their perspective what might be missing.

You might not fully get it, but you can still do it from a place of positive regard and care.

That’s where magic happens.

If you can do that consistently—over time, where it becomes just how you operate—I think real transformation happens.

Performance arises because people flourish.

I love this. How can people learn more about neurocoaching, Dan? When is your book releasing?

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Our book is releasing in May—just a few weeks away. We should have it in production by mid-May.

If people want to learn more, they can go to braintrustgrowth.com. You can learn more about the work we do there.

You can also find neurocoaching information there.

For speaking and similar engagements, I have a personal site at dandocherty.com, and my partner Jeff Bloomfield is at jeffbloomfield.com.

Like you, we’re trying to get this message out to more people—to create impact.

You said something really insightful, and I think it’s the perfect way to close:

If we can take what’s common sense and make it more common practice, I think for however long we’re here on this planet, we can help leaders make a real difference.

Leadership and coaching are hard. It’s hard work.

But I don’t know that there’s anything more rewarding than watching someone go from where they are to where they dream to be.

There’s just nothing more powerful than that.

And if that doesn’t light you up, you might want to take off the armor of coaching and go do something else.

Ashish Kothari:

Thank you, my friend.

I appreciate you so much. I appreciate the work you’re doing.

Business has gotten a bad rap lately. But as Clay Christensen said in How Will You Measure Your Life?—business and leadership can be the most noble of professions.

Because if you lead the right way, you impact so many lives—not just through the products and services you put into the world, but through the environments you create for people to grow, develop, and activate their fullest potential.

But you can only do it consciously. You can only do it with intentionality.

Thank you for what you’re doing. It’s making the world a better place.

It’s such a pleasure to collaborate with you, to have you here, and to do what we can to support and amplify your message.

Dr. Dan Docherty:

Yeah. You’re welcome. And thank you for what you’re doing as well.