Travis Bradberry, Ph.D. is an award-winning author, president of a professional consultancy firm, and California School of Professional Psychology alumnus. After receiving his Psy.D. and Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology, he went on to write the #1 bestseller Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and co-founded the world’s premier provider of emotional intelligence (EQ) TalentSmart. 

Bradberry set out on a quest to improve the way we build relationships in the workplace and enhance our professional capacity by understanding our emotional intelligence. After all, as he points out “We experience 27 discernable emotions every hour,” and we can’t just ignore that.

“We are emotional creatures before we are rational creatures. We have an emotional reaction to events before we have rational reactions to events…that’s just the way we’re wired,” says Bradberry. He knows that emotions drive behavior, and focuses on how to build awareness of that in order to improve professional practice.

Through his book and the work of his firm, he helps people explore self and social management in order to change how one goes about doing their jobs. “I think in work the reason we can become so self-centered is it’s very easy to overvalue how much of a role we play in the success of a project, the success of a task, the success of our business; and undervalue the role that other people play. So your point of focus becomes what you’re going to say next, what you think about this, what you think about that instead of what’s going on with them,” says Bradberry. “When you’re trying to build self-awareness, you have to lean into discomfort a little bit.”Bradberry knows that the top performing CEOs and leaders are those with the highest EQs and, through his work, he can likely make effective leaders of us all. He is a prime example of the power of an education in organizational psychology, he has been able to highlight the importance of self and social awareness in a way that only someone with a thorough understanding of psychology could.