The Emotional Skill Most Men Never Learned, and Why It’s Hurting Their Personal Growth, with Stefanos Koutsoumpis | #592

Agi Keramidas (0:03)
Today it is my real pleasure to speak with Stephanos Koutsoumbis. Stephanos, you help men who appear successful on the outside find the inner stability and contentment they have been missing. I'm excited to speak with you today.
Welcome to the show, it's such a pleasure.

Stefanos Koutsoumpis (0:21)
Hi, it's a pleasure and an honor for me as well. It's also nice to speak with a fellow Greek.

Agi Keramidas (0:26)
The main topic, Stephanos, that I want to explore with you today is emotional skills of men in particular, which you are focusing on and both of us are. So, we're talking about emotional skills, or actually it is your phrase, which I'm borrowing now, you talk about emotional skills that men were never taught. So, let's start with this, what do you mean by that and we will unfold it from then on.

Stefanos Koutsoumpis (1:09)
Sure, you know, when I start and ask the question of who is more emotionally intelligent, men or women, most of the time the answer is women, of course. If we try to go back to the theory of what emotional intelligence is, this is not quite accurate, because based on the model there are different interpretations, but in the model that we will be using here, emotional intelligence is about self-insight and self-awareness.
It's about being able to motivate yourself, so finding ways to work with yourself and then it's about social awareness, understanding how other people are feeling and about being able to connect with other people.
So, men actually, they can be very well self-motivated, this is our strong part. Self-insight is a strange subject, no one is good at that, well, when we're younger at least, but when we are moving to social awareness and empathy, this is where women are better.
They can understand how other people are feeling, they are more empathetic, they will empathize with you and try to nourish you when you are feeling bad and this is not something we are doing as men. So, this is the part that we are not strong at.
It's not that we are not emotionally intelligent, but we lack or actually we gravitate towards the inter-intelligence and not the intra-intelligence of other people. There are many reasons for that and some of them are biological, because we were born and this is our nature and you can see that when you are looking at little babies.
The baby girls will look their mothers and their fathers in the eyes and they stay there and they will mimic their emotions and their facial expressions and boys, they will just look at anything else, at their toys, at what is happening, but they don't care about faces.
So, they are not taught at early age, because it's not their talent at that point. They are not taught how to understand emotions and even growing up, you never go back to that, to actually looking at other people, empathizing with other people, having these mental exercises of what I feel like right now or what happened to him.
So, today he has a good day or a bad day. What happened to him yesterday? This is not something we practice a lot, so we are not taught and if you are lucky, then maybe your environment will help you growing up, but if you are like most of us, you will never learn this skill and this will create a lot of communication issues with both men and women, because communication is a challenge no matter what is the gender.

Agi Keramidas (4:40)
Let's talk about this, what you just said about the drawbacks, the issues that men have exactly because they do not have these skills or they were not taught these skills and you mentioned social awareness and empathy and I also understand the difference. There is a biological difference for sure and perhaps it is more of a quality that women have more easily than men, so I appreciate all that and the part of how we have been, we have learned since children.
So, tell me a bit more about, you mentioned communication problems, how does this lack of emotional awareness or skills translate into communication problems?

Stefanos Koutsoumpis (5:49)
Of course, of course. We are thinking a lot about leaders or we want to build our own teams or companies or whatever and a big part of that is being able to motivate others to understand their motives and give them what they need and also understand what happens below the table, what are the relationships of other people, why some people are working well together and some people are not working well together and this is a part where we can be helped a lot by our emotional skills.
If you think back to gossiping, gossiping has been around for as long as we are on the planet and there are social reasons, for example, for that. Gossiping is the easiest way to learn what are the relationships of other people. So, how you get to know who will cooperate with whom and this can be helpful in business.
Then again, empathizing and understanding other people can help you a lot to work with them but also can help them a lot to be able to feel heard and feel understood. When we are working with someone, it's a human relationship and if it's purely transactional, it can't work.
And we're seeing this a lot, not only business but in general. A lot of our communication is written communication, it's through messages and this is transactional a lot and there is a lot of miscommunication because through the written text, you can't quite understand how the other people is thinking or feeling or what they need or what is their status maybe.
And most of the times when you have a long chain of emails that make no sense, what's the solution? It's let's have a meeting. Let's try to see each other.
When you're doing an important deal, you're having meetings in person because there the communication is even more important and even slighter details like how someone will stand or look or frown maybe, this can be all information that we're missing when we are on the camera.
These are skills that can be taught and of course, we have a lot of leaders, both men and women, who use them a lot but this is where we are struggling most of the time with our collaborators or with our partners or our colleagues.

Agi Keramidas (9:02)
So for someone, a man now listening to us and saying, okay, Stefano, I hear what you're saying that I'm missing some emotional skills. How can I start building them?
And I will, in particular, because you mentioned empathy, let's explain that. Someone listening now would like to build that skill, that ability to be more empathetic and understand the others more. What would you suggest that they start with?

Stefanos Koutsoumpis (9:46)
All these things are embodied experiences. Understanding other people has to do a lot with understanding on a subconscious level most of the time. I'm mentioning this because we think, okay, I'll read the book and I was like that.
I'll read the book about body language and I'll know body language. I'll read the book about emotional intelligence and then I will be good at that. And I did that and I was not good because all these things need to be experienced to be learned.
A quick analogy is like riding a bike. I can give you a book and you can learn all about riding a bike and when you go to actually ride a bike, you will fall, most probably. But if you take a child that's four and he already knows how to do that, he can't explain it with words, but he can do it.
So it's the same for empathy, for example. You need to experience it and you experience it by bringing up, first of all, questions to yourself.
Okay, like I said before, how is I feeling right now? How would I feel if I was in his spot? What is happening in his life?
And we want to sit down and listen to the other person and really, really listen without any judgments or any conclusions or anything. Just listen to what is going on in his life.

Agi Keramidas (15:32)
Sure. I appreciate the clarification on this. I would like to bridge what we've been discussing, these emotional skills or the lack of them. And I want to hear your thoughts on how they are affecting and they are related men's mental health.
Because there is, especially with men, there is a lot of things that are not being said and mental health does deserve much more openness and ability to speak about it without any negative correlations and so on.

Stefanos Koutsoumpis (16:39)
You know, the emotions are giving you a signal when something is not working well. And this signal can be purely emotional, like, okay, I'm feeling uneasy or I'm feeling angry or I'm feeling sad.
Or when you don't hear that signal, it can be even embodied, which is, I have a back pain issue or a gut issue, IBS, or maybe I have migraines all the time.
And if you still cannot hear this, then the issues will continue and multiply. Maybe they will develop into real physical health problems or mental health problems.

Agi Keramidas (20:34)
You said that people who experience burnout often don't hear the signals. So what are some of the earlier signals someone should notice?

Stefanos Koutsoumpis (21:26)
Let's go even earlier on and get some values of how we want to feel every day. If someone misses small everyday happy moments, moments of gratitude, meaningful work, connection with people, or feels unmotivated or disappointed for a long period, these are the earliest signals.
Because these feelings are unpleasant, many people escape them by staying busy or by addictions. The question then becomes: why am I still busy? Why am I doing this?

Agi Keramidas (24:03)
That's great and I will bring it again with the men in particular with what we were saying and I know that you do run men's groups so for someone listening to us right now that has been perhaps they have heard about a men's group but they have not experienced one. Personally I have experienced one and I will say that it is very liberating to be understood about matters that you know other men can hear you out and we normally as men you know tend to not to open up easily so it is a very empowering environment you know to open up and be free.
So I would like to hear your thoughts on you know the importance or the benefit of participating in a men's group for someone who has you know been intrigued by this conversation so far.

Stefanos Koutsoumpis (25:17)
You know most of us we've never been actually heard until we are really really really old. Maybe your wife will hear you out or maybe your children your daughters will hear you out but most of us will never been heard by our parents, our friends, our colleagues.
We don't have this culture and we don't give it in the foundation. When we are speaking with a friend you are out for a beer or for coffee you don't actually listen to him you are just sharing news.
So we never are given the space to really open the valves and let some steam off. So this is the most important part of what is happening in the men's groups.
You are given the space to open up and the time you need to open up and you have other people who are interested in what is happening with you and there is zero judgment in what you are saying.

Agi Keramidas (30:28)
They certainly do and thank you for that they work if one works them otherwise they don't work on their own so it comes back and I will say that word again that I mentioned the embodiment and the way to embody it is by practicing it and what you said about habit and also from my own personal experience there is no magic button that you can press one day and the next day you are instantly happy.

Stefanos Koutsoumpis (32:11)
I will leave it you know by saying that it's important to give ourselves the permission to be human you know to feel to be tired to be stressed to be happy maybe to enjoy things so that's very very important and it will help greatly you know to get better insight in ourselves.