university kevin is the executive director and co founder of the hope collaborative hope focuses on the social and emotional intelligence is for you cancer is also an author and has written a book called a leader becomes a leader about the inspirational stories of leaderships for a new generation let's welcome kevin she han thank you for having me oh so good to have you here  with us today so today i just want to i want you to tell us why i'm like most conferences just happen like during adulthood but like personally like we as teens we think that they should happen earlier so we know what quite what to expect i mean like well what do you think about that's a terrific idea you know i mean part of the book that i wrote about leadership for a new generation as a review of the great leaders of the last hundred years from one hundred skun day to nelson mandela to eleanor roosevelt and and profiles how they became who they were in life and they were all teenagers at one point then you know adults and then adults and they you know many of them started to develop leadership qualities on their own and through their family life and th work life so you know the question you ask is a great one why not start that teaching in that discussion earlier why wait until you're twenty five or thirty year old entrant in the corporation organization  talk about those things i learn those things are earlier in life exactly and i'm pretty sure we all know that you really care about like social and like the emotional intelligence and what about the social and emotional intelligence what's your take on that and does that have to do like anything on like you're like awareness calles and how much do you understand things  leadership is leadership potential and then capacity is one of the most important qualities that make people successful in life that's the research and makes organization successful whether it's a small nonprofit or a big corporation or a midsize organization so social emotional learning is the precursor is the beginnings of leadership development  so when you're eight and ten and twelve and fourteen it's social emotional learning when you're twenty and beyond it's leadership development so you know families and schools and relationships that teach and foster self awareness ability to have good relationships ability to communicate ability to identify your emotions and talk about them so that they're not scary things are very important to creating a whole person and a confident person and i know that you value that very much and these are we wouldn't be here if you didn't and these are these are critical elements people in society are really figuring all this out what makes a person healthy what makes a society healthy and we're working in that in that role and a start what do you think one piece people are like you know because i know people who are like we should start i haven't classes on like oh wearing a skills personally for me i disagree with them i think that like awareness something like to be learned by yourself and not have like somebody else teach it for you it's kind of like not really a talent but i feel like everybody gets some sort of awareness like in like when you walk into a room for example like you might notice like that light is broken and then now when we're excited i feel like you can't get that as you grow and not like someone teaches you're like  physically aware but they're not very aware of their motions other people are very aware of their motions but they never remember where they leave something you know in the house or what have you so it's good to competencies these capacities determine where you're weak and where you're strong and where you have deficits strengthen them and that to your point some people like to strengthen them in self directed ways they read books they read articles they work quietly on their own other people like to do it in a more formal setting in a school setting or an after school setting and it's important to get people the support they need because people don't know what they don't know they don't know what their blind spots are but those blind spots can really define a life and get in your way and you might wake up at thirty years old thinking poor i i could have been a whole lot more productive if i had been able to work on that part when i was fifteen or seventeen or ten or what have you so that's how i think about i also think that like your self awareness kind of has to do a lot absolutely so a big driver in the life is where yeah land where we're born with the family what's the neighborhood and then who are the friends you pick because over time the older you get the more you can choose who to be friends with or who to spend time with so you're right boy those are really important drivers of what makes a life happen and the biggest question in my mind is two of the biggest dimension is to spend time with good people people who bring out the best in you people who are supportive people who are warm people who value other people and bring out the bastin is a great relationships are about where whenever i'm with him or her they really make me feel like me  versus some people don't make you feel like you and bring it down at a time that just want you to like change yourself and yeah absolutely maybe judgment all maybe they're not comfortable with themselves and they're very critical so so picking great cultures and people and groups to be with is really important the other thing is groups can get better so if you've got a group or a family where it's not going well and there are problems let's fix it let's get together and make our family group or our community group the best it can possibly be because we're going to spend a lot of time together and we better make it as strong and productive and healthy as we can allow that that's great but i feel like people can really learn from what you just said and that can also tell like bullying and how people like and your book is a leader becomes a leader now personally i have read this and you out you use like a really like large vocabulary i mean like how did you get here with like the high vocabulary sure can i ask you first when you read that how did you respond to the book i feel like people when they write books about like history like martin luther king gandhi people like that they don't really talk about like what they did when like they were little kids and then i notice that like even celebrities now unlike famous people basically and they actually have like like a really interesting like childhoods and like thirteen life and in your book you actually have like a little timeline thing like when they were born and how their families were and a lot of books about histories don't really have that so i think that was really nice and helpful really cool so that was one of the harder parts of the book to create because the child john coltrane of the childhood of the armstrong people don't know about necessarily and so it's really hard to find those facts and but we wanted to tell that story because you know apparently you know  coltrane like to eat eggs and you know neil armstrong was really excited about airplay when i was young and those facets make a person who they are and it's really fun you know to learn and interested in words because i think words are very magical things and so whenever i can add a word to my tool box i do and i like sharing great words with people  because i think that words have a lot of value and meaning in then and they're rich and important stuff you know so wherever we can share the music of the world with the language of the world of the emotion of the world the spirit energy of the world is great personally when i read the book i actually kept like a device was to me so i can like always you know google well we're into because i mean like and then i tried like a bigger word that they don't know and they get kind of afraid of it and then they don't look it up and and remember that it's your word it's not their word it happens to be in a book that you have it's your  you gravitate to your interests in your words and your relationships the more your life becomes you and that's exciting