How to Raise Self-Awareness and Your Emotional Quotient (EQ) with Gordon D. Melville

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Self-awareness is the key to a successful entrepreneurial venture and knowing your Emotional Quotient, or EQ, pays dividends in the long run. I discuss how to embrace both in this episode with my guest, Gordon. D. Melville.

Gordon, client dubbed, and now widely recognized as “The Vault,” has built his life’s work around one core belief: powerful people are still human, and ignored pressure eventually becomes destruction.

He works with elite founders, professional athletes, operators, and a small circle of courageous women who are done tolerating the disconnect between who they appear to be publicly and who they know themselves to be privately.

We dive into topics including:

Gordon’s Emotional Quotient origin story.
How to become aware of and embrace your Emotional Quotient.
What you can do to start your self-help journey and where to get support for your journey.
How to keep on keepin’ on during the rough times in your journey.
Why emotions, good and bad, don’t happen to you – you actually choose them.
The power of the “pause” and how to embrace it in your life.
How to rewire your brain to get out of bad mental states and negative emotions.
How to become aware of and shift your vibration or frequency.
How to choose to respond instead of reacting to negative situations.
Why knowing yourself is the best gift you can give yourself.
The one thing, above all else, you need to do to raise your self-awareness and Emotional Quotient.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

Gordon’s Self-Awareness and Emotional Quotient Origin Story

It’s something that has been near and dear to Gordon’s heart for 37 years in, in August, that Zig Ziglar put him on the path of self-awareness and showed him how things work in the world of self-improvement. As it turns out Gordon believes we try to win the game of life without knowing what the rules are. That’s where your problems begin.

Gordon works with a basketball team and if they don’t know what the rules are, it makes it very difficult if not impossible to win. But as humans, we try and do that. We try and guess our way through life without understanding what the rules are. Gordon realized that when Zig put him on a path of self-exploration, doing the inside work, and growth.

Gordon’s finding over decades is that self-improvement starts with self-awareness. It’s peeling off layers of our lives. When, when they asked Michelangelo how he found David in that statue in the rock, he said, “It was always there. All I did was take away the rough parts.” And Gordon believes we can’t become who we already are until we take away the rough parts.

Self Improvement is a Lifelong Journey

We’re already who we’re supposed to be at our core, but we have all this life stuff wrapped around us. And so that… It’s not just growth. It’s peeling off of that human stuff to reveal who we truly are underneath. And, and so that, that for Gordon has been an ongoing awareness to try and make sure he’s always growing.

He’s always pulling those layers off to make sure that he’s getting closer and closer and closer to who he truly already is. That journey has it’s bumps and bruises, and it’s hard, and Gordon believes that’s why less than 3% of the population does any kind of personal development. Because it’s difficult, it’s painful, it’s messy, and it requires a lot of introspection.

It requires a lot of looking in a mirror and going, “You know what? I’m not perfect by a long shot, but I have a lot of foibles. I have a lot of challenges, and, and I don’t know everything about everything.” And that’s where growth begins; it’s a choice …

Where do You even start to become aware if less than 3% of the population practices self-help?

It must come from getting to a place where either somebody shows it to you or you realize that you need to change yourself, so Gordon was blessed that Zig showed him. But a lot of people will wait until they’re in a bad place and it’s not that they wait, they’re not aware of the fact that they can change their course.

Gordon has heard a lot in past years from his clients, “Gordon, I didn’t even realize I could make a choice that way. I didn’t know…” As, as weird as that sounds to me, they, they s- “Gordon I didn’t know I could.” So that requires a choice. It doesn’t just happen on its own.

If you don’t take control of your life you’ll be at the whim of everybody else around you, and there’s no anchoring. In that case life’s just sort of happening. When you become intentional after you choose, it looks like “I’m choosing to, to step into that space. I’m choosing to have an awareness around my life as a whole…” One way Gordon does that is by reading at least five business books a month.

That’s a pouring in of great information. That’s an intentionally choosing to infuse himself and find some new ground and to have new awareness on a regular basis. He’s learning stuff all the time about who he is at his core.

What Gordon loves is finding somebody that can hold a mirror up for you and tell you the hard truth. While a mirror can’t show you where you’ve been, mirror can reflect what’s right now in this moment, in real time. And so having somebody in your life that can do that for you, they can hold up a mirror and be 100% honest with you but most of us don’t want to do that and that’s a mistake.

You Can Always Make a New Choice

Gordon believes that life is a series of choices. You must choose to step into that arena, and some people will do it for a little bit and then go, “You know what? It, it’s too hard. I’m out,” or, “I’m at a place where I think I like where I am, so it’s all good. I’m, I’m done with improvement.”

Then some people, like Gordon, there’s a very small percentage of people that say, “This will be a lifelong thing until I drop dead. Until I pop off my mortal coil, I, I’ll continue to want to refine and refine and refine and refine.” But it starts with a choice that leads to a series of new choices and a new path in life.

What You Can Do to Start Your Self-Help Journey

It all starts at different places for different people. The one thing Gordon wants to point out is that he believes nobody’s “broken”. We may feel broken, but we’re not broken. So if you start from there, that empowerment place that says, “I’m not broken in any way.” You may feel that way, but that’s not what’s happening.

When you start that journey, it comes to a place where we’re talking about your Emotional Quotient; your level of self-awareness and willingness to improve. People talk about it sometimes as emotional intelligence, and it’s not really an intelligence, it’s a quotient.

You could Google it and go, “Hey, tell me about emotional quotient,” and, and it’ll give you books, it’ll give you articles, it’ll tell you, define it. So again, that’s that choice to decide to intentionally figure this part of your life out. And when it’s weird about human behavior that, and Gordon does this with his athletes all the time when they tell him, “Gordon, I don’t have the time or the money for self-improvement,” and Gordon’s response is, “No offense, what I just heard was you don’t want to.”

As humans, if we really want to, we’ll figure out the money, the time, whether it’s good for us or bad for us, we’ll still figure it out if it’s important, if it’s a priority. And so, if it’s a priority for them to figure out once they become self-aware and that want that to improve themselves they’ll look around and find ways to make things happen.

And that’s just the beginning!

Watch or listen to the episode for the rest of the story and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

About My Guest

Gordon D Melville, client dubbed, and now widely recognized as “The Vault,” has built his life’s work around one core belief: powerful people are still human, and ignored pressure eventually becomes destruction.

As an anonymous advisor, speaker, media personality, and creator of the BISO transformational emotional clarity under pressure frameworks, he works with elite founders, professional athletes, operators, and a small circle of courageous women who are done tolerating the disconnect between who they appear to be publicly and who they know themselves to be privately.

His work cuts through performance, ego, and polished identity to expose the patterns quietly sabotaging relationships, leadership, health, purpose, and peace.

Known for his visceral communication style and unfiltered honesty, Gordon combines tough love with uncommon emotional depth. He creates confidential, leak-proof spaces where truth can finally breathe without judgment, performance, spectators, or posturing.

Clients often describe his work less as advisory and more as a complete internal reckoning that restores clarity, conviction, self-respect, and alignment. His message is polarizing by design, comfort has never transformed anyone, and greatness without internal congruence eventually becomes a prison.

Click here to learn more about Gordon!

Click here to connect with Gordon on LinkedIn!