Olivia: Most people think a great project manager is a master of spreadsheets and deadlines. What if the single most dangerous person on a project is the manager who doesn't know what they're feeling? Jackson: Whoa, that's a bold claim. You're saying the biggest risk isn't a blown budget or a missed deadline, but a manager's own unchecked emotions? That feels... dramatic. Olivia: It’s the billion-dollar question we're tackling today. And that very question is at the heart of Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers by Anthony C. Mersino. Jackson: Right, and Mersino isn't some armchair philosopher. He's a hardcore Project Management Professional, a PMP, who worked for giants like IBM and Unisys. He wrote this because he saw his own career stall until he figured this stuff out. Olivia: Exactly. He was one of thousands getting PMP certified in the early 2000s, and he realized that in a field flooded with technical experts, the real differentiator wasn't another certification—it was mastering the human element. His entire journey, and the book itself, began with one terrifying question from his therapist. Jackson: A therapist? Okay, now I'm hooked. This is already not the project management book I was expecting.

Olivia: It’s the perfect place to start. Mersino describes himself in 2001 as a successful, 39-year-old project manager. He had all the credentials, over 17 years of experience, but his career had hit a wall. He was passed over for a big promotion and felt this deep insecurity that he couldn't build strong relationships at work. Jackson: I think a lot of people can relate to that feeling. You're doing the work, checking the boxes, but something's missing and you can't quite put your finger on it. Olivia: Precisely. So he's in a session with his career coach, a man named Rich, and Rich just looks at him and asks, "Do you have any idea how dangerous it is not to be in touch with your feelings?" Jackson: Dangerous? There's that word again. That sounds a bit extreme. What's so dangerous about just being focused on the job and not, you know, navel-gazing about your feelings all day? Olivia: That's the core of it. Mersino argues that emotions aren't a distraction from the work; they are critical data. When you're out of touch with your own feelings, you're essentially flying blind. You make bad decisions, you misread people, and you react in ways that sabotage your own projects. Jackson: Okay, I need a concrete example. How does not knowing you're, say, angry, actually lead to a project failing? Olivia: He gives a perfect, painful one. He calls it the "Email Incident." He was managing a huge international project and had a really adversarial relationship with one of his team leads. It was a constant battle of wills. One day, the team lead sends a routine travel request via email. Jackson: And let me guess, Mersino was already having a bad day. Olivia: He was incensed. He felt pressured, annoyed, and completely fed up. So without even thinking, he fired back a terse, critical, and frankly, nasty email. He didn't pause, he didn't cool down. He just reacted. Jackson: Oh, I know that feeling. The "send and regret" moment. Olivia: Exactly. The team member was so offended he escalated the issue straight to Mersino's manager. It triggered a formal HR investigation. The relationship was completely destroyed, the team member left the project, and Mersino realized his single biggest mistake wasn't the project plan or the budget—it was that one email, sent in a moment of uncontrolled anger. He was out of touch with his own emotional state, and it had real, tangible, costly consequences. Jackson: Wow. Okay, when you put it like that, "dangerous" starts to make a lot more sense. It's not about abstract danger, it's about the danger of nuking your own career with a single click. So how do you even begin to fix that? Most of us aren't taught to be in touch with our feelings, especially in a corporate setting. Olivia: Mersino offers a surprisingly simple starting point. He introduces a framework called SASHET. It's an acronym for the six primary families of emotions: Sad, Angry, Scared, Happy, Excited, and Tender. Jackson: SASHET. It sounds like a fancy French satchel or something. Olivia: (laughing) It does! But it's incredibly practical. The idea is that most of our complex feelings can be traced back to one of these six roots. Are you feeling "overwhelmed"? That's probably a form of Scared. Are you feeling "irritated"? That's in the Angry family. He argues that just being able to name the core emotion is the first, most critical step to managing it. It’s about building your emotional vocabulary beyond just "fine" or "stressed." Jackson: So it's like, you can't fix a bug in the code if you don't know what the error message means. You have to identify the feeling first. Olivia: That's a perfect analogy. You have to read your own internal error messages. Mersino's journey started there. He realized his own upbringing in an alcoholic family had taught him to suppress everything. He felt numb, even when his brother died. It took him years of work to even recognize what he was feeling in the moment. Jackson: That's incredibly vulnerable for an author in a business book to admit. It makes the advice feel much more earned. Olivia: It does. And it underscores his main point for this 'Inner Game': self-awareness is the non-negotiable foundation. Before you can manage a team, a budget, or a timeline, you have to be aware of the emotional data your own body is giving you. He even talks about "stinking thinking"—these negative thought patterns that can trigger emotional breakdowns. Jackson: Hold on, "stinking thinking"? What exactly does Mersino mean by that? Sounds like something my grandpa would say after a bad meal. Olivia: It's a memorable phrase for cognitive distortions. For example, "All or Nothing Thinking." He tells a story about rushing to the airport to catch an earlier flight home. He makes it, which is great, but he loses his first-class upgrade and has to sit in a middle seat in economy. Jackson: A classic first-world problem. Olivia: Totally. But when he gets home, his wife asks how the trip was, and he says, "Awful." He got home an hour earlier, but because he didn't get everything he wanted—the early arrival and the fancy seat—his brain declared the entire experience a failure. That's "All or Nothing" thinking. It ignores all the positives and fixates on the one imperfect detail. Jackson: I can definitely relate to that. You get 99 things right on a project, but you obsess over the one thing that went wrong. It poisons the whole success. Olivia: And that's the Inner Game. Recognizing that your brain is telling you a distorted story. Self-awareness is catching yourself in that moment and saying, "Wait, is this trip really awful, or am I just disappointed about the seat?" That small act of self-interrogation is the beginning of self-management.

Jackson: Okay, so mastering your own internal chaos is step one. That makes a lot of sense. But project management is a team sport. How does this 'Inner Game' help you deal with the actual people—the difficult stakeholders, the unmotivated team members—who can make or break your project? Olivia: That's the perfect pivot to what Mersino calls the 'Outer Game': social awareness and relationship management. Once you can read your own emotions, you can start to accurately read the emotions of others. And this is where he introduces some fascinating and frankly, terrifying, archetypes. Jackson: I'm ready. Give me the archetypes. Olivia: He talks about the "Caveman Manager." This is the boss who is a "rage-aholic." They berate, intimidate, and run roughshod over everyone to get results. They might use sarcasm, inappropriate humor, or outright bullying. And the scary part is, sometimes it works... in the short term. Jackson: Oh, I think we've all worked for a 'Caveman Manager' or at least a close cousin. The person who creates a culture of fear, but because they hit their numbers, leadership looks the other way. Olivia: Exactly! Mersino connects this to another brilliant analogy: the "Bus Driver and the Cliff." He describes organizations where teams are rewarded for "heroic" last-minute saves. They stall, they delay, they drive the project bus right to the edge of the cliff, and then work 72 hours straight to pull it back at the last second. Jackson: And then they get bonuses and are celebrated as heroes! Meanwhile, the team that planned properly and finished on time with no drama gets completely ignored. Olivia: You've lived it. That culture, which rewards crisis, is the perfect breeding ground for Caveman Managers. It devalues planning and emotional stability. An emotionally intelligent leader, in contrast, understands that their job is to keep the bus safely on the road, not to give everyone a heart attack with their driving. Jackson: So what's the alternative? If you're not the Caveman, how do you manage stakeholders and get things done without being a bully or a doormat? Olivia: This is the core of relationship management. It’s not about just being nice; it's a systematic process. Mersino emphasizes that you have to actively manage these relationships. He tells a great story about a project where the executive sponsor, a VP, was completely aloof and uninvolved. The project was suffering because they needed his buy-in. Jackson: The classic absentee sponsor. A project manager's nightmare. Olivia: Mersino, in his early days, would have just avoided the guy and complained about him. But the emotionally intelligent approach was different. His own manager coached him to get on the VP's calendar with a series of regular "executive briefings." Jackson: Forcing the interaction. I like it. Olivia: It wasn't just about status updates. It was about building a relationship. In those meetings, he learned what the VP actually cared about, what his pressures were, what his objectives were. He started to see the VP as a person, not just an obstacle. That relationship ended up saving the project. The VP helped get resources, resolved thorny issues, and championed the project—all because Mersino took the time to manage that one critical relationship. Jackson: That's a powerful shift in thinking. Your job isn't just to report to the stakeholder; it's to understand their emotional world. What makes them tick? What are they afraid of? Olivia: Precisely. And it requires social awareness—the ability to read the currents of emotion and politics in a group. Mersino points out that in the workplace, people are often masking their true feelings. You have to look for the clues. You have to listen not just to what is said, but how it's said. You have to watch the eye-rolls in a meeting, like in that story from 'The Apprentice'. The words might be positive, but the body language is screaming contempt. Jackson: So an emotionally intelligent PM is basically a detective, looking for emotional clues that other people miss. Olivia: A detective and an influencer. Because once you have that data, you can use it to build trust, to inspire, to resolve conflict. You can approach a team member and say, "Hey, I noticed you seemed really frustrated in that meeting. What's going on?" instead of just ignoring it. That's how you build a team that wants to follow you, not one that's just afraid of you.

Jackson: It's fascinating. When you lay it all out, it seems the big takeaway is that project management isn't about managing tasks at all. It's about managing the emotional energy of a group of people—starting with your own. Olivia: Precisely. Mersino's core point, the one that resonates throughout the entire book, is that emotions are not noise to be filtered out; they are data to be analyzed. A team member's frustration is data. A stakeholder's fear is data. Your own anger is data. Ignoring it is like flying a plane with half the instruments blacked out. You might stay airborne for a while, but you're flying blind. Jackson: That's a fantastic way to put it. You're missing critical information that could prevent a crash. The book received pretty solid reviews for being so practical, but some experienced PMs found it a bit basic. From our discussion, it feels like maybe they're missing the point. This isn't about advanced techniques; it's about mastering the absolute fundamentals of human interaction. Olivia: I think that's right. The genius of the book is its accessibility. It's not for the EI expert; it's for the smart, technical project manager who keeps wondering why their projects are so hard, why their teams are so disengaged, and why their careers have stalled. It gives them a new, and arguably more important, set of instruments to look at. Jackson: So for everyone listening who's juggling a dozen tasks right now, what's one simple action they can take from this book today? Olivia: Mersino suggests a simple 'emotional check-in.' Before you send that critical email or walk into that tense meeting, just pause for five seconds and ask yourself: 'What am I feeling right now?' Using his SASHET model: Sad, Angry, Scared, Happy, Excited, or Tender? Just naming it can change everything. It can be the difference between sending a career-ending email and taking a walk to cool down. Jackson: I love that. A one-word intervention. It’s so simple, there’s no excuse not to try it. We'd love to hear your experiences with this. Have you ever worked with a 'Caveman Manager'? Or had a moment where checking your own emotions saved the day? Find us on social and share your story. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.