Resilience Spotlight: Rich Hua
Amazon’s former Chief EQ Evangelist on the power of emotional intelligence to help us thrive through change and uncertainty
Rich Hua is someone I’ve wanted to interview for a while. An expert in the field of emotional intelligence (abbreviated as EQ), he consistently shares thoughtful, research-backed insights on LinkedIn that I enjoy every day.
For the past five years, Rich served as Chief EQ Evangelist and Worldwide Head of EPIC (Empathy, Purpose, Inspiration, and Connection) Leadership at Amazon. Through his work, he helped more than a million people improve their EQ skills, both within Amazon and at thousands of other companies, ranging from Fortune 100 enterprises to startups.
Recently, Rich set out on his own and launched a leadership consulting company to further expand his impact and bring EQ skills to a billion people.
For those unfamiliar, emotional intelligence is defined by Mental Health America as “the ability to manage both your own emotions and understand the emotions of people around you.” EQ has four key elements: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
EQ is especially important when navigating uncertainty and everyday stressors. For me, it’s made handling the ups and downs of living with a rare muscle disease much more manageable.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rich as much as I did.
Q: You’ve said in interviews that you didn’t have strong emotional intelligence growing up, and gravitated more towards the intellectual (IQ) side of things. Can you talk about this, and ultimately, what made you take an interest in EQ?
I was born in Taiwan and moved to the U.S. when I was four. My early years were challenging: I didn’t speak English, had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and was socially awkward. One teacher thought I was cognitively impaired because I didn’t answer to my English name. (My parents called me by my Chinese name at home.) I had a hard time understanding social norms and making friends, and I felt a lot of anxiety, loneliness, disappointment, anger, and resentment. So I decided to shut my emotions off, thinking they were distractions. I focused on academics and aspired to be a “genius robot”, which worked for a while.
I excelled in school — got straight A’s, achieved a perfect SAT score, and was accepted at every college I applied to. I studied electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, and my “genius robot” plan was going great.
And then I did something that completely “messed” it up: I got married! My wife didn’t care about my “genius” side, and she really didn’t like the “robot” side; she wanted emotional connection, empathy, and vulnerability. That challenged me personally, and so I realized that, from a personal perspective, I needed to learn a new set of skills that were not in the IQ realm.
I needed to develop these skills for other reasons, too. After college, I worked as a missionary and evangelist for a church for 23 years and had kids. I realized emotional intelligence was essential both at home and in my professional role, helping people emotionally and spiritually.
It was around this time that I discovered Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, which was transformative. Suddenly, there was a framework and science behind what I needed to learn. I immersed myself in EQ — reading books, finding mentors, taking courses, and practicing these skills daily.
Over decades, I’ve developed these skills, and they’ve become the differentiator in my happiness, health, and career success. I like to say that IQ got me in the door, but EQ has enabled promotions, cultivated meaningful relationships, and allowed me to create my own role at Amazon.
Looking back, “genius robot” was the best I could come up with in my early years, but emotional intelligence has empowered me to become a much more optimal version of myself.
Q: Can you tell us about your career journey and how you ended up getting the EPIC role at Amazon? How did EQ become so popular within the company?
After spending two decades as a missionary and evangelist, I transitioned into the corporate world 13 years ago and joined Oracle as a solutions engineer.
When I started at Oracle, I quickly noticed that my colleagues were very technically astute, but there was a gap on the social-emotional side — in skills such as empathy, influence, and communication. That gap limited their effectiveness.
So, I decided to share what I knew about EQ. I began sending emails with tips. I also created internal courses, first for my fellow solutions engineers, and eventually to help train managers and new hires. My informal EQ training grew into a program that ended up reaching several thousand people across the company.
Then, after four years at Oracle, I moved to AWS (Amazon Web Services), where the EQ effort has scaled far beyond what I ever imagined and has reached over a million people.
I never could have predicted this journey. When I joined Amazon in a sales and business development role, I encountered super-smart colleagues with tons of technical experience, but I saw the same gap in EQ skills. I thought I could help. So I started giving talks about EQ to whoever would listen. The response was positive, and word spread.
In 2019, I submitted “Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success” as a topic for our sales kickoff. The organizers put me in a small room for 85 people, not expecting many people to show up for this strange topic that was off the beaten path.
The day before my talk, event organizers called me up and said, “So many people want to attend your session that we’re moving you to a bigger room — one for 1,000 people!” The talk wound up being standing-room only and was the highest-rated and highest-attended breakout session of the entire event. At Sales Kickoff the following year, twice the number of people (2,000) attended my EQ talk, and again it was the highest-rated session.
And then people came to me and said, “I want to help spread this message.” This led to the creation of the EQ Champions, an amazing group of volunteers committed to practicing, developing, and spreading EQ skills throughout Amazon. Some of the volunteers asked if they could help deliver EQ talks, so I started training and certifying them and called them EQ Evangelists.
Today, there are a thousand EQ Champions and EQ Evangelists across Amazon, and together, we trained over 400,000 employees and 100,000 customers. Another million people have been reached through Amazon’s thought leadership podcasts and articles in publications such as The Guardian and Washington Post.
Beyond just giving talks, Amazon has built a vibrant community of practice that numbers over 70,000. Members subscribe to a daily email with EQ tips and research, engage in an EQ Slack channel, and attend a monthly interview series featuring thought leaders such as Daniel Goleman, Marc Brackett, Amy Edmondson, and Adam Grant. Goleman said this was the largest corporate-based EQ community he’d seen anywhere in the world.
And yet, all this work was done off the side of my desk until three-and-a-half years ago, when I pitched this being a full-time role to Amazon leadership. To my delight, they approved it, providing me with a team and a budget.
That’s how I launched the EPIC Leadership Program and became Worldwide Head, with a mission to help both Amazonians and customers lead and work with greater empathy, purpose, inspiration, and connection.
Q: What are some misconceptions about EQ, and why should we take it seriously? Why is it worth investing in these skills?
Some people dismiss EQ as “soft” or irrelevant in our hard-driving, results-oriented business world. They say, “We are a data-driven company. What does all this emotional stuff have to do with that?” My response: emotions are data, and we ignore them at our own peril.
Here’s the thing — EQ is not about being emotional. It’s the intelligent use of emotions. Research has found that we experience emotions over 90% of our day, and these emotions affect nearly everything we do — including focus, decision-making, creativity, performance, and relationships. Who wouldn’t want to optimize those? It’s about knowing how to have emotions work for you rather than against you.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman’s research shows that emotional intelligence matters more than IQ for job performance — especially in leadership roles. Yes, IQ is important, and it matters a lot for school, tests, and initial jobs. After that, success is more impacted by resilience, positive attitude, adaptability, influence, and communication. This is especially true for those in leadership roles. IQ provides “threshold abilities”—they get you through the door. EQ provides “distinguishing abilities”— they make you stand out. This is why many brilliant people stall out in their careers when they lack EQ.
One thing I often say in my workshops is, “Take a look around you. What do you think is the average IQ in this room?” At companies like Amazon and their customers, that number is very high. Then I ask, “How will you distinguish yourself? By trying to be smarter than everyone else?” My point: probably not. You’re all smart enough (you got your job). It will be much more likely through qualities such as cognitive control, determination, empathy, and the ability to move others.
These are EQ skills.
Q: One of the common types of adversity that I and many of my readers face is burnout. What are some warning signs of burnout we should look out for? And are there any simple actions that you recommend to help prevent burnout?
Burnout is prevalent. It was before the pandemic, during it, and still is now. Warning signs include difficulty sleeping, anxiety upon waking, racing thoughts in the evening when you’re trying to relax, loss of interest in enjoyable activities, becoming more pessimistic, and consistent exhaustion.
The first piece of advice is to identify what’s causing your burnout, as there are many different causes. Overwork is obviously one, but there are others too — lack of human connection, lack of being appreciated/valued, and lack of meaning and purpose. A surprisingly significant one is lack of autonomy — when you feel like you can’t make your own decisions or chart your own course.
Different causes of burnout require different solutions. If your burnout is from a lack of relationships, for example, a vacation is not going to help you. Or if it’s from a lack of feeling appreciated, then taking more naps is not going to help you.
If you’re not sure what’s causing your burnout, there’s a great two-minute burnout quiz from Harvard Business Review that can help you pinpoint why you’re burnt out and what you can do about it.
Another key is recovery. Just like elite performers know, real productivity requires balancing full effort with intentional recovery, because rest is as important as the work itself.
Dr. Sahar Yousef, a cognitive neuroscientist and lecturer at UC Berkeley, developed the 3M framework, which is helpful for implementing different kinds of recovery:
Macro recovery: Take a half-day or full day off every month (like a 3-day weekend).
Meso recovery: Take a couple of hours off each week. One of the most powerful actions is to go out in nature and take a walk or stroll. Even 15 minutes outdoors reduces cortisol, the stress hormone.
Micro recovery: These are quick 1-2-minute resets throughout the day — such as closing your eyes, taking deep breaths, or brief mindfulness exercises. Deep breathing is especially powerful because it activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which reduces strong emotions like anger, anxiety, or fear. It also reduces your heart rate and blood pressure.
Two other helpful strategies are gratitude and reframing. I strongly advocate having a gratitude practice. My favorite is the “3 by 3” — writing down three things you’re grateful for every day for three weeks. This rewires your brain to be more positive.
Lastly, reframing is a really powerful technique to increase resilience. Reframing acknowledges our pain while also seeing its potential to foster growth and success.
Q: How can EQ help with managing uncertainty and ambiguity?
The challenge isn’t necessarily the uncertainty itself; it’s managing the emotional response, which can include anxiety, frustration, disappointment, annoyance, irritation, and fear.
Step one is to acknowledge your emotions. Labeling feelings provides clarity and improves regulation. You can say things like “I feel anxious” or “I am annoyed.” If you can name it, you can tame it. Apps such as How We Feel can help you expand your emotional vocabulary. With it, you check in throughout the day on a 12 x 12 grid of emotions. Since the average American can only accurately identify three emotions in real-time (happy, sad, angry), you can be way above average by using this app.
Step two is adaptability. There’s cognitive adaptability (learning new things, changing your mind, etc.), but emotional adaptability is just as important, especially when you face adversity. For example, work projects and priorities shift all the time. Maybe you’ve been working on something for two months, only for your boss to tell you to change course. It’s natural to feel frustration or disappointment. But the question is what comes next: Do you stew or adapt?
Emotional flexibility allows you to pivot and change course while effectively processing your emotions. It’s taking the weekend to chew on the situation and figure out what you’re going to do next, rather than dwelling on it for a month.
There’s a great quote from Adam Grant, who says that intelligence is not just thinking and learning well — it’s rethinking and unlearning well. EQ enables us to face uncertainty with a positive outlook, learn continuously, and remain agile in a changing world.
In an uncertain environment, “learn-it-alls” will outperform “know-it-alls” because they will act and lead with self-awareness and curiosity, not ego.
Q: For somebody who wants to learn more about EQ, what resources or books do you recommend, and how can they follow you?
Three suggestions. First, you can follow me on LinkedIn, where I post daily EQ insights. Second, you can visit my website, RichardHua.co, which has a host of videos, articles, and book recommendations on the topic. And third, via my Substack newsletter, EQ & Success.
As for foundational must-read books, I recommend:
Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence
Marc Brackett’s Permission to Feel
Travis Bradberry’s The New Emotional Intelligence
All three provide a strong starting point for learning and practicing EQ.
And one final thing – the best way to develop EQ is to practice it with others. Find some friends who value these “human” skills and work on them together. You’ll find that this is one of the most meaningful, beneficial, and connecting things you can do.
