Key ideas
Abstract
- Emotional intelligence concerns recognising emotions and using that information when thinking and acting.
- Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management provide four areas for practice.
- Training can improve measured emotional intelligence, although results depend on what is measured and how training is organised.
- Judge practical progress through specific behaviour and feedback from people affected by it.
An emotionally difficult conversation can involve several distinct problems. You may miss your own irritation, notice it but speak sharply, overlook the other person’s concern or avoid returning to the discussion. Separating these difficulties helps identify what needs practice. Self-awareness concerns recognising your response; self-management concerns what you do with it; social awareness attends to the other person; relationship management concerns how you handle the interaction over time (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009).
Connected to
Emotions | Self-Awareness | Emotional Regulation | Active Listening | Communication | Emotional Maturity
The four skills
Self-awareness involves noticing what you feel in the moment and recognising patterns across people and situations. Someone may notice that urgency makes them interrupt, or that criticism brings an impulse to discredit the speaker. They can acknowledge disappointment without requiring the other person to resolve it. Knowing long-term goals helps them notice when an immediate reaction conflicts with those goals. See Self-Awareness for journalling, values and feedback exercises.
Self-management involves using that awareness to guide behaviour. It includes delaying a sharp reply, listening before offering a solution and tolerating a short-term frustration while pursuing a longer-term goal. It also includes sustained habits: returning to an unresolved problem, keeping commitments and making room for rest. A quick, disjointed response, persistent negative commentary or inability to acknowledge another person’s success can provide occasions for reflection. None is an EI test by itself. The practical methods belong in Emotional Regulation.
Social awareness concerns other people’s emotions and circumstances. Attention moves from rehearsing your reply to hearing their words, noticing their response and checking your interpretation. This can involve recognising that a colleague is overloaded before adding a request, accurately representing an idea you disagree with, or naming an unresolved concern in a meeting. Observing a face or posture gives a clue, not access to another person’s thoughts. Active Listening explains how to check understanding.
Relationship management uses this information across repeated interactions. It includes explaining decisions, acknowledging effort, discussing disagreement directly and repairing mistakes. Relationships develop through the frequency, quality, depth and duration of contact. A history of dismissing someone’s contributions can make a later request harder to discuss. Curiosity and courtesy still matter when people disagree or have little in common. Communication contains examples of feedback and repair.
The four areas work together. If a colleague challenges a proposal, you might notice defensiveness, pause before replying, ask which part concerns them and agree how to revise the work. A difficulty at any step suggests a more specific practice than trying to improve emotional intelligence in general (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009).
Scientific models and measurement
Scientific models distinguish different meanings of emotional intelligence. An ability model concerns perceiving emotion, using it in thinking, understanding how emotions develop and managing them (Salovey & Mayer, 1990; Mayer et al., 2008). A performance test asks someone to solve an emotional problem. A self-report measure asks how capable they believe themselves to be, while a broad workplace inventory may also include personality and professional competence.
Those measures answer different questions. Confidence in being empathetic may not match accuracy in a task or how colleagues experience the person. Keeping the measures distinct makes it easier to understand what a research result actually demonstrates (Mayer et al., 2008).
Bradberry and Greaves’ four skills overlap with this literature, but do not reproduce the ability model’s four branches. A person can also describe themselves as empathetic while other people experience them as dismissive. Self-report, observed behaviour and feedback should therefore be kept distinct.
Training studies show moderate average improvements in measured emotional intelligence, with variation between programmes and measures. One meta-analysis covered 24 studies containing 28 samples of healthy adults and found gains that included follow-up improvements (Hodzic et al., 2018). Another also found a moderate positive training effect (Mattingly & Kraiger, 2019).
These results support the possibility of improvement through training. They give less certainty about whether a particular short exercise changes everyday relationships or work performance, because programmes differ in content and the outcomes they assess. Practical progress therefore needs its own evidence, such as fewer interruptions or more reliable follow-through.
Choosing a practice
Start with an observable problem: “I interrupt when challenged” gives a clearer target than “I need higher EQ.” Ask someone who experiences the behaviour for a recent example, then choose one response to rehearse. You might wait until the person finishes and summarise their concern before answering. Try the response in ordinary situations and ask what changed (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009).
A colleague who manages disagreement well may be able to explain what they notice and do. Record their suggestions, try a small selection and arrange a follow-up conversation about the result. Treat this as guided practice rather than a test score: the useful evidence is what happened in the interaction.
Stress can make an established skill harder to use. Notice your tone, pace and attention on difficult days as well as calm ones. Record the occasions when you pause or repair an interruption, including what made the response possible. Frequent self-criticism provides little information about the skill itself.
References
Bradberry, T., & Greaves, J. (2009). Emotional intelligence 2.0. TalentSmart.
Hodzic, S., Scharfen, J., Ripoll, P., Holling, H., & Zenasni, F. (2018). How efficient are emotional intelligence trainings: A meta-analysis. Emotion Review, 10(2), 138-148. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917708613
Mattingly, V., & Kraiger, K. (2019). Can emotional intelligence be trained? A meta-analytical investigation. Human Resource Management Review, 29(2), 140-155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2018.03.002
Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2008). Emotional intelligence: New ability or eclectic traits? American Psychologist, 63(6), 503-517. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.63.6.503
Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185-211. https://doi.org/10.2190/DUGG-P24E-52WK-6CDG