Emotional Intelligence: What It Is and How to Build It

Research suggests that emotional intelligence plays an important role in our relationships, communication, well-being, and overall functioning. Studies also indicate that it is not a fixed trait and can be strengthened over time.

But what exactly is emotional intelligence? According to Yu-Chen Chen and colleagues:

"Emotional intelligence refers to an individual's awareness of their emotions and their ability to effectively regulate them. Emotional intelligence also encompasses the ability to empathize with and establish meaningful relationships with others."

In practice, emotional intelligence involves recognizing what you are feeling, understanding how emotions influence your thoughts and behaviour, tolerating emotions and responding effectively rather than reacting automatically, and maintaining awareness of both your own experience and the experiences of others.

It's important to note that emotional intelligence is not static, even people with strong emotional intelligence may find these capacities temporarily disrupted during periods of trauma, loss, chronic stress, illness, or significant life change.

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The Key Concepts

High emotional intelligence

Tends to look like accurate noticing; recognizing what you feel, staying aware of impact, tolerating complexity, and adjusting without abandoning yourself. These capacities map onto the four-branch model of perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions.

1. Perceiving Emotion: This is the ability to accurately identify and register emotions in oneself and others. Key skills: Reading facial expressions, identifying body language, and detecting emotional content in artwork, voices, or environments.

2. Facilitating Thought Using Emotion: This is the capacity to use emotions to direct and improve cognitive processes like thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving. Key skills: Using changing moods to consider different perspectives, prioritizing thinking based on current emotional states, and generating specific emotions to aid in memory or judgment.

3. Understanding Emotion: This is the ability to comprehend complex emotional connections, transitions, and the meanings behind them. Key skills: Understanding how emotions combine or blend (e.g., how surprise and joy create awe), recognizing emotional transitions (e.g., how frustration can lead to anger), and interpreting the causes of emotions.

4. Managing Emotion: This is the highest-level skill involving the conscious, reflective regulation of emotions in both oneself and others. Key skills: Staying open to both pleasant and unpleasant feelings, effectively evaluating strategies to modify an emotional state, and managing emotions in social interactions without suppressing or overreacting.

Low emotional intelligence

Tends to look like misreading and reactivity. People may struggle to identify what they are feeling, dismiss or avoid emotions, misinterpret the intentions of others, personalize quickly, become overwhelmed by emotional states, or react before reflecting.

Low emotional intelligence is not necessarily a lack of caring. Rather, it often reflects difficulties accurately perceiving, understanding, or managing emotions in oneself and others. This can contribute to misunderstandings, relationship conflict, poor boundaries, impulsive reactions, and difficulty learning from emotional experiences.

It is also important not to confuse emotional intelligence with niceness. Someone can be highly accommodating and still have low emotional intelligence if they cannot accurately understand themselves, set boundaries, repair relationship ruptures, or recognize their impact on others. Likewise, someone can be direct and still have high emotional intelligence if they are self-aware, regulated, and able to navigate emotions effectively.

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Practical Steps to Build Emotional Intelligence

1. Practice naming without explaining: Label the feeling (sad, irritated, ashamed, threatened, disappointed, relieved, resentful, lonely) without analyzing it, fixing it or rushing it.

2. Slow down the first story: When something happens interpersonally, notice any assumptions you're making, what you're feeling, and consider what else might be true. This supports your capacity for emotion management and perspective-taking.

3. Track body cues: Notice how your body responds before you have the language to describe what you feel. Maybe it's a tight chest, tense shoulders, pulling away, clenched jaw, buzzing, or heaviness. Emotion recognition help with regulation.

4. Get relational feedback from safe people: Emotional intelligence requires both introspection and learning about your impact and what happens externally when you're under stress. Feedback from a trusted friend, family member, therapist, or other safe relationship can help identify patterns, strengths, and blind spots that may be difficult to recognize on your own.

5. Practice staying with difficult emotions: When uncomfortable emotions arise, notice the urge to immediately distract yourself, solve the problem, seek reassurance, or push the feeling away. Instead, spend a few moments allowing the emotion to be present while observing what happens.

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The Takeaway

Emotional intelligence is not about always remaining calm, rational, or unaffected. It is the ability to recognize, understand, and work effectively with emotions as they arise.

These capacities are best understood as a set of skills rather than a fixed trait. Like any skill, they can be strengthened over time, but they can also become harder to access during periods of trauma, loss, chronic stress, illness, or significant change.

Your One Action Step

For one week, pause once a day and write: What am I feeling? What triggered it? What do I need? What would help me respond rather than react?

The goal is not to get the answers "right," but to practice noticing and understanding your emotional experience with greater accuracy, while also strengthening your emotional awareness, reducing automatic reactions, and increasing your ability to respond intentionally.

References: Chen YC, Chiang YC, Chu HC. Comprehensive meta-analysis of emotional intelligence. Work. 2025 Feb;80(2):548-566. doi: 10.3233/WOR-230553. Epub 2025 Apr 2. PMID: 39240606. John D. Mayer, Salovey P, Caruso DR. Emotional Intelligence: Theory, Findings, and Implications. Psychological Inquiry. 2004;15(3):197-215.