Emotional intelligence has become one of the most talked-about skill sets in personal growth and leadership. People want to communicate better, stay steady under pressure, reduce overwhelm, and enjoy their day-to-day life more. These experience require adept emotional intelligence skills.
Here’s the part most people don’t know: emotional intelligence is made up of four parts, and each part plays a different role in how you think, connect, and make choices. Once you understand these four parts, you can see where to begin, and train to increase your emotional intelligence.
In this blog, we break down the four parts of emotional intelligence, a little history on how this framework came to be, and the part that matters most. At Move Strong Method®, we believe your EIQ starts with self-awareness because you cannot shift what you cannot see. If you can name an emotion, you can tame an emotion — but first you need to know it’s there.
The Four Parts of Emotional Intelligence (and Where This Framework Came From)
The idea that emotions influence thinking isn’t new. Psychologists began studying this connection as early as the 1960s through research on social intelligence and emotional perception. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that emotional intelligence became widely known.
Researchers Peter Salovey and John Mayer first used the term “emotional intelligence” in academic literature. Later, author and psychologist Daniel Goleman popularized the idea and organized it into four core skills.
According to this model, the four parts of emotional intelligence are:
- Self-awareness: Recognizing your emotions as they happen and understanding how they influence what you do.
- Self-management: Choosing your behavior when emotion is present. This includes staying steady, pausing before reacting, and redirecting your focus when needed.
- Social awareness: Seeing and Understanding the feelings, needs, and emotional tone of the people around you.
- Relationship management: Guiding interactions, communication, and collaboration using the three skills above.
These four parts give you a map for the inner and outer skills that shape your emotional life. And while all four are important, there’s a reason MSM puts self-awareness at the top.
Why Awareness Comes First at Move Strong Method®
When we talk about emotional intelligence and self-awareness at MSM, we keep things simple. Self-awareness of your emotions is the ability to notice your inner experience in real time. That includes thoughts, emotions, sensations, impulses, and automatic reactions.
Psychological research supports this. One definition of emotional intelligence emphasizes emotional perception — your ability to monitor your emotional state as it unfolds. That perception is considered the starting point for emotional intelligence.
Why does emotional self-awareness matter?
Because you cannot manage, or change what you are unaware of.
The good news is that awareness is both an experience and a trainable skill. You can practice noticing emotions, behaviors, thoughts, and patterns at different moments or in different ways. This practice trains your brain to become more skilled at helping you notice what’s going on inside of you.
At MSM, this is exactly what we teach in Module A of our ABC Methodology. Awareness training teaches you to bring consciousness to what you usually do automatically. You catch yourself mid-pattern — the moment you snap, withdraw, rush, shut down, or tense up — and giving you the chance to choose what happens next.
This is also how emotional intelligence is developed. You do not become emotionally intelligent by forcing a new behavior or avoiding an undesirable one. You develop emotional intelligence through awareness of current behaviors. This is the foundation that makes new behavior possible.
The Link Between Awareness and Emotional Habits
We all have emotional habits. A habit is an automatic action you perform under certain circumstances — without consciously choosing the action. Think of someone you react to quickly, a topic at work that instantly creates tension or a headline or situation that makes your body tighten before your mind has even processed the details.
That automatic emotional response is a form of emotional habit.
When we try to change a habit — emotional or physical — most of us focus only on the new habit we want. We skip the “now” moment. Instead of pausing to notice what we are doing unconsciously, we overlook the automatic behavior happening in the now.
People often ask, “Why does it matter what I’m doing now? Shouldn’t I just focus on the new habit I want?”
It matters because your current habit contains clues. When you pay attention to what you already do, you learn:
- What triggers the emotion
- What your body does
- What story your mind tells
- What actions you take automatically
These details show you how your existing emotional habit works and can give you valuable clues for how to replace your old reaction with the desired response you want most.
We’ll talk more about emotional intelligence habits in a future blog. For now, know this: automatic reactions direct your day more than you realize. They can move you toward resilience or toward overwhelm and burnout. Your opportunity is to start noticing our emotional habits so we have the choice to keep them or change them.
Two Validated Self-Awareness Exercises
Here are two simple, research-supported ways to build self-awareness without adding stress to your day.
1. Sensation-to-Label Scan
What to do:
Pick one to three random times during the day and pause for 30 seconds.
Ask yourself:
- What am I feeling?
- What sensations do I notice (tight chest, shallow breath, clenched jaw)?
- What emotion is here? Name it: “I feel irritated,” “I feel tense,” “I feel tired.”
Why it works:
Research on affect-labelling shows that naming an emotion reduces limbic system activity and helps the thinking part of your brain come online. You gain emotional vocabulary, emotional clarity, and self-understanding in real time.
Bonus:
Write your answers using “notes” in your phone to help you see patterns: “3:15 pm — chest tight — named it impatience.”
2. Daily Micro-Reflection Log
What to do:
At the end of the day, set a timer for five minutes and answer these questions:
- What emotion did I experience most today?
- What triggered it?
- What did I do in response?
- What could I try next time?
Why it works:
This is metacognitive reflection. It brings your experiences into conscious awareness and strengthens your ability to choose your next action. Over time, daily awareness helps reduce automatic reactions and supports calmer, more intentional responses — a process grounded in the same neuroplasticity principles used to train the brain for resilience and emotional regulation.
Awareness is the Anchor of Emotional Intelligence
When we ask, “Of the four parts of emotional intelligence, which one matters most?”
The answer at Move Strong Method® is always: self-awareness.
Because real change happens in this order:
- Become aware
- Name what you observe
- Brainstorm how you want to shift it
- Create a plan of action to make the shift
Remember, you cannot shift what you cannot see. Our automatic emotional reactions will drive us towards resilience or toward overwhelm and burnout. Through self-awareness practices like those listed above, you can notice your emotional habits and empower you ability to choose a new response.
At MSM, anyone can dive deep into awareness training via Module A of our self-paced DIY course.
If you lead a team, our enterprise program uses the same sequence to build emotional intelligence for professionals at all levels through awareness first, emotionally intelligent behavior second, and choice as a guided process third.