We’ve all met someone who’s brilliant on paper but loses their cool in a tough situation or tanks a conversation because they react to conflict. The truth? Intelligence gets you far, but it’s not enough. If you want to thrive in life and work, you need something more powerful. What you need is emotional intelligence.
At Move Strong Method® we teach that emotional intelligence (EIQ) is about three things: awareness, behavior, and choice.
Training these three skill sets helps you:
- know what drives your reactions,
- manage your emotions instead of letting them manage you,
- make smarter choices under pressure.
EIQ isn’t just “nice to have”. In today’s constantly stimulating and high-intensity world, emotional intelligence habits are required for you to successfully navigate the complexity and challenge of your day-to-day life.
What Is Emotional Intelligence (EIQ)?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to “think about” your emotions and to allow your emotions to “inspire thought”. It includes 4 topic areas that we dive more deeply into in an upcoming blog. The first and most important topic area is emotional perception. The ability to be aware of your emotional experience. Most of us are aware we are experiencing emotion when we have an emotional reaction to something.
Emotional reactions are a biological autopilot response that happens deep in the emotional center of our brains. These reactions are an important part of our natural survival mechanism and, in truly life threatening situations, they can keep us safe. When emotional reaction goes unchecked by emotional intelligence, we miss an opportunity to choose what happens next.
Think about a time when you said something you instantly regretted — that moment when stress, frustration, or fear hijacked your brain, and you reacted instead of responding. That’s what happens when emotional intelligence skills are missing from the moment.
Using emotional intelligence skills means slowing ourselves down enough to take the wheel back from emotional reaction and steer toward an intentional and purposeful response.
EIQ skills that help you take the wheel back from your reactions:
- Self-Awareness, like noticing your patterns, such as realizing, “Wow, I feel impatient or snippy in afternoon meetings when I haven’t eaten enough lunch.”
- Emotional Management, like knowing when emotions are present and driving your action. Managing this can look like pausing before firing off a snarky text or email.
- Conscious Choice: You make 30,000 to 40,000 small choices a day, most of which are unconscious. A conscious choice looks like pausing to lay out the action you want to choose and double-checking that it takes you to your desired destination.
The best part about emotional intelligence is that we are all born with the potential for it! Anyone can develop positive emotional intelligence habits through education, training, and practice.
Why Emotional Intelligence Habits Matter More Than Ever
There is a variety of evidence both anecdotal and research based to show that emotional intelligence often outperforms IQ when it comes to professional and personal success (O’Boyle et al 2011).
Think about it. Do you want a manager who is amazing with facts and spreadsheets but melts down when there’s a setback? Or a teammate who’s technically brilliant in their subject area but challenged to listen to colleagues, collaborate, or take feedback?
Here’s the hard truth: we all have moments when emotional reactions drive our choices and change the course of our experiences and relationships. As mentioned above, emotional reactivity is part of our built-in safety system, and sometimes our emotional reaction will save, support, and protect us. The problem is that “stressors” are so constant and persistent in our daily lives that we are on the offense, ready to react, more often than we are aware.
The whole point of training to strengthen your emotional intelligence habits is to put choice—some might even say control—back in your hands. We cannot stop the natural emotional reactions we have. We can become aware of when reactions are happening, what they signal to us, and create habits that help us choose what happens next.
When you have conscious control over more of your choices, your emotional intelligence becomes the game-changer that increases resilience, reduces burnout, and elevates you to the best version of yourself that you enjoy being and others want to live and work with.
Habits That Build Emotional Intelligence
So, how do we take control of our response when a reaction happens? It’s not about reading a self-help book and calling it a day. It’s about practicing small, repeatable habits (suggestions listed below) that change the way you show up for yourself and for others.
Give one of these three practices a try and be sure to adjust anything you need to make the action feel authentic and doable for you.
Self-Awareness in the Moment
Goal: Pick a specific time, day, or regular experience to notice what you feel and how it shows up in your body, thoughts, and behavior.
Try this: Set a silent timer three times a day. When it chimes, ask: What am I feeling, where do I feel it, and what story am I telling about it? Write one sentence to yourself via text or notes in your phone to learn any common patterns with emotion.
Why it works: You cannot steer what you cannot see. This awareness exercise gives you the wheel.
Acknowledge Emotions When They Happen
Goal: Read the moment and respond to human needs.
Try this: In your next meeting or conversation, pay attention to two tracks: Track A is content—what’s being said. Track B is tone and felt sense—what’s being felt aka. sensations, emotions or reactions. If tone drops, or before moving on to the next point, ask with care, “What is the tone of things after talking about ___?” or name it and check, “I’m picking up tension. What are you getting, and do we need to say anything else on the topic?”
Why it works: People support what they help build. Seeing others clearly lowers friction.
Self-Management Under Pressure
Goal: Create a gap between trigger and response using the 4×4 reset.
Try this: In a charged moment, inhale for 4, exhale for 4, and do that 3 times. Then pick one sentence that answers “What is the focus right now?” e.g. “Let’s slow down and look at options.”
Why it works: Short pauses reduce dysregulating reactions and keep you present to the task at hand.
Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
We are each the leading role in our own lives, and being a leader is often about setting the tone and pace for what’s happening. It is hard to inspire yourself and help yourself thrive—let alone others—when your emotions are in charge of the choices you make. This is true in both professional and social roles. You can be a leader at work, parenting as a leader at home, taking the lead with friends and family, or simply working to improve your own self-leadership in your day-to-day life.
Regardless of your path to leadership right now, emotional intelligence in leadership is often the missing ingredient to both individual and collective success. With it, we build trusting connections, improve understanding, and facilitate cohesion and collaboration. While IQ, training, life experience, and subject matter expertise open doors to opportunity and relationships — emotional intelligence keeps doors open.
Now What?
Every professional performance coaching session always ends with practice. So it’s time to pick yours. How will you start growing your emotional intelligence today?
Remember, the good news is that you do not need to overhaul your life or drastically change the way you do things. You do need to pick one simple – repeatable – doable action like we listed above AND you need to set a reminder to take this action.
I’ll probably say this in every blog; behavior change rule #1 is never expect yourself to remember a new action. It’s not personal. It’s just the way your nervous system is designed. So always set a cue to remember the action you want to take.
At the end of the day, “emotional intelligence habits” are not buzzwords. They’re an important part of our survival as well as a path to thriving in life. EIQ separates the stressed and stuck from the focused and accelerating.
The choice is yours. You can let your reactions run the show or start training the emotional intelligence skills that will change how you think, lead, and live.
Sometimes, the smartest investment you can make is not another degree or certification.
Sometimes, the smartest investment is in looking at the tools that already exist within you and learning how to optimize using them for your benefit and the benefit of everyone around you—so that all boats rise.
Want to know more about the Move Strong Method®?
If you like working on your own, start with my DIY course. If you lead a team or an organization, bring this training to your people so they can lead themselves well, with less burnout and more ownership.
All you need to improve your EIQ is one useful habit at a time and a plan to practice them. Let’s build that together.