No One Taught You This: An Honest Look at Emotional Intelligence
Adults feel pressure to just "know" certain things. But we can't know what we were never taught.
I see it time and time again in my practice. "Everything just feels hard." "I feel off." Vague, heavy, hard to pin down, and honestly, some of the most common things I hear in a session.
We want to jump straight to self actualization without doing the basics first. We can't cope without information. And a lot of that information comes down to two things: emotional intelligence and identification.
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence, or EI, is essentially the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions, while also being able to recognize and respond well to the emotions of others. It's not a personality trait you either have or don't. It's a set of skills, which means it can be learned, practiced, and developed over time (Filice & Weese, 2024).
How do we develop emotional intelligence?
This is the part people get stuck on, because "just be more self aware" isn't exactly a game plan. Developing EI is a process, not a switch you flip. It comes from consistent, intentional practice: naming what you're feeling in the moment, noticing your patterns and triggers, and building the habit of checking in with yourself instead of pushing through. Research on EI training programs shows this isn't just a nice idea. Structured practice actually moves the needle, improving people's measured emotional intelligence, not just their sense that they're doing better (Kawashima et al., 2025).
What do we do with emotional intelligence once we develop it?
This is the piece that gets skipped the most. Once you can identify what you're feeling, you use that information. You let it tell you something: I'm anxious because I'm underprepared. I'm irritable because I haven't had a break in days. I feel off because something didn't sit right earlier and I never addressed it. Emotional intelligence isn't just knowing your feelings exist. It's using them as data so you can actually cope, communicate, and make decisions instead of just reacting.
Feelings get a bad reputation.
Picture anger. Having anger isn't inherently bad. There are no bad emotions. But think about how anger usually presents itself. Picture a toddler yelling, biting, hitting, throwing. None of that is okay, and a caregiver is right to stop it. But what a child is usually told is "don't do that," which registers less as "that behavior isn't okay" and more as "what I felt was bad." They're rarely taught what to do instead with the anger itself.
We can learn to express and identify anger, and every other emotion, along with their triggers. But we can't deal with an emotion until we actually feel it first. Skipping straight to coping, without ever letting yourself feel what's underneath, is like trying to treat a wound you haven't looked at yet.
Feeling the emotion is part of the definition of emotional intelligence. Identification comes before regulation, every time.
Why any of this matters.
Emotional intelligence helps limit stress, helps you feel more connected to yourself, and has been shown to improve experiences at work, including communication and how connected people feel to their teams (Kawashima et al., 2025). It's also linked to stronger psychological well being and resilience, which tend to reinforce each other. The more emotionally intelligent someone is, the more resilient and well they tend to feel, and that resilience makes it easier to keep building the skill (Shengyao et al., 2024).
None of this is about becoming a different, endlessly calm person overnight. It's about giving yourself permission to feel what you feel, get curious about it, and then decide what to do with it, instead of skipping straight to "fixing" something you never let yourself understand.
If you're finding yourself stuck in the "everything just feels hard" or "I feel off" category and want support building this skill, visit my contact page and schedule with me or book a consultation.
References
Filice, L., & Weese, W. J. (2024). Developing emotional intelligence. Encyclopedia, 4(1), 583–599. https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia4010037
Kawashima, T., Ota, Y., Aikawa, G., Watanabe, M., Ashida, K., & Sakuramoto, H. (2025). Effectiveness of emotional intelligence training on nurses' and nursing students' emotional intelligence, resilience, stress, and communication skills: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Nurse Education Today, 151, Article 106743. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2025.106743
Shengyao, Y., Xuefen, L., Jenatabadi, H. S., Samsudin, N., Chunchun, K., & Ishak, Z. (2024). Emotional intelligence impact on academic achievement and psychological well-being among university students: The mediating role of positive psychological characteristics. BMC Psychology, 12(1), Article 389. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01886-4
