Emotional Intelligence
Two ways of framing it
Ability models (Mayer and Salovey) treat emotional intelligence as a set of cognitive skills: perceiving emotions accurately, using emotions to facilitate thought, understanding emotions, and managing them. Mixed models (Goleman) add personality and motivation, typically organised as four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness (empathy), and relationship management.
Skills that show up in questions
Self-awareness is the foundation - noticing your own triggers before acting. Self-management includes impulse control, reframing, and recovering from an amygdala hijack, where a fast emotional response bypasses deliberate reasoning. Social awareness means reading the room and taking another's perspective. Relationship management covers influence, coaching, conflict handling, and teamwork. Labelling an emotion tends to reduce its intensity; empathy is understanding another's feeling, not agreeing with it or taking it on (sympathy).
Traps
Emotional intelligence is not "being nice", not agreeableness, not a fixed trait, and not the same as IQ or technical skill. Empathy is not endorsement. Suppressing emotion is not self-management. High self-reported EQ scores are not proof of EQ - self-awareness is the usual weak link.
Worked example
A colleague snaps in a meeting. Instead of matching the tone, name it calmly ("that landed hard - can we take it offline?"), pause, and return to the issue later with SBI feedback: "In the review, when you cut across the client, the room went quiet; here is what I would find more useful."