Examples of emotional intelligence, skill by skill

Six skills, side by side

These six rows match the six areas the EQTiger assessment uses. Other models slice the same territory differently, and the guide to the components of emotional intelligence, model by model compares them.

At home, where the stakes feel small

Home is where emotional intelligence is easiest to skip, because the people there will usually forgive you. Three scenes:

• A father notices his chest tighten when his fifteen-year-old says “whatever.” Instead of escalating, he says, “I’m getting annoyed, and I don’t want to have this talk annoyed. Can we pick it up after dinner?” He named the feeling before it made the decision for him.
• A woman realizes on the drive home that she has been rehearsing a complaint about her husband for twenty minutes. She asks herself whether she is angry at him or worn out from work. It is mostly work. She tells him that, and the complaint shrinks to one sentence about the dishwasher.
• Two sisters share a group chat with their mother. When their mother sends a guilt-heavy message about Thanksgiving, one sister waits until morning to reply. The overnight wait is the skill. The reply she sends is shorter and kinder than the one she typed at 11 p.m.

Putting a feeling into words has a measurable effect even in a lab. In one brain-imaging study, labeling the emotion in an upsetting picture reduced amygdala activity compared with other ways of processing the same picture. (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007) That was a task with photographs, not a family argument, so treat it as a reason to try naming rather than proof that it will calm your house. The interactive emotion wheel helps when the only word available is “bad.”

With friends: comforting, celebrating, checking

The better reply does three things. It uses her name, it stays with the loss instead of shrinking it with “at least,” and it offers something concrete while letting her choose. Listening without jumping in to fix covers the same move in longer conversations.

Emotional intelligence also shows when things go well. When a friend says she got the job, “That’s great” is fine. “You’ve been working toward this for two years. What did they say when they called?” is better. In four studies, people whose partners usually met good news with active, interested responses reported more intimacy and satisfaction, though the data were correlational. (Gable and colleagues, 2004)

A third friendship scene: you are sure a friend is upset with you because her texts got shorter. Instead of going cold in return, you ask, “You’ve seemed quiet this week. Are we okay, or is it just a lot going on?” The question tends to beat your theory. Across 25 experiments, imagining another person’s point of view did not reliably improve accuracy about what they felt or wanted, while asking them did. (Eyal and colleagues, 2018)

In public, with people you’ll never see again

• A man at an airport gate watches an agent get yelled at about a delay she didn’t cause. When it’s his turn he says, “Rough morning. I just need to know whether I should rebook.” The acknowledgment costs him four seconds.
• At a dinner with your partner’s colleagues, you notice one woman keeps starting to speak and getting talked over. You turn to her: “You were saying something about Lisbon?”
• Someone cuts in front of you at the pharmacy. You feel the heat in your face, decide it isn’t worth a scene, and say evenly, “I think the line starts back there.” Then you let it go, whatever they do.

None of these requires reading minds. They depend on noticing tone, who is speaking and who isn’t, and how a stranger’s day seems to be going. Faces help less than people assume: a large review concluded that the same facial movement goes with different emotions depending on the person and the situation, so a face alone cannot tell you what someone feels. (Barrett and colleagues, 2019)

In a disagreement, the hardest place to show it

Conflict is where most people’s emotional intelligence drops, because a pounding heart is bad at listening. Picture a couple arguing about money at 11 p.m. In the lower-EQ version, it keeps going until someone says the unforgivable thing. The higher-EQ version contains lines like these:

The first line is a pause with a return time, which calling a time-out in the middle of an argument explains step by step. The second checks understanding before the rebuttal. The third is a repair. None of them requires agreeing.

What gets mistaken for emotional intelligence

Some behaviors look emotionally intelligent and aren’t, at least not on their own:

• Always being calm. Someone who never shows frustration may be holding it in, and held-in feelings have a way of coming out sideways a week later.
• Always agreeing. Giving in to end every argument can be avoidance. A skilled person can say, “I see why you want that, and I still don’t think we should.”
• Never crying. Tears say nothing on their own about skill; what someone does while upset matters more. The answer to whether crying means low emotional intelligence goes into it.
• Reading anyone at a glance. Confident mind reading is wrong more often than the confident person expects.

For a longer list with each claim checked against research, read eight emotional intelligence myths.

Writing an example for a class, an interview or a review

If you need an example on paper, a four-part shape keeps it honest: the situation, what you noticed you or someone else felt, what you did with that, and what happened. Keep it under a hundred words and include one line someone actually said.

For scenes set in an office, such as a frustrated client or a tense handoff, use emotional intelligence at work: four everyday examples.

Collect three of your own this week

After three evenings you will usually see which of the six skills comes easily and which keeps slipping. For a more structured read on the same question, the free EQTiger assessment asks about all six through everyday scenarios. The definition behind every example on this page is in what emotional intelligence is.