If you have worked in a large organization in the last twenty years, you have probably met emotional intelligence. Usually as a slide.

It is a genuinely useful framework, and it is worth knowing how it lines up with what you are learning here, because the two describe the same territory in different words.

The Four Competencies

The best-known version is Daniel Goleman’s, and it has four parts.

• Self-awareness. Recognizing your own emotions, and what they are doing to your thinking and your behavior.
• Self-management. Regulating those emotions, and what you do about them.
• Social awareness. Recognizing emotions in other people, and reading the situation the two of you are actually in.
• Relationship management. Handling the relationship itself. Communicating, resolving conflict, working alongside people.

Those are the four. Now the part that usually gets left out.

The Framework Names the Destination

Here is the problem with it on its own. It is a description of competence. It tells you what somebody who has it can do. It does not tell you how to become that person.

You can read the four definitions, agree with all of them, identify which one you are worst at, and still have no idea what to practice on Tuesday morning.

That is what the four steps are for. They are the training. Each one produces a piece of the framework.

Where Each Step Lands

Mindfulness produces self-awareness. Directly. That is what it is. Noticing your feelings, emotions, thoughts and beliefs while they are happening, rather than reconstructing them afterward.

Insight and reframing together produce self-management. Not by suppressing an emotion, which is what people usually mean by managing one. By finding the belief producing it, and changing that. The emotion moves because its cause moved.

Compassion produces social awareness. Once you can observe your own distress without attaching a verdict to it, you can do the same with somebody else’s. It is the same skill, pointed outward.

And all four together produce relationship management, which is why it sits last in both models. You cannot handle a difficult conversation well without noticing your own reaction, staying decent about it, recognizing what is driving the other person, and choosing a response rather than firing one off.

Two Things Worth Taking From This

If you have been told you need to work on your emotional intelligence, in a review, by a partner, by yourself, that is not a verdict about your personality. It names a set of skills, and skills are trained.

And if the framework felt abstract when you first met it, that was not a failure on your part. It described the destination without telling you how to get there.

So if you already know the emotional intelligence framework, you already know what these four steps are building toward.