The Five Practices of Emotionally Intelligent People: Week 2, Show Up for Yourself

This is the second post in a five part series on the practices of emotionally intelligent people. If you missed Week 1, start there.

Knowing what you feel is only half of it. The other half is what you do with it.

There is a specific kind of email that most of us have written and not sent. Usually composed at ten in the evening, after a day that went wrong in a particular way. The draft is honest. It is possibly even correct. It would also cause a problem that would take considerably longer to resolve than the one it was written in response to.

The fact that it sits in your drafts folder is not weakness. It is the gap, the space between the impulse and the action, working exactly as it should.

Self-expression and self-regulation are two halves of the same skill. Self-expression is the ability to communicate what you feel and believe honestly, constructively, with independence of thought. Self-regulation is the internal work that makes genuine expression possible rather than reactive: the ability to pause, to redirect, to choose your response rather than be driven by it. The pause and the voice. Both matter. Most people are stronger in one than the other.

What It Looks Like When It Is Not

Low self-regulation is easy to spot in others and surprisingly hard to see in yourself. It shows up as emails sent at the worst possible moment. As words delivered with a precision designed to land at exactly the wound it found. As decisions made in the heat of something that would have looked very different forty-eight hours later.

Low self-expression is less obvious. It looks like agreeableness. It looks like professionalism. It feels, from the outside, like someone who is easy to work with, right up until they leave, or explode, or it turns out they have been harbouring a perspective that would have changed everything if anyone had known about it.

This Week

Find one message or conversation this week that activates something in you and do not respond until you have changed your physical state. A walk, a breath, anything that moves the energy before you put words to it. Then notice what you write instead. In one conversation, practice inserting a pause before you respond, even a small one, even when the answer feels obvious. Notice what is in the pause. And identify one thing you have been not saying. Write it down as if you were going to say it. You do not have to send it. Just notice what happens when you give it language.

Most people think the risk is saying too much. The longer, quieter risk is saying too little for too long and calling it professionalism.

Next week: what keeps you going when the work gets hard.