Last week I told you about the two skills that run quietly underneath the working life I've built. The first one is emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the skill of reading a situation, including the one inside your head, and acting on it in a way that moves it somewhere better. It's learnable, it's sharpen-able and it gets better with practice.
When I say EQ, I mean a whole stack of skills you're using all day without naming them.
Reading the room, yourself included, and acting on what you read. You catch the shift in a client's tone halfway through a Zoom call, you see the person at the back of the room who has something to say, you feel the tightness in your own chest that indicates something's off before your brain does. Then you do something with it while the moment's still live: ask the question, address what you noticed, adjust course before a small problem turns into a big one. The catching and the acting both get sharper with practice.