Leveling Up Starts Within: Emotional Intelligence as a Growth Strategy

For International Services Week – Level Up: Skills and Strategies for Growth

Author: Robyn Duffy

When we talk about leveling up and building the skills and strategies that carry us toward future success, the conversation usually starts with the tangible stuff. New certifications. Technical fluency. The next tool, the next platform, the next credential on the profile. All of it matters. But I’ve become convinced that the skill with the highest long-term return is the one that rarely makes the development plan: emotional intelligence.

Back in 2023, I gave a talk I called My Journey of Imperfection. The title was the most honest thing in the whole deck. You don’t stand up to teach emotional intelligence because you’ve mastered it. You teach it because you’re still in the middle of learning it, and you’ve decided to stop pretending otherwise. Two years later, that framing feels even more relevant, because growth, real growth, isn’t about arriving at some polished, finished version of yourself. It’s about getting a little more skilled at being human, on purpose, over and over.

First, let’s clear up what emotional intelligence isn’t

We’ve quietly accepted a strange idea: that emotional intelligence means being unflappable. The person in the meeting who never gets rattled. But that’s not what EI is, and mistaking composure for emotional intelligence is one of the most limiting assumptions I see in professional settings.

Emotional intelligence is not the absence of difficult emotions. It’s not suppressing what you feel until you look serene, and it’s not being “nice” all the time. It’s the ability to recognize your emotions as they happen, understand what they’re telling you, and choose your response rather than be hijacked by it. The frustration, the anxiety, the flash of defensiveness when someone challenges your idea in front of the team. None of that disappears. What changes is the gap between feeling and acting. EI lives in that gap.

That reframe is what makes EI a genuine growth strategy. If it were a fixed personality trait, there’d be nothing to develop. But it isn’t. It’s a set of skills, and like any skill, it strengthens with deliberate practice. Imperfection isn’t an obstacle to leveling up. It’s the requirement.

The emotion beneath the emotion

One of the most useful distinctions I’ve learned is the difference between primary and secondary emotions.

A primary emotion is your first, immediate reaction: fear, sadness, joy, anger. A secondary emotion is what you feel about that first feeling. Picture someone who feels anxious before a high-stakes presentation, then becomes frustrated and ashamed of themselves for not being more confident. The anxiety is primary. The frustration and shame are secondary reactions stacked on top of the original feeling.

At work, this plays out constantly. We almost always act on the secondary emotion while the primary one goes unexamined. The colleague who snaps in a status meeting usually isn’t angry at the meeting. They’re anxious about a deadline or feeling unheard, and the anger is just the visible layer. When you learn to ask what’s underneath, you stop reacting to the symptom and start addressing the cause. As martial artist Joe Hyams put it, anger doesn’t demand action. Act in anger and you lose self-control. The feeling is information. You still get to decide what to do with it.

Why this is a business skill, not a soft skill

For a long time, emotional intelligence got filed under “nice to have,” while the serious currency was IQ and technical expertise. The research tells a different story.

According to TalentSmart, which tested emotional intelligence against 33 other key workplace skills, EI is the single strongest predictor of performance, explaining roughly 58% of success across all types of jobs. In their data, 90% of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence, while only about 20% of bottom performers are. It even shows up in compensation: people with high EQ earn, on average, around $29,000 more per year than their low-EQ counterparts.

I’m careful with statistics, since they get repeated until no one remembers the source, but the pattern holds, and it rings true for anyone who’s worked on a team. This is especially true in our line of work. In consulting and transformation projects, almost nothing happens alone. You’re helping people through change they didn’t ask for, balancing the priorities of different stakeholders, and sensing when a project starts to strain. Technical skill gets you in the door. Emotional intelligence decides what happens once you’re there. It’s why a brilliant specialist can struggle when they move into leadership, and why someone with ordinary credentials can become the person everyone wants to work with.

The work itself: three places to start

When I talk about this, I focus on three personal competencies, the ones you can practice on your own, without anyone else in the room. They’re the foundation for everything involving other people that comes later, and they’re a practical place to begin if you want to level up this skill on purpose.

Self-awareness comes first, because nothing else is possible without it. You can’t regulate an emotion you haven’t noticed. This is the practice of catching your feelings early, knowing your triggers and your limits, and understanding how your internal state colors what you perceive and how you behave. My favorite practical tool here is the 6-second rule: it takes roughly six seconds for a stimulus to travel from the emotional center of your brain (the amygdala) into the reasoning center (the neocortex). So when something lands hard, a curt email or a pointed comment, you breathe and count to six before responding, and ask yourself: What am I making up about this? What’s actually true? Six seconds is often the entire difference between a response you’re proud of and one you have to apologize for.

Self-regulation is what you build on top of that awareness. It’s managing disruptive impulses, staying flexible when plans change, and remembering that you have a choice in how you respond. Imagine a leader who walks into a room visibly upset and opens with a barrage of accusatory questions. Everyone in that room now faces a regulation test. The skill isn’t suppressing your reaction; it’s choosing a response that serves the situation instead of escalating it. Cognitive reframing, building distress tolerance, reading the nonverbal cues in the room: these are practices, not personality traits.

Self-motivation is the quieter competency, and maybe the most important over a long career. Daniel Goleman identified four elements: a personal drive to achieve, genuine commitment, initiative, and optimism. In practice, it looks like setting goals that stretch you, persisting after setbacks, using realistic self-talk instead of catastrophizing, and operating from the hope of success rather than the fear of failure. It’s what keeps you going through the slow, unglamorous middle of any growth, long after the excitement has worn off.

The point of imperfection

The goal was never to become someone who has it all figured out. I still count to six. I still catch myself reacting to the secondary emotion before I’ve found the primary one. I still have conversations I’d handle differently in hindsight.

But that’s not failure. That’s the work. There’s no finished version of emotional intelligence. You return to it daily, imperfectly. And that’s exactly why it’s such a powerful growth strategy. The technical skills you build today will eventually be outdated. The capacity to understand yourself, manage your reactions, and keep showing up with intention only compounds.

So if you’re waiting until you’ve mastered yourself before you start, don’t. Start in the middle. Start imperfect. That’s the only place any of us actually begins. And it’s a pretty good place to level up from.