# Emotional Intelligence Characteristics: Five Behaviors You Can Learn Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/emotional-intelligence-characteristics/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/emotional-intelligence-characteristics.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving building self-awareness at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The five emotional intelligence characteristics, from self-awareness to social skill: what each looks like at work, and why all of them can be learned. ## Key facts - Title: Emotional Intelligence Characteristics: Five Behaviors You Can Learn - Category: Personal Qualities - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Building Resilience, Communication - Primary keyword: emotional intelligence characteristics - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/emotional-intelligence-characteristics/ ## What this page covers - The five emotional intelligence characteristics, from self-awareness to social skill: what each looks like at work, and why all of them can be learned. - Practical guidance for emotional intelligence characteristics - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation The most widely used model names five emotional intelligence characteristics: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill. Put simply, they describe two abilities: noticing emotions as they happen, in yourself and in other people, and using what you notice to choose how you respond. None of them requires you to stay calm all the time. That last part surprises many people. You can feel criticism sharply, get irritated in a meeting, or lie awake over a mistake and still be highly emotionally intelligent. What counts is what happens in the short gap between the feeling and your reaction, and that gap turns out to be something you can work on. ## The five emotional intelligence characteristics The academic idea of emotional intelligence dates from 1990, when psychologists Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer defined it as the ability to monitor your own and other people's feelings, tell them apart, and use that information to guide your thinking and actions. The definition treats emotions as information. The skill lies in reading them accurately and letting them inform what you do, not in switching them off. The five characteristics most people know come from Daniel Goleman, who applied the idea to work in his 1998 Harvard Business Review article "What Makes a Leader." Three of them face inward and describe how you handle yourself. Two face outward and describe how you deal with other people. Goleman and Richard Boyatzis later condensed the model into four domains (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management), and researchers still disagree on whether emotional intelligence is best understood as an ability, as a person's view of their own abilities, or as a blend of skills, personality and motivation. So the number of characteristics depends on the model. The behavior underneath stays recognizably the same, and that behavior is what each of the five describes. ### Self-awareness Self-awareness is knowing what you feel while you feel it, and how that feeling affects you and the people around you. It is the foundation for the rest. In the four-domain version, both pairs start with recognizing an emotion before managing it, because a reaction you have not noticed is one you cannot yet steer. At work, it looks like catching the tightness in your chest when your manager asks whether you have a minute to talk about the report, and recognizing it as worry about being judged before you walk into the conversation. It also means knowing your patterns: which situations reliably set you off, and why some of them hit harder than they objectively should. Sometimes the why is a belief rather than the event itself. > You have this slightly irrational idea that everything has to fall into place right from the start. If I had been criticized — and I know now that you don't die from it — I would have found it embarrassing to be corrected, maybe even a bit humiliating. That was the feeling: it would be embarrassing not to deliver what I was supposed to. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, describing how she felt before her first placement. What she put her finger on is not the criticism but the expectation underneath it: that everything should work from the start. [Naming a belief like that](/knowledge/self-awareness/iceberg-beliefs/) is self-awareness in practice, and it is often the step that makes a strong reaction manageable. ### Self-regulation Self-regulation is controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses and moods: thinking before you act. The four-domain version calls it self-management, and it is the characteristic most often mistaken for having no feelings at all. It is not suppression. [Holding irritation down](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/managing-anger-at-work/) until it leaks out as sarcasm two days later is not regulation; noticing the irritation and choosing what to do with it is. Picture a colleague questioning your analysis in front of the team. The impulse might be to defend every number at once. A regulated response could be to ask which part they disagree with, make a note, and come back with an answer once you have checked. You still felt the heat. You simply did not let it write your reply. ### Motivation Motivation, in Goleman's sense, is pursuing goals with energy and persistence for reasons that go beyond money or status. It appears in the five-part list but has no domain of its own in the four-domain version. It still belongs here, because it describes how you handle your own discouragement, which is as much an emotional task as handling anyone else's. It shows up most clearly after a setback. A project you cared about gets cut, or your first draft comes back covered in comments. Someone strong here feels the disappointment, lets it register, and then returns to the work because it matters to them, instead of quietly withdrawing effort for the rest of the month. ### Empathy Empathy means taking other people's feelings into account, and it starts with perceiving them accurately. In Mayer and Salovey's ability model, perceiving emotions in yourself and others is the first of four branches, ahead of using, understanding and managing them, because every later step depends on reading the situation correctly. The four-domain version files empathy under social awareness. At work, empathy is noticing that a teammate has gone quiet since the deadline moved, and asking how the change affects their part of the work rather than assuming you already know. It is [not the same as agreeing](/knowledge/people-skills/empathetic-skills/). You can fully understand why a colleague is frustrated with a decision and still think the decision was right. ### Social skill Social skill is managing relationships and building rapport; the four-domain version calls it relationship management. It is where the other four characteristics meet another person in real time. It looks like raising a disagreement so that the working relationship survives it, helping a tense conversation cool down instead of escalating, or giving a colleague credit in front of others when the work was partly theirs. None of this calls for charm or an outgoing personality. A quiet person who listens closely and says the difficult thing plainly can have just as much of it as the most talkative person in the room. ## How to tell whether you have these characteristics The honest answer depends on how you check. Emotional intelligence is measured in two quite different ways. The MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test) scores how you perform on emotional problems, while questionnaires such as the TEIQue and the Bar-On EQ-i ask you to rate your own emotional abilities. The second kind captures your self-perception. That is useful, but it can differ from how you actually behave on a stressful afternoon, and nobody sees their own blind spots. So treat any self-rating as a starting point and check it against two things. The first is your own recent moments. Think of the last time you felt criticized, rushed or irritated at work and walk through it: what you felt, what you assumed, what you did, and how the other person responded. A handful of moments like that tell you more than any general impression of yourself. The second is the people who see you react. Asking a colleague "Am I emotionally intelligent?" invites a polite non-answer. Ask something specific and forward-looking instead, such as how your disagreement in yesterday's meeting came across and what would have made it land better. Then hear the whole answer before you explain yourself. A structured self-check gives you somewhere to begin: the free Job Skills Test offers [a snapshot of your habits](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) at work in a few minutes, which you can then hold up against those moments and against what colleagues tell you. ## Can emotional intelligence be learned? Whether emotional intelligence itself is fixed or changeable is still debated among researchers. For your working life, a more useful distinction comes from Goleman's 1998 book *Working with Emotional Intelligence*: emotional intelligence sets your potential for learning the practical skills, while emotional competence is the learned, job-related capability built on top of it. Being high in the first does not guarantee the second. That puts the weight where it belongs. What colleagues and managers notice is not an inner quality but behavior: the pause before a reply, the question asked instead of the assumption made, the disagreement raised without heat. Behavior like that is built through practice in ordinary situations, so a gap you notice today is something you can work on rather than a verdict on your personality. You stay entirely yourself while you change how you respond. ## The skills that make emotional intelligence visible at work Trace the examples above back to what someone is actually doing in the few seconds between a feeling and a response, and three workplace skills keep turning up. **Building Self-Awareness** is how the five characteristics stop being abstract and start describing you. Part of it is spotting the deep-seated beliefs that make certain moments land harder than they should: a belief about achievement can turn a small correction into a sense of failure, and a belief about acceptance can make a short reply feel like rejection. The other part is feedback, asked for specifically and about the future, then heard out before you respond. It is an ongoing habit of noticing and asking, not a score you either reach or miss. **Building Resilience** explains how self-regulation actually works. Between something happening and your reaction sits an automatic thought, and it is usually the thought you react to. If your manager answers your update with a single word and the thought that flashes up is "they're unhappy with me," you have jumped to a conclusion. Resilience means catching that thought and testing it against what actually happened, which opens up a calmer and more accurate response. The feeling still arrives. It just no longer gets the final word on what you do. **Communication** is where empathy and social skill become visible to other people. Full attention, a genuine wish to understand, and adjusting to how the other person likes to talk are what "good with people" looks like from the outside. It also covers the moments that test emotional intelligence hardest: responding to a colleague who is angry, disagreeing without making it personal, apologizing when you got something wrong. Understanding someone never obliges you to agree with them. You can take their view in fully and still say clearly that you see it differently. The Job Skills Test, which is free, measures all three of these directly, so you can see [which one to practice first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than working on everything at once. Because it covers **twelve workplace skills** in total, it also shows where your existing strengths lie, and every one of them can be developed from wherever you stand today. A couple of these characteristics may already describe you on an ordinary working day, even if you have never put that name to them. If you know that one particular colleague's tone gets under your skin faster than anyone else's, you already have the kind of observation self-awareness is built from. The characteristics that feel out of reach say more about where you have had practice so far than about who you are. None of them asks you to become a different person; pick the one that would change your working week most, and start there. As your responsibilities grow, more of your results will depend on how you handle people at exactly the moments you feel least composed: a client who is unhappy, a deadline your team is about to miss, a manager who disagrees with you. Starting now, on small everyday frictions, is the easiest way to be ready for those. ## See your own skills profile All that is left is to look at your own starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your workplace skills: in 7 minutes it shows how you stand across all twelve, including the three above, and which ones would make the biggest difference for you to develop next. **[Discover my skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear instantly.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The five emotional intelligence characteristics, from self-awareness to social skill: what each looks like at work, and why all of them can be learned. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Building Resilience, Communication. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/resilience.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/emotional-intelligence-characteristics/ Preferred summary: "The five emotional intelligence characteristics, from self-awareness to social skill: what each looks like at work, and why all of them can be learned." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.