EQindex® Field Guide
EQ is your delivery system for everything you know. Learn the 6 Domains of Emotional Intelligence and how to measure the intent behind behavior.
If leadership is influence, emotional intelligence is the conduit of influence.
Your emotional intelligence (EQ) determines your ability to interact effectively with other humans. It’s your delivery system through which you share your knowledge, experience, and skills with others. If your delivery system is broken or inefficient, your influence won’t translate or make the right impact. To achieve high performance, you don’t just need great technical skills (IQ), you need a great delivery system (EQ).
Plenty of people cruise through life unaware of emotional intelligence as a concept, and plenty who are aware of the concept lack the self-awareness and willingness they need to make more than a marginal improvement in their EQ skills. Those who put in deliberate, concerted effort to learn through experience will see the biggest positive impact on their personal and professional lives.
EQ vs. personality
We love to be told who we are. Maybe you’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the DISC profile, or some other personality test. While these kinds of tests can tell us a lot about who we are, they tell us very little about who we can become.
When we talk about EQ, we’re not talking about your personality. Personality can shift and evolve over time, but it is, for the most part, a combination of fixed traits. Call your personality your core, since it’s the core of who you are, how you think, and what you do. Surrounding your core is your crust. Your crust is your emotional intelligence. It surrounds, and, when used appropriately, enhances your personality.
The key difference between your core and your crust is that emotional intelligence is a learnable skill. Your core is solid and somewhat fixed, but your crust definitely isn’t. You can strengthen it, develop it, and improve it. As you improve your interactions with others, you’ll find that you can more easily connect, collaborate, and innovate.
Defining EQ through history
The concept of emotional intelligence has been around as long as humans themselves, but it wasn’t until the late 20th century that it became a formal research topic. Edward Thorndike framed it in 1920 as acting wisely in human relations. Peter Salovey and John Mayer defined it in 1990 as the ability to monitor your own and others’ feelings, discriminate among them, and use that information to guide thinking and action. Daniel Goleman popularized it in 1995 as recognizing and managing feelings in ourselves and in our relationships.
In the beginning, emotional intelligence was an amorphous idea of social interaction. People were either good at it, or not good at it. We’ve gotten better at breaking it down into component parts, and that has paved the way for EQ measurement. You may recognize the common models used to measure EQ worldwide:
| Goleman | MSCEIT | EQi 2.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Self-awareness | Perceiving emotions | Self-perception |
| Self-management | Using emotions | Self-expression |
| Social awareness | Understanding emotions | Self-regulation |
| Relationship management | Managing emotions | Empathy |
| Social skills |
What’s missing
There is a key problem with these popular emotional intelligence frameworks: they don’t acknowledge that behavior is merely a symptom of your emotional intelligence, not the source.
Behavior doesn’t just exist, it’s driven by a person’s intent and motivations. How you think about yourself and others has a profound influence on how you interact with those around you. If we don’t account for the fundamental beliefs a person has about themselves and others, we can easily assign high emotional intelligence scores to those with manipulative tendencies. This dark side of charisma can let destructive leaders slip through the cracks in both self- and multi-rater assessments.
Your perceptions and actions are lag indicators of what precedes them, your motivations. Measuring behavior still matters, but to get the full EQ picture, we need to measure the intent behind the perception and action. Frameworks that can’t account for motivation are broken from the get-go. The EQindex® adds that missing circle: motivation, alongside perception and action.
The 6 Domains of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence consists of three internal and three external domains that act as companions: self-regard and social regard, self-awareness and social awareness, and self-management and social management.
| Internal domains | External domains | |
|---|---|---|
| What you believe | Self-regard | Social regard |
| What you know | Self-awareness | Social awareness |
| What you do | Self-management | Social management |
The six domains address different aspects of emotional intelligence: what you believe (the regard domains), what you know (the awareness domains), and what you do (the management domains). The regard domains cover your beliefs about yourself and others and the intent you bring to social interactions. The awareness domains cover your understanding of your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and those of the people around you. The management domains cover the behavior and skills you bring to social interactions — the culminating domains that determine your overall interpersonal effectiveness.
What you believe: self-regard and social regard
As emotional intelligence’s lead indicator, what you believe truly shapes how you show up in the world. Self-regard and social regard become a “prism of intent” through which we perceive and interact with others.
What do you believe about yourself? Self-regard boils down to four distinct things: respecting yourself, having confidence in your abilities, believing in your own self-worth, and knowing that you matter and have inherent value. People with high self-regard develop better coping skills to adapt and respond to the challenges of life. They have the courage and confidence to reach their potential by resisting the opinions, criticisms, and limitations that others place on them.
What do you believe about others? Social regard boils down to five distinct things: genuine concern for others, respect for others, appreciation for differences, faith in the goodness and capacity of people, and empathy for others. Social regard enables deeper connection. It counters cynicism by reinforcing belief in human goodness. People are more willing to trust and open up when they feel genuinely cared for.
Here’s how the two show up in practice:
| High scorers | Low scorers | |
|---|---|---|
| Self-regard | Show patience with themselves, allow for mistakes, hold themselves accountable, see failure as a learning experience, recover from setbacks | Are overly critical of themselves, measure self-worth by others’ opinions, see failure as a reflection of self-worth, fail to develop their unique talents |
| Social regard | Treat all people with respect, model kindness, show curiosity to learn from others, believe people are inherently good | Discriminate in their treatment of others, feel entitled, are suspicious and cynical, are indifferent or rude in relationships |
The guide pairs each domain with ten practice moves. A few from the self-regard list: explore and identify your personal strengths, admit mistakes and apologize to those you have offended, express gratitude and avoid complaining, teach, coach, or mentor others. And from the social regard list: ask someone you don’t know well to share their story, organize diverse groups to solve problems, recognize that diversity is a fact but inclusion is a choice.
What you know: self-awareness and social awareness
Your ability to perceive the world around you affects how you interact in it.
Self-awareness is four things: recognition of your personality, disposition, and temperament; perception of your behavior and interactions with others; awareness of your motives, beliefs, and values; and consciousness of your own feelings and desires. Self-awareness is an acquired skill. It depends primarily on personal honesty, effort, and a willingness to make ongoing, small self-corrections. Without self-awareness, it’s impossible to improve yourself because you don’t know where you are.
Social awareness covers recognizing and understanding the emotions of others, awareness of the social dynamics around you, interpreting the intents and desires of others, and perceiving the mood and morale of the social environment. People with high social awareness build and sustain strong relationships, collaborate effectively, and have a higher tendency towards inclusivity.
| High scorers | Low scorers | |
|---|---|---|
| Self-awareness | Willing to listen to feedback, open and honest with themselves, monitor themselves while stressed, perceive and correct themselves | Are defensive and unwilling to listen, excuse or justify their own behavior, can’t perceive how their behavior affects others |
| Social awareness | Show empathy, focus on people more than tasks, spot potential conflict before it happens, give others their full attention | Are insensitive to others’ needs and feelings, focus on tasks more than people, can’t detect conflict ahead of time, are preoccupied with their own thoughts |
The practice lists here get specific: assign others to tell you what’s wrong with your ideas, stop talking, look for the causes of your emotions and identify the points where they shift, focus not only on what people say but on what they don’t say, track shifts in morale and mood in groups, and examine your role when there is a conflict.
The full guide keeps going from here: the What You Do domains (self-management and social management, with their high- and low-scorer profiles and 20 more practice moves), then the improvement half — the five traits of deliberate practice, breaking interactions into component parts, 10 questions to ask a trusted mentor about your EQ, the Head-Heart-Hands model behind Behave Until You Believe, the Patterns of Deflection that signal you’re regressing to the mean, the 4-step EQ Improvement Mechanism, and a page-by-page walkthrough of a sample EQindex® self-assessment report.
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