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.
Setting boundaries and holding them. A boundary is yours to keep. Other people won't hold it for you, and some of them will lean on it to see if it gives. You hold it, you support it, you protect it, like your business depends on it.
Building community. This is what happens when you're curious about people, when you're showing up consistently because you care, when you're playing a long game without keeping score. Word-of-mouth businesses run on it. Mine did for twelve years.
Communicating clearly for the person who's listening. The same point lands differently depending on who's across from you. A seasoned client and a nervous first-time buyer need the same information delivered two different ways. The skill is reading who you're talking to and shaping the message so it's clear to them. Most of us communicate in our own default register and hope it carries.
Listening to understand. Slow down enough to figure out what someone is telling you, and what's sitting underneath it. The real information lives there, and most of us are moving too fast to find it.
Every piece of what I just described is a skill. You can get better at any of it on purpose, the same way you got better at the technical parts of your job. None of it is fixed.
The personal version of this took me longer to see than I'd like to admit. I've been an EQ practitioner my whole career, using these skills on every client, in every room I've ever walked into, every time I've sat across from someone trying to figure out what they needed. The shift I had to make was realizing there were places in my own working life where I'd never thought to apply the expertise I'd been giving away all day. It showed up in how I priced, in how I let scope creep slide, in the boundaries I held firmly for clients and quietly failed to hold for myself, and in the Zoom calls where I read the room for everyone else while overriding what my own body was telling me. When I turned that same attention on my business, I found the spaciousness I needed to thrive.
Hi! I’m Carrie. I believe doing good work and living the life you want are not in conflict. If you’re ready to build that way, reply to this email or see how we can work together.
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