Are you sure you’re the emotionally intelligent one?
I just read a piece of absolute drivel which moved me to seize my pen for this post.
It started with a former client sending me a passage that, she said, resonated powerfully with her.
Frankly, my blood is still boiling. I’m angry about what it tells people.
I’m also very worried about what it might lead them to believe about themselves and their colleagues.
The piece encourages people to mistake a flattering interpretation of their own behaviour for evidence of emotional intelligence. It offers readers a ready-made explanation for difficult relationships at work.
They are the emotionally intelligent ones, trying to make things better.
The people who resist them are the problem.
And that resistance confirms the diagnosis.
My position is not that anyone identifying with this text must be wrong about their colleagues or workplaces. But they are being encouraged to reach a conclusion without examining the evidence.
If I am struggling with office politics, I can now reassure myself that the problem is the people around me. I can feel sorry for myself, point the finger, and feel vindicated in doing nothing.
This is what makes the text so harmful. It offers vindication where reflection is needed.
If I do nothing, nothing changes.
My colleagues remain dreadful. My workplace remains hell on Earth.
I remain helpless. I continue to hurt. I still lose sleep over how toxic my work environment is.
Have a read of the passage itself:
“Emotionally intelligent people tend to believe, with a sincerity that is both their strength and their vulnerability, that things can be better. They invest in trying to improve relationships, to have honest conversations, to name what is not working and offer something more constructive. In a toxic environment, this effort is not simply unrewarded. It is often punished. The person who says the honest thing, who tries to introduce accountability or care into a culture that has none, frequently becomes the problem. Not because they are wrong, but because their presence is disruptive to a system that has found an equilibrium, however unhealthy.”
Look at how the argument works.
Each step sets the next up, stealthily seducing the reader into a flattering interpretation of their own behaviour: they are the emotionally intelligent person trying to make things better, surrounded by cruel people. The text never asks the reader to examine whether their interpretation is actually true!
There is no consideration that the person intervening might have
Instead, the reasoning is circular.
If people resist my efforts to improve things, I can interpret that resistance as evidence that the environment is toxic. And once I’ve decided the environment is toxic, I can interpret their resistance as punishment for disrupting an unhealthy system.
The possibility that I might be wrong never enters the picture.
An interpretation that turns resistance into confirmation of its own correctness is not emotional intelligence. It is a self-serving narrative.
The Relationship Wisdom pivot: emotional intelligence begins where self-protection ends.
Emotional intelligence requires something rather more demanding than the conviction that you are the person trying to make things better. It requires the capacity to question your own interpretation, in particular the will and ability to distinguish between what you intended and what you brought about.
You need to take appropriate responsibility for your own contribution.
That is where your agency begins.
If someone else’s resistance to your intervention is the very thing you use to prove that your interpretation is correct, how can you ever hope to discover that you were wrong?
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📧 alexandra@coachingforinspiration.com
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