The four domains of emotional intelligence
Two questions generate the whole map. Are you reading or handling, and is it yourself or someone else?
The grid
The arrangement popularised by Daniel Goleman organises emotional intelligence along two lines. One runs from perceiving to acting: noticing what is happening emotionally, versus doing something useful about it. The other runs from self to others. Crossed, they give four domains: reading yourself, handling yourself, reading others, and handling others.
The grid earns its keep because the four cells genuinely dissociate. Someone can be precise about their own inner weather and poor at reading a room. Someone can read a room instantly and still say the thing that makes it worse. A single "EQ" figure flattens exactly these differences, which is why a profile is more informative than a total.
How our five facets sit on it
- Self-Insight: reading yourself, the noticing and naming cell
- Composure: handling yourself under load
- Attunement: reading others from words, tone and behaviour
- Repair: handling others, especially after friction
- Drive: the folded-in domain, running across both columns
What the grid is not
It is not a set of types, and nobody belongs to a cell. It is a map of skills that vary independently, each a matter of degree, visible as everyday behaviour, recognisable in the moment and practisable one at a time. And it is not a scoring system: the grid says what to measure, not how, and the how splits the whole field in two.
The rest of this family
Each page here covers one part of the territory: the map starts at what emotional intelligence is.
Find out how you read a room, and how you handle one.
54 questions, about 12 minutes. Free to take, and your band is free to see.
Take the EQ test