Composure

Where it sits

Composure is one of five facets, and it covers handling yourself. The five are arranged along two lines: reading versus handling, and yourself versus other people. The territory as a whole is mapped at what emotional intelligence is.

It is measured by 8 items in the questionnaire, five keyed positively and three reversed. The full method is here.

What a high score looks like

Pressure moves you less than it moves most people, and you come back to level quickly when it does.

What a low score looks like

Strong feeling tends to take the wheel, and a bad moment carries further into the day than you would like.

Low here is not a character verdict. It describes what tends to happen, and it is the part of the profile most worth working on, which is why the practical recommendations start from the two lowest facets rather than the highest.

The part nobody tells you

Staying level can shade into not registering that something is wrong. Composure is meant to buy you a choice, not silence.

Every facet has a cost at the top end as well as the bottom. A report that only describes strengths as good is describing a person who does not exist.

What this facet cannot tell you

It is a self-report figure, so it measures how you see yourself on composure, which is useful and is not the same as how you come across. It carries a margin of about 9 points either way, so a small difference between two facets is not a difference at all. And it is not clinical: it cannot identify a condition and must not be used to decide anyone’s job, place or care.

The other four

• Self-Insight: noticing, naming and tracing your own emotions.
• Attunement: reading other people accurately from words, tone and behaviour.
• Repair: cooling a conflict down and putting a relationship back together after it.
• Drive: using emotion to get yourself moving, and keeping it out of decisions where it does not belong.