What it is
Peter Salovey and John Mayer framed emotional intelligence as a mental ability in 1990, and later split it into four branches: perceiving emotions, using emotions to help you think, understanding emotions, and managing them. Daniel Goleman’s 1995 bestseller made the idea famous, and researchers note that some of his popular claims went further than the evidence.
It can be measured three ways: ability tests that score your answers to tasks, like an IQ test; self-report scales; and broader “trait” models that overlap a lot with personality. Researchers generally treat the ability tests as the standard.
A related idea I find useful is emotional sovereignty: feeling your emotions fully without being controlled by them, with enough room to choose a response instead of reacting automatically.
How it shows up for me
I’m strong at perceiving emotion and weaker at managing my own in the moment. Knowing which branch I’m weak in made the work specific instead of vague.