Psychology & Ethics · March 2026
Emotional Intelligence: Skill Nobody Taught You That Shapes Everything Else
Emotional intelligence has been called the “it factor” of success, the secret ingredient behind great leaders, great relationships, and better decisions. It has also been badly explained for decades. Here is a clearer account — and three questions that can immediately make you better at it.
Think of the last time you said something you immediately wished you could take back. A sharp reply in a meeting. A text sent in frustration. A comment at the dinner table that landed harder than you meant it to. In the moment before you said it, there was a window — a gap, barely a second wide — where a different choice was available. You didn’t take it. Most of us don’t, not reliably, not under pressure, not when it matters most.
That gap — and what you do with it — is where emotional intelligence lives.
Justin Bariso has spent over a decade writing about emotional intelligence, coaching founders and leaders, and translating a field full of academic jargon into something ordinary people can actually use. His book, EQ Applied, has been translated into a dozen languages. His column draws over a million readers a month. And the question he gets asked most often, the one that opens almost every conversation he has on the subject, is the simplest one: What is emotional intelligence, really?
The question persists, Bariso says, because most of what’s out there on the topic is “cloudy, fuzzy, full of theory, fluff, and vibes, but not well defined or easy to understand.” So here is a clearer account, built on the three things Bariso believes you actually need to know — and three questions that can immediately sharpen your EQ, starting today.
Thing 1: What Emotional Intelligence Actually Is
The shortest accurate definition Bariso has found is this: emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage emotions. He prefers to phrase it as “making emotions work for you, instead of against you.”
That includes your own emotions and those of the people around you. And it goes further than just “how you feel.” Emotional intelligence covers everything that happens when our feelings intersect with our choices — how we decide what to say, when to say it, how to respond to someone else’s bad day, how to hold our nerve in a difficult conversation, how to recover after we’ve handled something badly.
What Does “Managing Emotions” Actually Mean?
It’s Not About Suppressing How You Feel
Managing your emotions does not mean not having them. It does not mean smiling through things that hurt, or pretending to be calm when you’re not. It means that your emotions don’t automatically run the show. You feel the anger, the anxiety, the disappointment — and then, instead of immediately acting on it, you have a moment of awareness where you can choose your response. That awareness is the foundation. Without it, emotions don’t get managed; they just happen, and you clean up afterward.
Research originally pioneered by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer in the early 1990s, and later popularised by Daniel Goleman‘s landmark 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, has consistently shown that EQ is a better predictor of long-term success — in careers, relationships, and health — than IQ alone.
IQ gets you the job. EQ determines whether you thrive in it. The person who is technically brilliant but leaves a trail of damaged relationships in every room they enter is a common archetype. So is the person who isn’t the smartest in the room but has an uncanny ability to read what’s happening, say the right thing at the right moment, and make everyone feel heard. The second person often goes further.
Thing 2: What Emotional Intelligence Is Not
One of the most common misunderstandings about emotional intelligence is that it means being perpetually nice. Agreeable. Conflict-averse. The person who never pushes back, never delivers hard news, never says anything that might upset someone.
This is not emotional intelligence. It is emotional avoidance — and it often does more harm than a difficult conversation would have.
Bariso is insistent on this point. High EQ does not mean you never confront. It does not mean you suppress your reactions or give everyone a pass. It means you can deliver hard feedback in a way that the other person can actually hear. It means you can disagree without demolishing. It means you can be honest without being cruel. The goal isn’t to remove your emotions from the equation. It’s to find the right balance between what you feel and what serves the situation.
EQ Is Not the Same as Empathy
And Empathy Has Its Own Limits
Empathy — the ability to sense and share another person’s feelings — is a part of emotional intelligence, but it is not the whole of it. Unmanaged empathy can actually work against you. If you absorb everyone’s distress as your own, if you feel all the pain in a room and have nothing left to give, that’s not high EQ — that’s burnout. Bariso calls the alternative “emotionally intelligent empathy”: learning to show genuine care for others without losing yourself in their experience. It’s the difference between a therapist who helps their patient and a therapist who goes home and can’t function because they took on every patient’s weight.
The second common misunderstanding is that EQ is a fixed trait — that you either have it or you don’t. Bariso’s entire career is built on the opposite premise: emotional intelligence is a skill, and skills can be learned. You are not stuck at the level of emotional awareness you had at twenty-two. Every difficult conversation you handle well, every moment of self-restraint, every time you pause before you react and choose your response instead — these are reps in a gym. They build something.
Thing 3: Emotional Intelligence Runs on Decision-Making, Not Just Feeling
This is the piece that most EQ content skips. Emotional intelligence is not only about how you experience emotions. It is about how emotions underpin every decision you make.
We are, as Bariso puts it plainly, “emotional creatures.” We like to think of ourselves as rational agents who weigh evidence and arrive at logical conclusions. Decades of neuroscience and behavioural economics have dismantled that flattering self-image. We feel first. We rationalise second. The story we tell ourselves about why we did something usually comes after we’ve already done it. Which means the emotion that drove the decision — the irritation, the pride, the fear, the desire to be liked — is the actual mechanism, whether we acknowledge it or not.
High EQ doesn’t eliminate this. It makes it visible. When you can see the emotion that’s driving you — I’m reacting this way because I feel undermined, not because the argument is actually wrong — you have a choice about whether to act on it. When you can’t see it, you don’t.
The Three Questions That Actually Change Your Behaviour
Theory is useful. Practice is what actually changes things. And the most practically useful tool Bariso says he has encountered for improving emotional intelligence is not a framework from an academic study. It came from a comedian.
Bariso was watching an interview with Craig Ferguson — the Scottish-American comedian and former Late Late Show host — when Ferguson said something he couldn’t shake. Before you say anything, Ferguson told the interviewer, you should always ask yourself three questions:
The Three Questions
1. Does this need to be said?
Before you open your mouth, check whether what you’re about to say actually needs to exist in the world. A lot of what we say — in arguments, in group chats, on social media — adds noise without adding anything useful. This question is a filter.
2. Does this need to be said by me?
Sometimes something genuinely does need to be said — but you’re not the right person to say it. Maybe you’re too emotionally involved. Maybe you don’t have the relationship with this person that would make the message land. Maybe someone else could say it better, or is better placed to say it without escalating the situation. This question saves you from the missionary impulse to correct everything you see, everywhere, always.
3. Does this need to be said by me, right now?
Even if something needs to be said, and even if you’re the right person to say it — timing matters more than most of us admit. A conversation had when someone is exhausted or defensive or already overwhelmed lands differently than the same conversation had when they’re calm and receptive. This question is about choosing the moment, not just having the courage.
Ferguson joked that it took him three marriages to learn this lesson. Bariso says he uses the rule every single day — often more than once. It takes about three seconds to run through the three questions. In those three seconds, it catches a remark that would have started an argument, a message that would have created a misunderstanding, a comment that would have been technically true and entirely unhelpful.
The questions work because they introduce a pause — that fraction-of-a-second gap between feeling and acting — and fill it with intention rather than impulse. This is, in its simplest form, what emotional intelligence practice looks like. Not therapy. Not journaling for hours. Just three questions, asked before you speak.
Why This Matters More Now Than Ever
There is a specific reason that emotional intelligence — a concept that has been around in academic literature since the early 1990s — feels increasingly urgent in the present moment. Bariso names it directly: as artificial intelligence takes over more of the technical, analytical, and knowledge-processing tasks that humans used to do exclusively, the skills that remain irreducibly human are precisely the ones EQ encompasses. Empathy. Context-reading. Relationship-building. The ability to sit with discomfort and respond rather than react.
AI can write the memo. It cannot read the room.
The other reason is more personal and less technological. We are living through a period of extraordinary friction — political, social, institutional — and most of the tools we use to communicate with each other amplify exactly the wrong impulses. Social media rewards the sharp take, the immediate reaction, the satisfying demolition of an opposing view. The three questions are almost structurally incompatible with how most people use the internet. Which is also why asking them, deliberately and consistently, is becoming more unusual — and therefore more valuable.
Go back to that moment at the beginning — the comment you wished you could take back, the message sent in frustration, the remark that landed harder than you meant. In almost every one of those cases, the three questions would have caught it. Does this need to be said? By me? Right now?
The answer, more often than we’d like to admit, is no. Not because we don’t have a point. Not because our feelings aren’t valid. But because the moment isn’t right, or the delivery won’t work, or the energy spent on a reply that satisfies our impulse to correct or retaliate costs more than the alternative of simply letting it pass.
Emotional intelligence, at its most practical, is the skill of knowing the difference. You can start practising it in your next conversation. The three-second test costs nothing. The payoff, compounded across years of relationships and decisions, is significant. Ferguson took three marriages to figure it out. You don’t have to.
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On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, which confirmed its 2016 finding of a decline in worldwide progress towards gender parity.
Over 2.8 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. As many as 104 countries still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and it is astonishing that a handful of countries still allow husbands to legally stop their wives from working.
Globally, women’s participation in the labour force is estimated at 63% (as against 94% of men who participate), but India’s is at a dismal 25% or so currently. Most women are in informal and vulnerable employment—domestic help, agriculture, etc—and are always paid less than men.
Recent reports from Assam suggest that women workers in plantations are paid much less than men and never promoted to supervisory roles. The gender wage gap is about 24% globally, and women have lost far more jobs than men during lockdowns.
The problem of gender disparity is compounded by hurdles put up by governments, society and businesses: unequal access to social security schemes, banking services, education, digital services and so on, even as a glass ceiling has kept leadership roles out of women’s reach.
Yes, many governments and businesses had been working on parity before the pandemic struck. But the global gender gap, defined by differences reflected in the social, political, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attitudes of men and women, will not narrow in the near future without all major stakeholders working together on a clear agenda—that of economic growth by inclusion.
The WEF report estimates 135 years to close the gap at our current rate of progress based on four pillars: educational attainment, health, economic participation and political empowerment.
India has slipped from rank 112 to 140 in a single year, confirming how hard women were hit by the pandemic. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two Asian countries that fared worse.
Here are a few things we must do:
One, frame policies for equal-opportunity employment. Use technology and artificial intelligence to eliminate biases of gender, caste, etc, and select candidates at all levels on merit. Numerous surveys indicate that women in general have a better chance of landing jobs if their gender is not known to recruiters.
Two, foster a culture of gender sensitivity. Take a review of current policies and move from gender-neutral to gender-sensitive. Encourage and insist on diversity and inclusion at all levels, and promote more women internally to leadership roles. Demolish silos to let women grab potential opportunities in hitherto male-dominant roles. Work-from-home has taught us how efficiently women can manage flex-timings and productivity.
Three, deploy corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the education and skilling of women and girls at the bottom of the pyramid. CSR allocations to toilet building, the PM-Cares fund and firms’ own trusts could be re-channelled for this.
Four, get more women into research and development (R&D) roles. A study of over 4,000 companies found that more women in R&D jobs resulted in radical innovation. It appears women score far higher than men in championing change. If you seek growth from affordable products and services for low-income groups, women often have the best ideas.
Five, break barriers to allow progress. Cultural and structural issues must be fixed. Unconscious biases and discrimination are rampant even in highly-esteemed organizations. Establish fair and transparent human resource policies.
Six, get involved in local communities to engage them. As Michael Porter said, it is not possible for businesses to sustain long-term shareholder value without ensuring the welfare of the communities they exist in. It is in the best interest of enterprises to engage with local communities to understand and work towards lowering cultural and other barriers in society. It will also help connect with potential customers, employees and special interest groups driving the gender-equity agenda and achieve better diversity.