Emotional Intelligence – Do We Really Understand It?
- Brainz Magazine
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Donna Reynolds empowers clients to build confidence, understanding it as the foundation for achieving personal goals. With experience working with people of all ages, her Confidence is Key approach helps foster a positive mindset, enabling individuals to move forward with clarity, self-assurance, and resilience.
I tend to write about whatever shows up in life, in conversations, in passing moments, and often in sessions with my clients. Emotional intelligence is one of those ideas that’s been floating around for years, yet so many people talk about it without truly understanding what it means.
I was speaking with someone recently who told me they’d been handed a test of about 150 questions to measure their emotional intelligence. They weren’t in the right frame of mind to complete it, but it had to be submitted by a certain deadline. So they rushed through it, only to be told afterwards that they had no understanding of emotional intelligence.
And honestly, how can anyone decide that for you from a piece of paper, without any consideration of what was happening around you at the time? Without context, without conversation, without curiosity?
Is this just another example of how quick we are to throw labels at people without actually sitting down with them, engaging with them, or taking the time to understand who they are?
Instead, we hand them a piece of paper, having never met them, and from a set of multiple-choice questions we somehow decide, I know you. I know your emotional capacity. I know you have no understanding of your own emotions or anyone else’s.
So here we are in 2025, and if you do a quick Google search, you’ll find a neat little definition, emotional intelligence is “the ability to recognise, understand, and manage one’s own emotions, as well as to recognise, understand, and influence the emotions of others.”
So let’s dive a little deeper into emotional intelligence. Is it something we’re born with? Is it something we’re taught? And more importantly, how is it actually affecting people in everyday life here in 2025?
Because from where I’m standing, in my time of life, in the conversations I’m having, in the sessions I’m running, and in the friendships and connections I’ve built, emotional intelligence, or the lack of it, keeps showing up. Again and again.
Let’s look at some of the examples that have been coming up for me at this stage of my life.
I’m a single, middle-aged woman, I’m a therapist, and I spend a lot of time dealing with people, whether that’s through my mental health work, my property business, or just being a bit of a social butterfly. In other words, I’m constantly navigating emotions, mine and everyone else’s, whether I want to or not.
Let’s chat about the middle-aged part for a moment. Being middle-aged and single, while also running two businesses, means I naturally attract like-minded people, other single, middle-aged women for the most part, and plenty of them are carving their own path as entrepreneurs. We talk about all sorts of things, but the topic of singleness comes up a lot. And what’s interesting is that I keep hearing the same themes over and over again.
When you listen to women talk about why more of us are choosing to stay single, the reasons tend to repeat themselves. For a long time, I thought people were searching for integrity in others, but through conversations and experience, I’ve realised that what they’re actually looking for is emotional intelligence. They just don’t always know that’s the missing piece, or how to articulate it. Few people say, “I’m looking for someone emotionally intelligent.” But that is what they’re describing.
Because honestly, when in our lives did we ever hear our parents talking about emotional intelligence? It wasn’t a thing. And when we were younger, falling into long-term relationships, nobody was asking, “How emotionally aware are you?” It just wasn’t part of the conversation. We were told to look for stability, a good job, someone who didn’t cheat or slap you around, but emotional intelligence? Never mentioned. It wasn’t on the checklist.
So why now is it the thing so many of us are searching for, and yet the thing that seems to be missing so often?
Let’s lean into some of the conversations I’ve had recently, because the themes are starting to sound very familiar, mainly frustration around other people’s behaviour. And an all-too-familiar scenario is, of course, online dating.
I use online dating as an example because, in today’s society, it’s rare to meet anyone who hasn’t tried it, or who doesn’t at least know someone with experience of it. It’s become a shared cultural reference point, which is why it highlights so clearly where emotional intelligence is failing miserably in adulthood.
Online dating has become so normal that many people have become completely disconnected from the idea of meeting someone in a conventional way. It doesn’t even cross their mind that they might meet someone naturally, you know, the so-called old-fashioned way. In fact, meeting someone offline is now treated almost as unusual. With the language people use, “old school,” “not the norm,” “unusual,” is it any wonder they end up feeling lost, confused, and emotionally shut down?
People keep saying the same thing over and over, “I genuinely thought we were getting on well, we chatted for ages, and then he ghosted me.” Just disappeared from the conversation as if the connection never happened.
I hear it all the time, “It’s a cesspit, you have to dig through so much rubbish, I’m exhausted, I’m frustrated.” And just when they think they’ve connected with someone they might actually like to get to know, that person vanishes and has already moved on to the next match. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions, up, down, hope, disappointment, repeat. Another sentence I hear repeatedly is: “Online dating is all about sex now, it’s shocking what goes on.”
After a while, the constant micro-rejections take their toll. People become drained, disheartened, and even depressed. And of course, behaviours like this would affect anyone who is genuinely just looking to meet someone decent.
So imagine, just for a moment, how someone lovely, kind, and actually emotionally intelligent is supposed to fare in an environment like this. They’re walking into a digital arena that rewards quick thrills, not meaningful connection. They’re bringing depth to a space that was built to scroll past it.
Do we think that if more people online were emotionally intelligent, it might actually change the whole experience altogether? Imagine if all of us became aware of what it actually is, and if we started to engage in being emotionally intelligent. Imagine the changes this might have on the world as a whole. Now, I said the world, which may sound far-reaching or overzealous, but imagine if everyone in the world became emotionally intelligent. Imagine the problems this could solve. Should we all start to look at ourselves and look to become more emotionally intelligent?
As with almost everything that is psychology-based, there is another layer. Let’s take a look at that.
If we’re seeing such widespread struggles in adults, it begs the question, what’s happening with our children? How is their emotional intelligence developing in a world that looks very different from the one many of us grew up in?
How the next generation is learning to recognise, understand, and manage emotions, and whether the society they’re growing up in is helping or hindering that process.
Children, bless them. It’s such a confusing time to be growing up. They are constantly bombarded by outside influences, social media, computer games, television. The list goes on. And every platform has something to say about who they should be, how they should behave, and all the ways they’re supposedly falling short. The messages are loud, conflicting, and overwhelming.
I recently spoke about the structure of many schools today. Children are being trained to sit up straight, look forward, do what the teacher says, don’t speak unless spoken to, stand in line, and follow every instruction to the letter. But how on earth is this helping them develop emotional intelligence? They’re becoming little robots in the making.
Then we send them out into the world, into workplaces, relationships, and society, and suddenly expect them to think for themselves, communicate well, manage their feelings, solve problems, and show confidence. And when they struggle, people treat them as if they’re doing something wrong.
How can we expect children to develop emotional intelligence when we’ve been teaching them to conform at every opportunity? When do they learn to understand their emotions? When do they learn to express themselves? Where do they gain the confidence to make decisions, navigate conflict, or communicate assertively?
If we keep raising children to follow instructions rather than understand themselves, how are they supposed to function in society or build a career in a world that supposedly increasingly values communication, empathy, resilience, and independent thought?
Let’s look at the long-term effects this might have.
I’ve been following Erica Komisar for a while now, and I absolutely love what she’s saying. People might not agree with her, and that’s fine, but much of what she shares is undeniably true. She talks openly about how children need nurturing, attuned, loving caregivers from birth, and what happens when they don’t have that. Her voice has become a bit of a beacon of hope for me, because she says what many people are afraid to say.
In one interview, she mentioned something that really resonated with me, there’s little point taking a child to therapy if the parent isn’t willing to learn. And honestly, I teach this to every parent I work with. What are you willing to get on board with? You can’t drop a child off for an hour, expect some magical transformation, and then send them straight back into the same environment that created the issues in the first place. Therapy isn’t a car wash. You don’t go in dirty and come out shiny. Parents have to be willing to learn too.
There’s a quote I love: “No one knows enough to be a pessimist.”
So why aren’t we more open to new ideas? Learning is how we evolve. If more parents were willing to grow for the sake of their children, we’d be raising much happier, more emotionally aware young people.
But here’s the challenge: how do we do this when we have emotionally unintelligent parents trying to raise emotionally intelligent children? How do we start changing the world we live in when so many adults don’t even know what emotional intelligence is?
Maybe the first step is teaching the behaviour changes in a language people already understand, breaking it down, simplifying it, showing them what emotional intelligence actually looks like in everyday life, rather than making it sound like some psychological theory.
Because if we can make it relatable, we can make it reachable. And if we can make it reachable, we can finally start raising a generation who can truly thrive, emotionally, socially, and mentally.
All of this sounds good, but it leaves us with the important questions. Where do we start? Who is willing to share this message? Who is willing to get on board and move forward with it?
For me, the answer keeps coming back to the same place. Confidence.
I genuinely believe it’s my mission in life to teach confidence. And yes, I believe emotional intelligence and confidence are absolutely connected. If you have the confidence to believe in yourself, you naturally develop the confidence to believe that anything is possible. And when you’re in that mindset, you become more open, open to learning, open to self-awareness, open to understanding both your own emotions and the emotions of the people around you.
So maybe that’s where I begin. Teaching confidence.
And through my therapy work, my new book, my CPD-approved courses, and of course my Brainz Magazine articles, this is exactly where I am going to start.
"Confidence."
Read more from Donna Kirsten Reynolds
Donna Kirsten Reynolds, Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist
Donna Reynolds discovered her passion for mental health and personal growth while living abroad and navigating her own challenges. After experiencing a sudden divorce that mirrored the struggles of many women around her, Donna sought to understand why such upheavals were so common. This quest led her to study mental health and behavior, ultimately guiding her to Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy. She believes that by changing our thoughts, we can overcome any barriers and create meaningful, lasting change in our lives.
