Can Emotional Intelligence be Trained?
This article originally appeared in the Mental Arena newsletter delivered via Substack. Check out more articles on sport and performance psychology, emotional intelligence, and high-performance at mentalarena.substack.com.
I recently wrote an edition of Mental Arena where I discussed Emotional Intelligence (EQ) as a skill.
I framed it this way because, like mental skills, better emotional outcomes begin in the mind. There is a space between event and response that we control. The capacity to identify that space and consciously direct our response serves as the foundation of self-regulation. Beyond that, there are subsequent skills involved in anticipating certain reactions and proactively preparing your response. This requires a streamlined approach to mental training and often necessitates a coach to help break down the nuances involved. Because these nuances are so significant, I decided to examine recent research on emotional intelligence as a trainable skill. These studies are not exclusive to sport because effective command of our emotions and the components of EQ (self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and social skills) are relevant in every industry, domain, and environment.
The question of whether EQ can be trained arises in performance environments, as with other skills. We ask if composure can be trained? Or if focus can be trained? And often, can confidence be trained?
Sport and performance psychology has spent decades operating from the premise that these psychological capacities are not simply qualities a performer brings into the arena. They are skills that can be developed through deliberate practice. Athletes train attentional control. They rehearse imagery. They develop self-talk routines. They practice regulating arousal. They build pre-performance routines designed to help them access productive psychological states when pressure rises.
We rarely expect an athlete to become more composed simply because a coach explained its importance, and EQ should be viewed through the same lens.
→ EQ must be trained because it is a skill, not inherent.
EQ is a Skill, Not Just a Trait
Before getting into the evidence, it helps to be precise about what I mean by "can be trained." A trait is generally understood as relatively stable. A skill, by contrast, can be developed through instruction, deliberate practice, feedback, repetition, and application. Skills can also deteriorate when they are not practiced.
That distinction fundamentally changes how we approach EQ.
EQ is often discussed casually as though some people are simply “good with people.” These people know how to read a room. They have the ability to stay calm and often know what to say. They understand what others are feeling. Other people seemingly do not possess those abilities.
This framing makes EQ sound like an interpersonal gift.
But EQ can be broken into identifiable competencies involving recognizing emotions, understanding them, using emotional information, and regulating emotional responses. Once we begin thinking about those competencies separately, EQ starts looking much less like an innate quality and much more like a collection of trainable mental skills. And, like any other skill, reps are required for improvement.
In fact, the need for continued reinforcement may itself tell us something important about EQ. Research on emotional intelligence interventions suggests that improvements can persist following training, but continued practice and maintenance matter. That should not necessarily be interpreted as a weakness of EQ training, since we would expect the same from almost any other performance skill.
→ If you stop strength training, strength eventually declines.
→ If you stop practicing a technical skill, precision can deteriorate.
→ If you stop deliberately training your attention, you’ll start to lose focus.
Mental skills are no different because, as humans, we are either getting better or getting worse. There is no such thing as staying the same.
This distinction also changes the job of the coach, leader, mental performance consultant, or individual performer. If EQ is largely fixed, development becomes an assessment problem. Identify who possesses it, select those people, and compensate for those who do not.
If EQ is trainable, development becomes a training-design problem.
Now we can ask better questions: Which emotional competencies need development? What exercises target them? In what sequence should they be trained? How can they be practiced under realistic pressure? What feedback does the performer need? And how will the skill be maintained once formal training ends?
→ EQ, like mental skills, lives inside the mind, and it’s useful to think of them like this.
The Evidence Says EQ is Trainable
The research generally supports the idea that emotional intelligence can be improved through structured interventions. Mattingly and Kraiger’s 2019 meta-analysis synthesized 58 studies examining emotional intelligence training and found a moderate, statistically reliable effect. Importantly, the effect appeared across different approaches to measuring EQ and was not limited to a particular gender.
The research is clear that EQ is trainable, despite some identified methodological issues. Beyond these studies, we can assess EQ as a mental skill because it resides in the mind, making it a trainable skill, drawing on additional research from sport psychology.
Hodzic and colleagues reached a similar conclusion in a separate meta-analysis examining 24 studies across 28 samples. Again, emotional intelligence interventions produced a moderate positive effect. Their findings also provided evidence that improvements could persist beyond the immediate training period.
Taken together, those findings make it difficult to argue that emotional intelligence is completely resistant to intervention.
But there is an important qualification. Kotsou and colleagues’ review of 46 EQ intervention studies also concluded that emotional competencies could be improved and identified methodological limitations across the literature. Some studies depended heavily on self-report measures. Others lacked strong active-control conditions, and follow-up periods were sometimes relatively short.
Those limitations matter because believing that you have become better at regulating emotions is not necessarily the same thing as demonstrating better emotional regulation when a deadline collapses or when a teammate confronts you. Knowing that your emotions are out of control matters little when the competition begins to slip away.
In most domains, performance is the real test.
And that is especially important from a sport and performance psychology perspective. Mental training is ultimately valuable because the skill transfers into the environment in which the performer needs it. The evidence shows that a single workshop or training event is not enough to transform someone’s EQ overnight. EQ is trainable, yes, but improvements are moderate because it is a skill that requires ongoing training and refinement.
→ If this sounds like physical and technical training, it’s because it’s the same thing. There are only three things we can train, our body, craft, and mind.
Sport Psychology is the Blueprint
Sport and performance psychology has been solving a structurally similar problem for decades. Many psychological characteristics associated with elite performance were once treated primarily as things great competitors simply possessed. We used to think that the best athletes were inherently confident, focused, and mentally tough. But now we know that these are qualities that can be trained and improved.
Sport psychology helped move the conversation from identifying desirable psychological characteristics to developing the mental skills that support them. Confidence could be strengthened through preparation, mastery experiences, self-talk, and mental imagery. Attention could be deliberately controlled with similar strategies. Arousal could be regulated by rehearsing responses to mistakes.
Once these capacities became skills, they became trainable.
Emotional intelligence can be approached the same way.
Rather than telling a leader to “be more emotionally intelligent,” we can identify the psychological processes underneath EQ and build deliberate practice around them. This is where the connection between EQ and mental training becomes useful.
Self-Awareness: To Regulate, First Recognize
Mental training begins with awareness. An athlete cannot regulate an internal state they have not noticed. Imagine a basketball player approaching the free-throw line late in a close game. The situation will cause their shoulders to tighten and their breathing to become shallow. This is automatic because we know how much the situation matters and we care a lot about the outcome. As a result, many athletes also shift their attention toward the consequences of missing, causing their internal dialogue to accelerate in the wrong direction.
“This is why I consider EQ a mental skill and something that sport and performance practitioners are well equipped to address. The performer cannot intervene until they recognize their internal states.”
The physiological and cognitive signals are already there, which makes the first skill noticing them. This is why I consider EQ a mental skill and something that sport and performance practitioners are well equipped to address. The performer cannot intervene until they recognize their internal states. Before you can regulate frustration, anxiety, anger, disappointment, or excitement, you have to accurately identify what is happening. It sounds simple, but it rarely is.
Self-Regulation: Composure is an Action
Once a performer recognizes their internal state, mental skills training gives them something to do with it. With proper training, they might use controlled breathing to help regulate their physiology. They might use an instructional cue to bring their focus to the present moment. They could also reframe the meaning of their physiological reaction. At the highest levels, we may witness a pre-performance routine that has been rehearsed thousands of times.
Composure is not the absence of emotion. It is the ability to respond effectively while emotion is present. Emotional regulation is sometimes misunderstood as the suppression of undesirable feelings. But the performance goal is not to become void of emotion. The goal is to regulate emotion well enough that it serves rather than disrupts the demands of the moment.
“Nerves are so misunderstood. They are just your body preparing you for something important.”—Jonah Oliver, performance psychologist
Sport and performance psychology regularly uses progressively demanding environments to help performers apply mental skills under stress. The same principle applies to EQ. Emotional regulation can be rehearsed in increasingly realistic situations where frustration, uncertainty, interpersonal tension, or pressure are deliberately introduced in manageable doses.
→ The emotional skill will become more robust if it’s practiced closer to the environment in which it will be needed.
Understanding Emotion: Learning to Read the Game
Experienced performers develop another skill that can be difficult to quantify. They learn to read what is happening. A veteran athlete notices when an opponent is frustrated. A coach senses when the team’s energy has changed. A leader notices when a meeting has shifted from productive disagreement toward defensiveness.
These performers have built internal models of cause and effect. Understanding the situation is useful, but knowing why it’s occurring is much more powerful.
Over time, emotionally skilled performers begin recognizing patterns. They learn what situations reliably trigger their own defensiveness. They understand how fatigue changes their communication. They recognize when anxiety causes them to rush. They notice what types of feedback cause a teammate or colleague to disengage.
They are studying emotional patterns the way an athlete studies game film.
This creates another opportunity for deliberate practice, using experience as feedback for training.
After an emotionally significant interaction, instead of simply deciding whether it went “well” or “badly,” the performer can review it:
What did I notice?
What triggered the emotional shift?
How did I respond?
What effect did my response have?
What would I do differently next time?
Build the Ideal Performance State
One of the most useful lessons from sport psychology is that there is no universally ideal emotional state. Different performances require different levels of activation. Although we think being calm is the best performance state, it may not be the appropriate state for the task at hand.
The notion of an ideal performance state comes from sport and something I’ve written about in a previous edition. However, it relates to the EQ competency of using emotion effectively. Rather than viewing emotions as unwanted interference, performers learn to treat emotional states as information and, when possible, as resources.
The emotionally intelligent performer does not simply ask, “How do I get rid of this feeling?” The much better question is, “What does the performance require from me now?”
→ That is EQ operating as a performance skill.
The larger lesson from the research is not simply that emotional intelligence can improve. It is that we should change the way we think about developing it.
If EQ is a collection of skills involving awareness, regulation, understanding, and the effective use of emotion, then telling someone to “be more emotionally intelligent” is about as useful as telling an athlete to “be more confident” or a leader to “handle pressure better.” The desired outcome may be clear, but the training required to produce it is missing.
Sport and performance psychology gives us a better model.
We identify the skill. We break it into components. We deliberately practice those components. We apply them under increasingly realistic conditions. We review what happened, make adjustments, and repeat the process until the response becomes more reliable when pressure arrives. This is already how performers develop confidence and focus. Emotional intelligence deserves the same treatment.
The important word is practice because performance exposes the difference between knowing and doing. Always remember that improvement requires behavior change. And over time, the goal is not to eliminate emotion.
The goal is to become more skillful with the space between what happens and what you do next.
→ EQ is the skill of getting better inside that space.
