The Career Skill No One Talks About Enough: Emotional Intelligence and Self Awareness

In this episode, I explore why emotional intelligence and self-awareness are two of the most powerful skills you can develop to build a successful and fulfilling career. Drawing on my experience as a former HR Director and certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner, I share what I learned from years of hiring, coaching, and leading people through difficult workplace situations. We also discuss how emotional intelligence shapes everything from interviews and leadership to career growth, resilience, and building trust with others.

Tune in to hear more about:
• Why emotional intelligence is often the difference between professionals who simply do the job and those who earn trust, influence, and career opportunities
• How self-awareness helps you communicate more effectively, manage setbacks, and understand the impact you have on others
• Why emotional regulation is essential for navigating interviews, workplace challenges, leadership, and career transitions with confidence
• How job search setbacks can become valuable data that helps you refine your strategy instead of defining your self-worth
• The interview behaviours that demonstrate maturity, coachability, and confidence, and the common habits that can unintentionally hold candidates back
• Five powerful self-reflection questions that will help you better understand your strengths, build stronger relationships, and make more intentional career decisions

Tune into this episode of Career Ambitions to discover how strengthening your emotional intelligence and self-awareness can help you build confidence, earn trust, and create lasting success throughout your career.

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Threads: Joanne Sparrow 🔹 (@careercoachjo) 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Career Ambitions, the podcast for corporate professionals who are ready to stop waiting and take control of their careers. If you're tired of sending applications into the void, wondering why you're not getting interviews and watching opportunities go to people who are no more qualified than you, you're in the right place, my friends. I'm Joanne Sparrow, former HR Director Turned Career Coach, and I've spent more than two decades sitting on the other side of the hiring table. That means I know exactly what hiring managers think and what they say behind closed doors. Join me on this episode of Career Ambitions, where I'm pulling back the curtains on the hiring process and unapologetically exposing the truths, job seekers are never told to give you the strategy and confidence to move your career forward and land your dream job or promotion. Welcome back to Career Ambitions, the podcast for corporate professionals who are ready to take control of their careers, build more confidence, and move forward with purpose. I'm Joanne Sparrow, a former HR Director Turn Career Coach, and for more than two decades, I sat on the other side of the hiring table. I've coached leaders, I've supported employees through their career transitions and challenges, I've worked with hiring managers and influenced hiring decisions, and I saw over and over again that the professionals who grew, advanced, and recovered from setbacks, built trust, and earned opportunities were not always the smartest people in the room. They were not always the loudest. And they were not always the most polished on paper, but they had something that made people trust them. They had emotional intelligence. And more specifically, they had self-awareness. Today I want to talk to you about EQ and self-awareness from three perspectives. First, my own learning journey as a certified emotional intelligence practitioner, and how studying emotional intelligence changed the way I understood people, leadership, communication, and careers. Secondly, how emotional intelligence helped me as an HR leader, especially in those moments where emotions, conflict, decisions, performance, and people often collided. And third, why emotional intelligence is one of the most critical skills corporate professionals need today, not just to land the job, but to build a career that is sustainable, meaningful, and successful in the long term. Because here is what I know for sure. Technical skills may get you considered. Experience may get you into the conversation, but self-awareness, communication, and emotional regulation, such as empathy and relationship management, often determine how far you will go. And in today's job market, that matters more than ever. When I first began learning about emotional intelligence, I thought I already understood people fairly well. After all, I've spent years in HR. I sat in difficult conversations, I've supported leaders through conflict, I've worked through restructures, performance issues, accommodations, employee relations matters, hiring decisions, terminations, promotions, and leadership development. People were always at the center of everything I did. But studying emotional intelligence gave me language for things I had been observing for years. It helped me really understand why two people with similar qualifications could show up so differently in the workplace. Why one leader could create safety, trust, and commitment while another leader with the same title and authority could create fear, disengagement, and turnover. It taught me why some professionals could receive feedback and grow from it, and while others immediately would become defensive. It also helped me understand why some candidates could walk into an interview and create instant trust, while others, despite being highly qualified, struggle to connect. It has helped me understand that career success is not just about what you know. It is about how well you understand yourself, how well you read the room, how well you manage your reactions and communicate under pressure and building relationships, and how well you recover when things don't go your way. And finally, it helped me understand how well you understand the impact you have on other people. That last point is a big one because many professionals think self-awareness means knowing their strengths. Yes, that is definitely part of it, but true self-awareness goes so much deeper. It is knowing your strengths, but also knowing when those strengths become too much. It's knowing your communication style, but also understanding how that style lands with others. And it's knowing what gives you energy and what drains you, what triggers you, and knowing your patterns. It's knowing what happens to you under stress. And it's knowing when you're trying to prove yourself instead of just being yourself. And it is being honest enough to ask, what is it like to experience me? That question can change the course of your career. Because most people evaluate themselves based on intention. They say things like, That's not what I meant. I was trying to be helpful, I didn't intend to come across that way, or I was only trying to explain. But other people experience us based on impact, not intention. And emotional intelligence helps close that gap. It helps us understand the difference between what we meant and how it landed. That is where the growth happens. As an HR leader, emotional intelligence was not just a nice to have, it was absolutely essential. HR is one of those functions where we're constantly balancing the needs of the business with the needs of the people. We're supporting leaders who are under pressure, we're supporting employees who may be frustrated, scared, disappointed, angry, confused, and you're navigating sensitive information. HR is often the person in the room when decisions are difficult, emotions are high, and the stakes are real. And in those moments, your ability to manage yourself matters. Because if you absorb everyone's emotion, you're going to burn out. If you react too quickly, you lose trust. If you over-identify with one side, you lose objectivity. If you avoid discomfort, you fail to lead. And if you become too corporate and disconnected, people stop feeling safe with you. So much of HR leadership requires emotional discipline, not emotional suppression. There is the big difference. Emotional suppression is pretending you don't feel anything. Emotional discipline is recognizing what you feel, understanding why it is showing up, and choosing how to respond in alignment with your values and the situation. That is self-awareness in action. I can remember many moments in my HR career where the facts of a situation were only part of the story. On paper, something might have looked very simple. A performance issue, a conflict between a manager and employee, or a candidate that didn't get selected for a role, a leader frustrated with someone's behavior. But when you got underneath the surface, there was usually more going on. Lack of clarity, miscommunication, need to be heard, lack of trust, ego. Big one is ego. Perhaps it was a leader who avoided feedback for too long. Or perhaps it was a leader who avoided giving feedback for far too long. An employee who didn't realize how they were being perceived. Emotional intelligence helped me listen differently, not just to what people said, but to what was underneath what they said. It helped me ask better questions. It helped me pause before responding. And it helped me notice when someone's reaction was bigger than the moment. And it helped me coach leaders and employees to move from reaction to reflection. Because in corporate environments, people are often rewarded for moving fast, solving problems, and having answers. But emotional intelligence asks us to slow down. Slow down just enough to ask what's really happening here? What is the reaction telling me? What assumptions am I making? What does this person need from me right now? That kind of thinking changes the quality of your leadership and it changes the quality of your conversations. Now let's bring this into the job search because this is where I see self-awareness make or break opportunities. A lot of job seekers come to me focused on the tactical pieces: the resume, LinkedIn profile, interview answers, networking strategy, job postings, the ATS and recruiter screen. And yes, all of those things matter. You need to have strong tools and you need to have a clear strategy. You need positioning that makes you the obvious choice. But here's the part many people miss. Your job search will expose your self-awareness. It will expose how you clearly understand your value and whether or not you know what roles actually lie to your strengths. It will expose whether you can talk about your experience in a way that is relevant to the employer and whether you can manage rejection without spiraling. It will also expose whether you're applying from a strategy or a place of panic. It will expose whether you can show up in an interview with confidence instead of desperation. And I say this with compassion because job searching is absolutely emotionally exhausting. It can bring all of those negative feelings, fear, comparison, self-doubt, frustration, and even shame. You apply and hear nothing back. You get interviews and do not move forward. You see other people posting announcements on LinkedIn and wonder what you're doing wrong. You start questioning your value. And this is where emotional intelligence matters. Because without self-awareness, it's easy to turn every setback into a story about your worth. I'm not good enough, no one wants me, my experience doesn't matter, I'm too old. But with self-awareness, you can pause and separate the facts from the feelings. The fact may be I didn't get selected for this role. The feelings may be I feel disappointed, embarrassed, and discouraged. The story in your head might be this means I'm not employable. And the story is where many job seekers get stuck. Emotional intelligence will help you interrupt that. It helps you say, okay, I'm disappointed, that makes sense, but what data do I actually have? Was my resume aligned to the role? Did I clearly communicate my impact? Was I applying to roles that matched my experience? Did I prepare strong examples? And did I follow up? Is the rejection about my worth or is this feedback about my strategy? That mental shift matters because emotionally intelligent job seekers do not avoid disappointment. They are processing it differently. They learn from it and adjust. They do not let one outcome define their entire identity. Self-awareness is one of the biggest differentiators in interviews. And I can tell you from the other side of the hiring table, hiring managers are not only listening for what you did, but they're listening for how you think and how you communicate, how you reflect, take ownership, handle challenge and conflict, and how you describe your growth. This is where emotional intelligence shows up. A self-aware candidate can say, here's what I learned. Here's what I would do differently today. Here's how I adapted. And here's where I had to adjust my communication style. That is powerful. It signals maturity, coachability, confidence, and it signals that you do not just move through experiences, but you learn from them. A less self-aware candidate may answer behavioral questions by blaming others or rambling, overexplaining, avoiding accountability, name drop instead of demonstrating impact, or they may even sound defensive when asked about feedback. And often they don't realize how they're coming across. And that is an issue. Most interview mistakes are not because the person lacks talent, they're because the person lacks awareness on how their message is landing. That is why I encourage job seekers to practice interview answers out loud, not just in their head. Out loud, preferably with another person. Because what sounds clear in your mind does not always sound clear when spoken out loud. You need to hear your own patterns. Are you talking too long? Are you bearing the result? Are you over-contextualizing? Do you sound apologetic? Are you using we so much that your own contributions are disappearing? Or are you speaking with confidence? Or do you diminish yourself? This is self-awareness. And that is a skill you can build. So let's talk about career growth. Because emotional intelligence does not stop once you land the job. In many ways, emotional intelligence becomes even more important as you move up. The higher up you go in your career, the less success is about doing the task yourself, and more it becomes about influence, including communication, judgment, trust, decision making, stakeholder management, conflict resolution. All of these things require emotional intelligence. And you can be technically brilliant and still struggle to advance if people experience you as reactive, dismissive, unclear, defensive, impatient, or just unaware. That may sound direct, but it is true. I've seen talented professionals stall because they couldn't read the room. I have seen leaders lose trust because they communicated without empathy. I've seen employees miss opportunities because they thought working hard was enough, but they never learned how to advocate for themselves. And I've seen high performers burn out because they had no awareness of their own boundaries. I've also seen people say they wanted leadership roles, but they had not yet developed the emotional regulation required to lead through pressure. Leadership is not just about authority, it's about the emotional tone you set. And it's whether people feel safe bringing you problems, whether they trust your judgment, and whether you can disagree without damaging relationships. It's about whether you know when to speak, when to listen, and when to pause. That's emotional intelligence and self-awareness is the foundation. So, how do you build self-awareness? I want to give you five questions to start with. These are questions I would encourage every corporate professional, job seeker, and emerging leader to reflect on. Question one: What do you want to be known for? This is a career positioning question. If people were in a room discussing you for an opportunity, what would you hope they would say? She's straight, she's strategic, calm under pressure, they know how to build trust, can lead through ambiguity, they're the person you want in the room when things get complex. Now ask yourself, what are the actions reinforcing that reputation? Because your personal brand is not just your LinkedIn headline, it is the consistent experience people have of you. Question number two: what gives me energy and what drains my energy at work? This is one of my favorite questions because it reveals alignment. Some people are absolutely energized by solving complex problems. Some are energized by building relationships, some are energized by presenting, influencing, creating, analyzing, organizing, coaching, or improving broken systems. And some environments drain them. Constant conflict, lack of structure, micromanagement, repetitive work, no autonomy, no creativity. And when you understand what gives you energy and what drains you, you can make better career decisions. You can stop chasing titles that look good but feel wrong. You stop applying to jobs that aren't aligned, and you stop ignoring the signs that a role may not fit how you work best. Question three: What happens to me under stress? This is critical because who you are under stress is often who people will remember. Do you shut down or do you overfunction? Do you become controlling? Are you avoiding conflict? Do you become defensive? Do you withdraw or perhaps overexplain? There's no shame in having stress patterns. We all have them. The opportunity is to know them. Because once you can name a pattern, you can manage it. You can pause and ask for clarity, take a deep breath before responding. And you can notice when you're reacting from fear instead of responding from leadership. Question four. What feedback have I heard more than once? This one can be uncomfortable, but it's very important to reflect on what feedback you have heard more than once. People may have told you, you need to speak up more, you need to be more concise, you need to bring people along, or you need to be more strategic. Feedback is data. It is not always perfectly delivered, it's not always completely accurate. But if a pattern keeps showing up, there is probably something worth explaining. Self-awareness doesn't mean accepting every piece of feedback as truth. It means just being willing to ask yourself, what part of this might be useful? That question alone can accelerate your growth. Question five, how do people experience me? This might be the most important question of all. Do you know if people experience you as trustworthy, clear, calm, curious, collaborative? Or do they experience you as rushed, distracted, defensive, unclear, critical? Again, this is not about self-judgment. It is about impact because career growth is relational. People refer people they trust. People promote people they trust. People hire people they trust and they'll advocate for people they trust. And trust is built through repeated experiences. In today's job market, emotional intelligence gives job seekers an advantage because employers are not only hiring for skills. They are hiring for adaptability, communication, they're hired for people who can work across teams and learn quickly. And they're hiring for people who can receive feedback, manage stakeholders, and represent the organization well. And in many cases, they're trying to reduce their risk. A hiring manager is asking, can this person do the job? But they're also asking, can I trust this person? Will they work well with the team? Will they handle pressure? Will they communicate effectively? Will they need a lot of hand holding? Will they make my life easier or more difficult? Your emotional intelligence helps answer those questions. Not because you say I have a high emotional intelligence. Please do not say that in an interview and leave it there. Show it. I want you to show it. Show it in how you answer, show it in your listening, how you reflect, how you talk about your challenges and your growth. Show it in how you manage your energy and presence. That is what creates confidence in the hiring process. So let's get practical. Here are a few ways to start building self awareness right away. First, after important conversations, I want you to do a quick reflection and ask yourself what went well? Where did I feel activated? Was there something I might have assumed? Or did I avoid saying something? What did I say that seemed To have landed well, and what might I do differently next time? This can take you a few minutes, but the learning will compound. And then, second, I want you to ask for specific feedback, not vague feedback like, do you have any feedback for me? Most people don't even know how to answer that. I want you to ask something more specific. Was my message clear? Did I provide enough context? Or is there anything I could have done to make that meeting more effective? These specific questions will create useful feedback for you. Next, I want you to practice naming your emotions. That might sound simple, but many people skip this step. They say, I'm stressed. But stressed actually means disappointed, overwhelmed, embarrassed, resentful, afraid, uncertain, or exhausted. The more accurately you can name what you feel, the better you can respond to it. And then fourth, I want you to notice your patterns. What situations keep creating that same reaction? Is it perhaps unclear expectations, feeling ignored, being interrupted, receiving feedback, being compared to others? Once you know the pattern, you can prepare for it. And then, fifth, get support. This might be coaching or a mentor or a trusted colleague. It might be formal emotional intelligence work. Self-awareness grows faster when we have safe reflection spaces because we all have blind spots. That is why they're called blind spots. We cannot see them on our own. I want to pause here and say something very important. Self-awareness is not self-criticism. It's not beating yourself up or obsessing over every interaction. It's not about being perfect or trying to make yourself smaller. Actually, real self-awareness should make you more grounded, more confident, intentional. Because when you know yourself, you stop performing. You stop chasing every opportunity, you stop trying to be everything to everyone, you stop confusing feedback with failure, and you stop taking rejection as a reflection of your worth. You become so much more clear. And you can say, This is what I do well, this is where I'm going. This is the kind of environment I thrive in. And this is the impact I can make. That is confidence without arrogance. That is humility without self-doubt. And that is the kind of presence that stands out. So if you're listening to this and you are in your job search, I want you to hear this. Yes, your resume matters. Your LinkedIn profile matters, and interview preparation matters. The networking strategies matter. But the way you understand yourself matters as well, because the job search is not just a tactical process, it is an emotional one. It requires resilience, confidence, clarity, and self-reflection. It requires you to have the ability to keep showing up even when the process feels discouraging. And if you're already in a role in thinking about the next level, self-awareness absolutely matters here too, because your next promotion may not come from doing more. It will come from communicating better, building stronger relationships, managing conflict more effectively, advocating for yourself more clearly, and letting go of perfectionism. Emotional intelligence is not a soft skill in the way people sometimes dismiss soft skills. It's a human skill, it's a leadership skill, and it's a career acceleration skill. In a world of constant change, technology, automation, restructuring, competition, and uncertainty, your ability to understand yourself and connect effectively with others is no longer optional. It's absolutely essential. So here's my challenge for you this week. Ask yourself one question. What is the one pattern in my career that I need to become more aware of? Perhaps it's how you respond to rejection, prepare for interviews, talk about your value, how you communicate under pressure, how you're choosing roles to apply to. Do not judge your pattern, just notice it. Because awareness is the first step. And once you see something clearly, you can start to change it. Thank you for spending the time with me today. And if this episode resonated with you, I would love for you to follow career ambitions and share it with someone who's navigating a job search, preparing for interviews, stepping into leadership, or trying to build more confidence in their career. And if you're ready to approach your career with more clarity, strategy, and self-awareness, make sure to check out the show notes for ways to work with me. Until next time, make it a great week. Thank you so much for listening to Career Ambitions. If this episode gave you a new perspective, a practical takeaway, or even a little spark of confidence you needed, I would love for you to follow the show and leave a review. And if you're an ambitious corporate professional who's ready to stop guessing and start moving with a clear strategy, I would love to invite you to my masterclass. Inside this masterclass, I teach the exact strategies my clients are using to land their dream jobs. You can learn more about the masterclass in the show notes or at joannsparrow.com. See you in the next episode of Career Ambitions.