By Chelsea Ross, Founder of Goddess Retreats
Let’s be honest, life isn’t getting any simpler.
Between work, family, relationships, and the constant background hum of notifications, it’s easy to feel like we’re just reacting our way through the day. We want to feel grounded, calm, and connected… but instead we’re stuck in overdrive, wondering why peace feels like such a moving target.
That’s where emotional intelligence comes in. It’s not just a buzzword. It’s the skill that helps you stop being emotionally hijacked by everything around you and start responding from a place of clarity, presence, and inner strength.
Think of it as the difference between being swept away in a riptide… or calmly swimming back to shore because you know what’s happening beneath the surface.
So, what is emotional intelligence?
In simple terms, emotional intelligence (or EQ) is your ability to understand, manage, and express your own emotions while also being able to navigate the emotions of others.
It includes skills like:
- Recognising when you’re triggered, and instead of snapping or shutting down, pausing to ask yourself, “What’s really going on here?”
- Setting a clear boundary, like saying “I need time to think about this” when someone puts pressure on you, without guilt or overexplaining.
- Not taking things personally, like when your partner is moody, and instead of spiraling, you understand it’s their bad day, not your failure.
- Letting a difficult conversation land, feeling your discomfort, but staying open and curious instead of defensive.
- Soothing yourself when you’re overwhelmed, maybe by going for a walk, doing breathwork, or just naming your emotion out loud.
In other words, it’s not about never having strong emotions. It’s about not being controlled by them.
Why does this matter so much for women?
Because most women I know are overtrained in emotional labour and under-supported in emotional awareness. We’ve been taught to prioritise other people’s needs, smooth over conflict, smile when we’re exhausted, and apologise when we’re not at fault.
But emotional intelligence flips the script.
Instead of people-pleasing, you learn to listen to your own needs. Instead of bottling up feelings until they explode, you learn to process them in real time. Instead of reading between the lines in every conversation, you start asking clear, honest questions.
This is what it can look like:
- Standing in front of a mirror before a hard conversation and saying, “I can stay calm, I don’t need to fix everything, I just need to speak clearly.”
- Catching your inner critic mid-sentence and replacing it with: “I’m doing my best. And that’s enough today.”
- Being at a family dinner when an old pattern gets triggered and choosing to respond with a quiet breath, not a reactive jab.
That’s emotional intelligence in action. It’s subtle. It’s powerful. And it changes the whole atmosphere.
What we focus on at Goddess Retreats
On our retreats, we help women develop emotional intelligence the way it was meant to be learned: not from a textbook, but from lived experience.
Through self-reflection, healing rituals, deep conversations, and space to actually hear yourself think, you start to connect the dots between how you feel and how you live.
You don’t need to fix everything.
You just need to feel more equipped to face anything.
This is where the real transformation begins.
