How are you feeling? Seriously—how are you feeling, and what did or didn’t happen that made you feel this way? You might not be in the mood to talk about your feelings right now, but we need to talk about the concept of feelings and how they relate to you and your customers. Selling—and business in general—is more than just facts and numbers. It has a lot to do with emotion, and that can be frustrating because feelings are hard to predict and even harder to control. Enter our old friend: Emotional Intelligence (EQ). EQ has gained a lot of popularity over the last two decades, and rightfully so. It’s the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others, in order to develop clarity, harmony, insight, perception, and trust. Now, for those who like to say “facts don’t care about your feelings”—well, feelings don’t care about your facts either. Both are true and important, but feelings are a powerful and often unwieldy force we have to deal with—especially when it comes to customers. Because at our core: we feel, we think, we seek.
Emotions are our impulsive responses to everything we experience. They have a funny way of making simple decisions complicated—especially when more than one person is involved. Customers are unique; they process your company, your products, and even you in different ways. At the center of all that processing? Emotion. You can point to needs, desires, past experiences, and expectations to explain customer behavior—but all of those elements feed into emotion. And too often, we overlook this—or worse, we assume everyone feels the same way we do. They don’t. That’s why EQ is essential. It helps us understand our customers, coworkers, and even ourselves. And it all starts with this simple process: we feel, we think, we seek.
The Emotional Progression: We Feel → We Think → We Seek
- We have an emotion – Emotions are automatic, immediate, instinctual responses to experience. They’re primal, reactive, and often happen without warning—setting off a chain reaction in how we perceive the world.
- Emotion becomes a feeling – Feelings are shaped by past experiences and personal meaning. They’re how we interpret and internalize emotion. Once a feeling sets in, it can be difficult to change.
- Feelings become thoughts – Thoughts are emotions and feelings taking shape as ideas. “I think…” implies we’re processing, but we’re already on our way to forming a conclusion. Our minds crave closure so we can make decisions.
- Thoughts become biases – Bias is often just perception filtered through emotion and experience. We each carry our own version of the truth—our personalized mix of fact and feeling.
- Biases seek validation – Once we believe something, we look for things that affirm it—and ignore what doesn’t. That’s how our worldview is formed, and it’s how we become who we are.
This is why EQ matters. If you want to build strong relationships and create meaningful customer experiences, you have to address the primal, emotional side of people—yourself included. We can talk about quality, value, and service all day long, but none of it lands unless we understand the emotional engine behind it all.
