How to Be an Emotionally Intelligent Communicator

As much as we may try to avoid it, having difficult conversations is inevitable. Two people cannot always have the same needs, desires, opinions, and abilities. While emotionally evocative topics and conflicting perspectives can be quite uncomfortable, resolution can paradoxically build trust, connection, and safety, strengthening the relationship. Communicating effectively facilitates deeper learning about one another, as well as assurance that one’s unmet needs don’t go unannounced and fester into resentment.

What Is Emotionally Intelligent Communication?

Emotionally intelligent communication entails a combination of verbal and nonverbal skills that are tailored to the person to whom you’re speaking, as well as the topic and context of the interaction (e.g., the environment, type of relationship, roles, “emotional baggage” between parties, past unresolved conflict). Putting it into practice requires the following:

• Recognizing and managing strong emotions
• Being present with your emotions as well as others’
• Asserting your needs and making reasonable requests to meet them
• Being able to listen attentively and remain open-minded
• Responding to and expressing what matters most while avoiding punishing behaviors
• Believing that resolution is in both parties’ interests
• Being aware of and respecting differences with others, including differences in their emotional experience

Four Common Communication Styles

With those tenets of healthy and effective communication in mind, let’s look at four common styles of communication. Knowing your typical style or the style you tend to default to during challenging interactions can build more awareness and help you notice opportunities to pivot to a healthy communication style.

Passive Communication

Passive communication occurs when you avoid expressing your opinions, emotions, perspectives, or needs and prioritize those of others. As unmet needs mount due to not being expressed, they build into resentment and annoyance and reach a point at which expressing them can no longer be avoided. This can result in emotion dysregulation and angry outbursts. Because explosive outbursts are unusual for this type of communicator, feeling shame, guilt, and remorse for expressing intense emotions can arise and prompt a quick retreat back to a passive communication style. Passive communication can take many forms and may look like:

• Self-sacrificing by putting others’ needs repeatedly over your own
• Failing to assert yourself or self-advocate
• Allowing others to make choices for you
• Keeping your emotions, needs, perspectives, or opinions to yourself
• Avoiding eye contact during tension, disagreements, or conflict
• Speaking with a soft or quiet tone of voice
• Communicating apologetically or without confidence
• Slumping down or making yourself small

Passive communicators use this approach to avoid the likelihood of conflict, judgment from others, or the emotional discomfort they fear may come from self-expression. Consequently, they often feel stuck, helpless, anxious, or resentful for not expressing themselves. They may also feel confused and have difficulty knowing what they stand for after repeatedly ignoring their own feelings or needs. Furthermore, emotional maturity can become stymied from the recurrent absence of addressing needs and resolving disagreements.

Aggressive Communication

Aggressive communicators tend to express themselves and their emotions strongly without considering others’ needs, desires, or feelings. They express themselves in a dominating and uncompromising style that can feel disrespectful, condescending, or abusive to others. Their communication is often accompanied by interrupting others, not listening fully, defensiveness, and expressing frequent frustration. Over time, aggressive communicators may feel estranged from others, have few close relationships. They frequently experience short-lived relationships, and feel misunderstood or disliked by others. Aggressive communication can look like:

• Quickly expressing impatience, irritability, and frustration
• Speaking in a loud tone of voice
• Using intimidating body postures, such as standing close to others or pointing
• Frequently interrupting
• Being unwilling or unable to consider the other person’s experience
• Expressing anger or defensiveness with little provocation
• Humiliating, blaming, or harshly criticizing others
• Expressing disappointment that others have not met unrealistically high standards
• Being unwilling to compromise and/or insisting that only you are “right”

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Aggressive communicators often use this approach to maintain feeling in control and avoid feeling insecure or anxious. This pattern of exerting an unreasonable amount of influence and control over others’ lives can create a false sense of confidence, but it results in relationships that are strained, tense, and lack closeness, as others are afraid to interact with or open up to them. Often, aggressive communicators have unsatisfying relationships and feel isolated and misunderstood, deepening their insecure feelings.

Passive-Aggressive Communication

Passive-aggressive communication occurs when someone appears passive and quiet but has a perspective, need, or emotion that is not being expressed directly and instead is expressed obliquely and unclearly. By withholding their experience from others, resentment from repeated unmet needs builds and is expressed indirectly through condescension, undermining, or subtly critical means. This is typically an attempt to express feelings without taking responsibility for them and putting that responsibility on others—this is not usually a conscious motivation, but instead an unhealthy way of coping with a fear of what could happen if feelings, needs, or opinions were directly expressed. Passive-aggressive communication can entail:

• Speaking under your breath rather than confronting the person directly
• Suppressing and avoiding disappointment, hurt, anger and resentment
• Offering backhanded compliments (e.g., complimenting while also criticizing)
• Using sarcasm to express dissatisfaction
• Denying there’s an issue when there is
• Undermining someone without addressing the issue with them
• Intentionally completing a task poorly to avoid being asked to do it in the future
• Using facial expressions or a tone of voice that doesn’t match how you feel
• Making critical remarks or unintended yet hurtful “jabs”
• Appearing cooperative but engaging in sabotage behaviors behind the scenes to annoy others
• Giving others “the silent treatment” (e.g., withholding interaction, avoiding people at the center of the conflict)

Passive-aggressive communication is used to avoid the emotional discomfort of addressing an issue directly with someone. While it may feel satisfying to use spite or other actions to get back at others when hurt or angry, by withholding how they feel, passive-aggressive communicators often feel resentful, misunderstood, and dissatisfied with their relationships. Because others cannot read their minds or know their needs, passive-aggressive communicators’ needs and opinions go unmet. In doing so, frustration from others builds, causing serious tension in relationships, ruptures, festering mistrust, and eventually it can lead to lost relationships.

Assertive Communication

Assertive communication entails clearly stating opinions and feelings, and self-advocating without being disrespectful or violating the rights of others. Assertive communicators don’t expect others to know how they feel or what they want. They value themselves and are willing to self-advocate while still expressing respect for others. As a result of self-advocating, assertive communicators don’t suffer from resentment or pent-up frustration from unmet needs. Relationships between assertive communicators tend to be healthy as well, as others are less likely to guess or attempt to anticipate their needs because they have already been communicated. Assertive communication looks like:

• Using “I” statements to communicate how you feel, what you’d like, and your unmet needs
• Refraining from blaming others while self-advocating
• Attentively listening without interrupting
• Clearly stating feelings, needs, and wants respectfully and honestly
• Speaking in a calm tone of voice and with a relaxed body posture
• Noticing but not permitting others to manipulate or control you
• Taking responsibility for your impact on others; apologizing and rectifying hurts
• Maintaining good eye contact
• Being willing to compromise and negotiate, and offering to do so when it doesn’t infringe on your own rights or needs

Assertive communicators express themselves clearly, allowing others to know where they stand without having to guess. They take responsibility for how they feel and their actions and don’t cave in when others try to control or manipulate them. While this approach can be initially uncomfortable to adopt, in the long run, assertiveness allows others to know where they stand. The productive outcome of this is that others are less anxious to open up to them, as they don’t have to worry about outbursts or payback later, facilitating more collaborative, open, and clear communication and healthier relationships. When assertiveness is the main communication approach, it fosters self-esteem and confidence, reduces the likelihood of resentment in relationships, and builds trust.

A common misconception about assertiveness is that it’s rude, blunt, or heavy-handed. On the contrary, assertiveness exists on a spectrum, and a skillful assertive approach is custom-made to the person and context of the interaction (e.g., the topic, environment, level of closeness or emotional intimacy in the relationship, nature of the relationship, and cultural factors).

Knowing which one or two communication styles you tend to rely on provides a powerful starting place for change. It can be especially useful to also identify the style you tend to use during difficult interactions, particularly conflict. This will point you toward shifting from an unhealthy style to an emotionally intelligent approach.