The Two Emotional Intelligence Skills That Turn Disasters Into Comebacks

Key takeaways

• The emotional intelligence skills that matter most under pressure are adaptability and resilience, and you can practise both long before a crisis arrives.
• Resilience is the pause that stops a bad moment from becoming a bad decision. It buys you the few seconds you need to think.
• Adaptability is what you do with those seconds: dropping the plan that has already failed and building a workable next step.
• These aren't "soft skills". At work they're the difference between people who recover from a derailed project and people who stay stuck arguing about whose fault it was.
• You can train both by treating small setbacks as rehearsals, not just annoyances.

I've just come back from a month in Italy. I know, poor me. I had a wonderful time, thanks for asking. But it did not start that way. Not even close.

Picture two exhausted Australians, 30 hours in transit, landing at the start of a long-planned holiday to find they have no luggage, no rental car despite booking one, and three weeks of non-refundable accommodation they now have no way of reaching.

That was us. And somewhere between the airport floor and the Europcar desk, I got a very practical reminder of when emotional intelligence stops being a workshop topic and starts being the thing that actually saves your holiday.

When emotional intelligence skills stop being theory

Here is the honest version of how it fell apart.

The grand entrance. With all the grace of a newborn giraffe, I face-planted on a wet road climbing into our airport transfer. If you believe in omens, that was clue number one.

The domino effect. A rogue cockpit warning light left us sitting on the Singapore tarmac for two hours. That delay triggered a missed connection and a six-hour wait for the next flight.

The luggage lottery. Our bags decided to take their own European adventure. After two hours in a queue, and a front-row seat to the customer service Italians are famous for, I asked whether the bags might come on the next flight. The man gave a shrug, said "anything it is possible", and walked away. We were told to wait for an email that might arrive somewhere between now and never.

The final straw. Now eight hours behind, we raced to the car rental desk, where they asked for our International Driving Permits. Cue mutual blank stares and a hopeful glance at each other. "I don't have one, do you?" Neither of us did. The law had recently changed, and there was no car without the permit.

Reality check. Every one of our bookings was somewhere out of the way, and all of it was planned around having a car we no longer had.

So there we sat in forlorn silence outside Europcar Milan. Exhausted, luggage-less, car-less, with a hotel two hours away we couldn't reach. Peak defeat mode, activated.

Resilience is the pause, not the pep talk

People think resilience is about being tough, or gritting your teeth and pushing through. In that moment it was something much smaller and much more useful. It was the decision not to react.

We had two options. A complete meltdown, which was genuinely tempting, or a few slow breaths and a choice about what to do next. We could easily have joined the tourists having very public breakdowns near the baggage carousel. I understood them completely.

Instead we did three unglamorous things.

• We paused and breathed. No plan, no solution yet, just the refusal to make it worse.
• We laughed at our spectacular cock-up. Naming how absurd it all was took the heat out of it.
• We agreed we'd deal with it one step at a time, rather than trying to solve the whole broken week at once.

That is resilience in real life. Not a motivational poster, just the gap you put between the setback and your response, so that your next move comes from your thinking brain and not your panicking one.

I see the same thing at work all the time. Someone sends the wrong figures to a client, or a launch date slips, and the first reaction sets the tone for everything after. The people I trust most in a crisis are rarely the loudest. They're the ones who go quiet for a moment, take a breath, and then start solving.

Adaptability is what you do with the pause

Resilience buys you the seconds. Adaptability is what you do with them.

Once we'd stopped catastrophising, we started moving. First we booked a hotel near the airport so we had somewhere to think that wasn't a plastic chair. Then we found the online applications for International Driving Permits, and blessed the day FedEx was invented. We swapped the whole car-based plan for trains, reshuffled the accommodation we could still reach, and let go of the bits we couldn't.

Here is the part that surprised me. That reshuffled, train-hopping, lost-luggage trip turned into the most memorable holiday we've ever had. We were more spontaneous because we had to be. We were more grateful, because nothing arrived the way we'd assumed it would. Some of the best days came directly from the plan going sideways.

The trick with adaptability is that it starts with a small, uncomfortable admission: the plan I had is gone, and no amount of arguing with the car rental man will bring it back. Only once you've accepted that can you build the next plan.

I coach a lot of people who are brilliant at Plan A and completely lost without it. They keep pushing on the door marked "pull". Adaptability isn't about having a better Plan A. It's about being willing to reach for B, C and D without treating each one as a personal failure.

Why these two matter more at work than at the airport

Travel chaos is a neat story because it's contained. It ends. Work rarely offers you that courtesy.

At work the curveballs are constant and quieter. Projects get derailed. Priorities change the week before delivery. A key team member resigns with no warning and takes half the context with them. The client changes their mind about the thing they insisted on last month.

The people who thrive through all that aren't the ones who somehow dodge every problem. Nobody dodges every problem. They're the ones who can sit with uncertainty without falling apart, and then find a workable path when Plan A collapses.

And here's what I want to be clear about. Adaptability and resilience are not personality traits you're either born with or not. They're skills, which means they're built by practice. You practise resilience every time you feel the urge to fire off an angry reply and choose to wait an hour instead. You practise adaptability every time a small plan falls through and you find a next step without sulking about it.

That is why I nudge people to treat minor setbacks as rehearsals. The missed train, the double-booked meeting, the feedback you didn't want. Each one is a low-stakes chance to practise the exact muscles you'll need when the setback is a big one. If you want to go deeper on the everyday version of this, I've written a companion piece on Emotional Intelligence at Work, and the structured version of the practice is what I do in my EQ coaching.

So the next time everything goes pear-shaped, it might help to remember what I learned outside Europcar Milan. The point was never to avoid the chaos. It's how gracefully you adapt once it has crashed your party uninvited.

Frequently asked questions

Which emotional intelligence skills help most in a crisis?

Adaptability and resilience do the heaviest lifting when things go wrong. Resilience gives you the pause that stops a bad moment becoming a bad decision, and adaptability turns that pause into a workable next step. Self-awareness feeds both, because you can't manage a reaction you haven't noticed you're having.

Can you actually learn adaptability and resilience, or are they personality traits?

You can learn them. Both are skills built through repetition, not fixed traits. Every small setback you handle without spiralling is a rep. Treat missed trains, changed plans and awkward feedback as low-stakes practice, and the big upheavals feel far less overwhelming when they eventually arrive, because you've already rehearsed the response.

What's the first thing to do when a plan falls apart?

Pause before you act. Take a couple of slow breaths and resist the urge to fix everything at once. Then name the reality out loud: this plan is gone. Only after you've accepted that can you build the next step. Solving one small thing beats staring at the whole mess.

If you looked honestly at your own adaptability and resilience today, how would they hold up the next time life throws you a curveball you didn't see coming?