Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.

Why Perpetual recommends it
Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves’ Emotional Intelligence 2.0 takes Goleman’s four-domain model of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management and turns it into a practical, testable programme, built around the authors’ own EQ assessment and a long list of concrete strategies for each domain.
What sets this book apart is its bias toward action: rather than simply explaining why EQ matters, it hands the reader specific behavioural moves, counting to ten before responding, naming the emotion driving a decision, noticing body language shifts in a conversation, that turn theory into daily habit.
The authors are direct about the return on investment: they point to research linking higher measured EQ with better performance, pay and promotion outcomes, positioning emotional intelligence as a skill worth training with the same rigour as any technical competency.
We recommend this book alongside our leadership development work because it gives coaches and participants a shared, practical vocabulary and a starting assessment, which makes it much easier to track real behaviour change over a coaching engagement rather than relying on self-report alone.
- Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management are trainable skills, not fixed traits
- Small, specific behavioural strategies compound into meaningfully different outcomes over time
- Measured EQ correlates with stronger performance and career outcomes
- Turning EQ into habits requires practice under real pressure, not just insight
A good starting point is picking one strategy from each of the four domains and tracking, for two weeks, the specific moments you actually used it rather than just intended to.
We give this book four out of five stars.