How to Use Emotional Intelligence to Lead in Every Area of Your Life with Shanon Owens
By Miri Lenoff
·June 17, 2026
When most people think about leadership, they think about strategy, vision, decisiveness. They think about someone who is commanding, articulate, confident. They think about traits they can see from the outside.
Shanon Owens has spent years working with leaders and aspiring leaders, and she will tell you that the most important factor in sustainable leadership is almost invisible from the outside. It is emotional intelligence.
What Emotional Intelligence Actually Is
Emotional intelligence is not being nice. It is not avoiding conflict or always knowing the right thing to say.
It is the ability to notice what you are feeling, name it accurately, and choose how to respond rather than simply react. It is also the ability to read other people's emotional states and adjust your approach accordingly.
These two capacities, self-awareness and interpersonal awareness, are the foundation of everything else in leadership. Without them, even technically skilled leaders tend to create friction, lose trust, and fail to bring out the best in the people around them.
Why High Performers Often Struggle With This
Shanon sees a consistent pattern in high-achieving professionals. Their results-orientation, the very thing that made them successful, can work against emotional intelligence development.
When you are focused on outcomes, emotions can feel like noise. They slow things down. They complicate decisions. The instinct is to push past them and stay focused on what needs to get done.
The problem is that other people are also emotional beings, and if you are not attending to that reality, you are operating with incomplete information. Decisions get made without crucial context. People disengage without you knowing why.
Leadership Starts Before the Boardroom
One of the things Shanon emphasizes that surprises people is that emotional intelligence development does not start at work. It starts at home, in personal relationships, in how you treat yourself.
How you relate to your own emotional experience determines how you relate to other people's. A leader who cannot tolerate their own uncertainty or discomfort will struggle to hold space for those things in others.
The inner work and the outer work are not separate. They feed each other.
Practical Ways to Build Emotional Intelligence
Shanon recommends starting with a simple practice: before any significant interaction, ask yourself what you are bringing to it. What is your emotional state right now? How might that be affecting your approach?
This micro-pause creates the distance between stimulus and response that is the essence of emotional intelligence. It is small, it is free, and done consistently it changes how you show up.
Watch the full conversation with Shanon Owens on the Known Success Coaches Spotlight.