錨

Your score sat in the middle band of workplace emotional intelligence — you read the room reasonably well, manage your own reactions most of the time, and can hold a hard conversation without it becoming a scene. This is where most functioning professionals sit, and it is not a lesser position; it is the working baseline the top band is built from.

What it gives you is reliability under ordinary conditions. Colleagues experience you as even, approachable, and safe to bring things to. You can absorb a bad meeting and still run the next one, and you notice when someone is struggling before they say so, most of the time.

The friction is where the middle band gives way: sustained pressure, a person who pushes the specific button, or a week where nothing has gone right. There the seams show — the sharper reply, the withdrawal, the read that came in wrong because there was no capacity left to make it. Those moments are rare enough to be memorable, which is exactly why they cost more than they should. The work is to know your own early signals, and to treat a full week as a reason to slow down before the seam opens rather than after.