Emotional Intelligence Begins With Learning to Listen to Yourself
9 July 2026
By Iryna Wood
There’s a particular quality of afternoon light in the south of France, somewhere between four and six, when the heat finally breaks and everyone slows down without appearing to notice they’ve done it. Cafés fill. Conversations get longer. Nobody is checking a watch. I lived inside that rhythm for years before I understood what it had actually taught me, and even longer before I lost it.
I remember one particular evening on a terrace near the port, doing absolutely nothing of consequence – a glass of rosé going warm in front of me, a conversation with a friend that had no destination, no next thing waiting on the other side of it. I wasn’t performing relaxation for anyone. I simply wasn’t in a hurry, because nothing around me was hurrying either. It took me years to understand that this wasn’t laziness or luxury. It was a kind of nervous system I had, without trying, learned to keep.
Then life did what life does. I moved. I built things – a business, a marriage, a home in a country running on an entirely different clock. And somewhere in the accumulation of all that good, necessary work, the terrace-hour version of me quietly checked out. I didn’t decide to abandon presence. I just got busy enough, for long enough, that hurrying became the default setting, and I stopped noticing I’d left the slower version of myself behind.
What’s strange, looking back with the training I now have in how people actually change, is that I could have told a client this exact story and known immediately what was happening. We don’t usually lose our better habits in one dramatic moment. We lose them the way you lose a language you stop speaking – gradually, without a single day you could point to and say, that’s when it left. Presence, unused, atrophies quietly. I know the theory. It still happened to me anyway.
A few months ago I sat down to dinner with my husband and realized four minutes in that I couldn’t have told you a single thing we’d eaten. I was there in the way a phone is “on” when the screen is dark – technically running, nothing actually lit up. That was the moment the Cannes evenings came back to me, not as nostalgia, but almost as a rebuke. I used to know how to do this.
I haven’t moved back, and I’m not trying to. What I’ve done instead is smaller and, I think, more honest: I’ve started stealing back single hours the way I used to have entire evenings. One unhurried coffee. One walk with nowhere to be at the end of it. One meal where the phone stays in another room and I actually taste what’s on the plate. It’s a much smaller terrace than the one I remember. It still works.
If there’s a version of that terrace hour in your own life – a season, a habit, a version of yourself you quietly let go of while you were busy becoming who you are now – I don’t think the goal is grieving it. I think the goal is noticing, the way I finally did over a plate of food I couldn’t taste, and building it back in whatever small size your actual life can hold.
I don’t think the answer is a vacation, though a vacation never hurts. I think the answer is remembering that presence was never a place – not Cannes, not any specific address on a map. It was a decision I used to make dozens of times a day without noticing I was making it, and it’s a decision I can still make now, in a life that will never again run at that particular southern-French pace. I just have to actually choose it, on purpose, instead of waiting for a coastline to hand it to me.
Learn to love yourself and trust the Process!
Iryna Wood,
Host, STARS ABOUT STARS® podcast
