I grew up thinking my older sister was just unusually calm. At family dinners, when things got tense—and in our family, they got tense often—she had a way of staying level that I mostly wrote off as personality. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties, watching her talk my father down from something at Thanksgiving, that I understood it wasn’t temperament. It was something she did deliberately. When he said something that landed wrong, she didn’t defend herself or explain. She just said, “Tell me more about that.” He talked for another few minutes. By the end of it, whatever had been building had quietly dissolved.
I asked her about it afterward. She said she’d learned a long time ago that most arguments weren’t really about what they seemed to be about, especially in our family, and that getting to the real thing was mostly just a matter of staying curious long enough to find it.
What she had, I came to understand, wasn’t a special emotional capacity—it was a different vocabulary. A set of phrases she reached for almost automatically that opened conversations instead of closing them down. These are seven of them.
1. “Tell me more.”
Three words, and they do a remarkable amount. When high-EQ people say this, they’re not being polite—they’re genuinely inviting more, signaling that what was just said hasn’t been fully heard yet, and they want to keep going. It resists the impulse to respond, evaluate, or redirect. It just asks for more of what the other person was already offering.
Research by Netta Weinstein on the motivational value of listening, published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, found that high-quality listeners ask open-ended and clarifying questions and convey a non-judgmental attitude—not agreement with what’s being said, but a genuine acknowledgment of the other person’s right to say it. “Tell me more” does exactly that. It keeps the speaker at the center and holds the listener’s response at bay long enough for something real to be said. Most people have a hard time doing this. The urge to jump in, to connect what someone is saying to their own experience, to offer a fix or a counterpoint—it’s strong. The phrase is a way of overriding that urge and staying in place a little longer.
2. “I think I messed that up.”
Accountability without a lengthy defense is genuinely unusual, and high-EQ people have gotten comfortable with it. They don’t say this as a performance of humility—they say it because they’ve developed enough self-awareness to catch their own missteps without needing the other person to formally flag them first. It’s a phrase that skips the preamble and goes straight to the part that actually moves things forward.
What makes it different from a standard apology is the specificity of it. “I’m sorry” can be reflexive, a way to end discomfort. “I think I messed that up” names the action, locates the problem clearly, and opens the door to repair without demanding anything in return. It doesn’t ask for reassurance or absolution—it just acknowledges what happened and stays there. For the person on the receiving end, it tends to be disarming in the best way. There’s nothing to argue with, nothing to defend against. The acknowledgment has already been made, and what’s left is just figuring out what comes next.
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3. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
This phrase signals something that’s harder to pull off than it sounds: the genuine updating of a position in real time. High-EQ people say this when they mean it—when something someone said has actually shifted how they’re seeing a situation—and they say it without the qualifier most people instinctively add, the “but…” that takes back the concession before it’s even fully given.
Brittany Jardine and colleagues, whose meta-analysis on emotional intelligence and relationship satisfaction has been published in Personality and Individual Differences, found that people with higher emotional intelligence show greater empathic perspective-taking and are more likely to cooperate with their partners—skills directly linked to better relationship quality across 78 samples. “I hadn’t thought of it that way” is that perspective-taking made verbal. It says: your view of this is legitimate, it’s expanded mine, and I’m not threatened by that. For the person who said the thing that prompted it, it’s one of the more satisfying phrases to hear—because it means they were actually listened to and taken seriously, not just tolerated.
4. “I appreciate you telling me.”
I think of a colleague I used to work with who said this so naturally and so regularly that it took me a while to understand why conversations with her always felt different. What she was doing, I eventually understood, was naming the act of disclosure itself as something worth acknowledging. Not just what was shared, but the fact of the sharing.
This matters because telling someone something—something real, something that required a degree of trust—is a small act of vulnerability, and most of the time it goes unacknowledged. People respond to the content and move on. High-EQ people notice the gesture itself, and they say so. For people who find it hard to open up, having that act named and valued makes the next time slightly less difficult. It reinforces the relationship as a safe place to bring things, without requiring a big emotional production. It’s a small phrase that does a structural thing—it makes honesty feel like it was worth the risk.
5. “I could be wrong about this.”
The willingness to hold a position loosely—to present a view while genuinely leaving room for it to be challenged—is one of the things that distinguishes high-EQ people in disagreements. They use this phrase not as a preemptive hedge but as a real signal: I have a take, I’ll share it, and I’m not going to defend it past the point where it stops being defensible.
What that does to the person on the other end of the conversation is significant. It makes disagreement feel less risky. When someone makes clear that their position isn’t an identity they need to protect, the person responding doesn’t have to brace for the conversation that usually follows a different kind of certainty. They can just say what they actually think. That dynamic—where both people feel like they can be honest without triggering a defensive response—is how most productive conversations actually work, and it rarely happens without someone going first. High-EQ people tend to be the ones who go first.
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6. “I’ve been sitting with something.”
This is a phrase for the things that are hard to raise—the observations that feel risky to name, the feelings that have been present for a while but haven’t had a clear opening. High-EQ people use it to begin conversations they might otherwise avoid, because it gives the other person a heads-up without creating immediate alarm. It’s honest without being abrupt.
What it communicates, before anything else has been said, is a kind of care about how the conversation lands. They’ve been sitting with something means they’ve been thinking about it, which means the other person matters enough to be thought about—and that the thing being raised wasn’t a reactive impulse but something considered. That framing tends to shift how the other person receives whatever comes next. They’re less likely to be defensive, more likely to listen, because what they’re hearing is an invitation rather than an accusation. It’s a phrase that does its most important work in the first three seconds, before the actual content has even arrived.
7. “You can always come to me.”
The simplest phrase on this list is also, in some ways, the most consequential. High-EQ people say this and mean it—not as a social nicety but as an actual standing offer, a consistent signal that the relationship can absorb difficulty, that showing up with a problem won’t be a burden or an imposition. Said regularly, and meant regularly, it changes the nature of a relationship over time.
What it does is remove a barrier that most people don’t even realize is there: the uncertainty about whether bringing something up is welcome. Many people hold things back not because they don’t trust someone but because they’re not sure if the moment is right, or if the other person has capacity, or if what they’re feeling is significant enough to warrant taking up space. “You can always come to me” answers all of those uncertainties at once. It says the door is open, the timing will never be wrong, and whatever it is will be received. For the people in a high-EQ person’s life, that phrase—said often enough that it becomes something they actually believe—is one of the quieter gifts those relationships offer.
