Having emotional intelligence (EQ) won’t make you successful. But, using emotional intelligence habitually will help you achieve your goals.

Today, it’s well known that personal and professional success are deeply intertwined with emotional intelligence. But logically understanding how emotional intelligence works and actually putting it to work for you are as different as night and day. For instance, do you behave with emotional intelligence even when your mind is still reeling from that curt email you just received from your boss? How about when you’re consumed by an impending deadline?

In order to maximize your success in leadership, communication, service delivery, or virtually any other endeavor involving people, you must turn your emotional intelligence into an automatic process—a habit.

The Shortcut to Habit Formation

There are two ways to form habits—the long way and the short way. Most of us are familiar with the long way. Do something every day for a minimum of 3-4 weeks (often 6-12 months) until performing that action becomes second nature.

However, few people know about the shortcut to creating habits. New York University psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues are some of those few. Gollwitzer’s team has amassed over two decades of evidence supporting the idea that wording can make all the difference between good intentions and automatic actions.

Allow me to explain. When we put our intentions into an if-then format, we create what Gollwitzer calls “instant habits.” For example, say you want to improve your self- management skills by working on proper breathing. Instead of saying, “I will practice inhaling through my nose and exhaling through my mouth,” phrase it as “if I read an irritating email from my boss today, then I will inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth.”

Gollwitzer has found that even a slight change in wording makes people up to two to three times more likely to stick to an exercise regimen, eat healthier, avoid distraction, or do just about anything else that pits our wills against our wants. So, why does this work? The “if” part of the statement gives your brain an automatic reminder to be on the lookout for a specific situation. Without that automatic reminder, your brain has to not only remember the intended behavior, but it must also constantly calculate whether a given moment is the right one to perform the intended behavior. On the other hand, when your brain recognizes that you are indeed sitting at your computer today reading an annoying email from your boss, it automatically cues you to perform the “then” action (i.e. “inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth.”)