Take a moment to think about how your emotional intelligence showed up during your last team assignment.
Did you notice any areas where you were able to improve your collaboration skills, or any areas where you could develop further?
Share your experience!
As interpreters, our brains are constantly doing the impossible—processing, feeling, translating, regulating—all in real time. But here’s the thing we often forget:
Emotional intelligence isn’t a soft skill—it’s an essential communication skill.
Reflection Prompt:
Think back to your most recent interpreting experience.
What was the emotional tone of the room?
How did it affect your presence, choices, or energy?
Empathy with boundaries isn’t a wall. It’s not rigid. Not sharp. Not cold.
It’s a breath. A pattern. A living, moving pulse that keeps you connected without losing yourself.
You inhale their experience—deeply, consciously. You let their story rise in your chest, settle in your awareness. You allow yourself to feel. To care. To be with them in that sacred in-between.
But then you exhale.
You come back to you. To your body. To your baseline. To the truth that what they are carrying is not yours to hold forever. This is the art of compassionate empathy: You breathe in presence. You breathe out attachment.
And just like breath, it’s cyclical. It happens again and again—moment to moment, session to session, client to client.
What do you do when you’re emotionally flooded or feel drained after a job? Let’s swap strategies for staying grounded and resilient.
How well do you know your body’s cues under stress or pressure? What helps you stay centered while interpreting?
Pretty darn well. I can feel my energy rise which ends up getting my cheeks to feel warm and knots in my tummy. As cliche and redundant as it sounds, breathing. There is something about breating in a quiet place with no distractions. So if you are at a job and are able to step away, even if its a for a few moments, take that time to breath. If there is grass outside, take off your shoes and connect with your inner hippie... get those green blades in between your toes :-)
Breathing. Finding a person to confide in to talk about the emotions (try to avoid the the details of the work) and sit in them. Every once in a while, a good cry feels right since thats one way to drain the emotions... literally. Big smile.