Background:

emotional intelligence (EI) is the individual's ability to identify emotions, manage and understand is own emotions and self-motivate in awkward and conflict situations. It reflects the professional's attitudes and behaviors in different contexts, impacting the quality of their performance.

Objectives:

to describe the IE of expert nurses in the critical care area and to identify the behavioral strategies used by nurses to approach the critically ill patient.

Methodology:

qualitative, descriptive and exploratory study. Data collection was performed using the focus group with 8 expert nurses in the critical care area.

Results:

there are 6 categories related to nurses IE in the area of critical patient care: professionalism, interpersonal relations, service organization, emotions sharing, work management and emotional self-control.

Conclusion:

the strategies identified were sharing emotions among peers, managing time to discuss existing situations during working hours, capacity of emotional self- control, adaptability to the environment and the way to establish relationships with the client.