Principals face many workplace stressors. Given these pressures, it is imperative that principals identify and strengthen their emotional intelligence, resilience, and resonant leadership. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine principals' self-perceptions of the relationship between emotional intelligence and resilience and how their perceptions of these concepts were applied to initiate, utilize, and sustain resonant leadership throughout their career. This study examined the ways in which principals demonstrated evidence of initiating, utilizing, and sustaining resonant leadership. The study also examined which skills of emotional intelligence and resilience principals drew on to initiate, utilize, and sustain resonant leadership. The data was triangulated utilizing the tenets of Goleman's Four Quadrant Model of Emotional Intelligence, Reivich and Shatté's seven abilities of resilience, and Boyatzis and McKee's concept of resonant leadership (Boyatzis & McKee, 2005; Goleman, 1995; Reivich & Shatté, 2002). The study revealed that depending on a participants' years of experience, principals demonstrated different skills of emotional intelligence and resilience to initiate, utilize, and sustain resonant leadership. The study findings suggest Reivich & Shatté's seven abilities of resilience as pre-requisite skills to support a leader's ability to initiate, utilize, and sustain resonant leadership, as opposed to a byproduct of emotional intelligence and resonant leadership originally proposed by Goleman (1995) and McKee, Boyatzis, & Johnson (2008).