Emotional Intelligence: Self-Awareness

Self-awareness, the first domain or bucket in the emotional intelligence model.

Self-awareness is our ability to accurately recognize our emotions as they happen and understand how we respond to different people and situations. And then understanding the connection between our emotions and what we say, think, and do. A guiding principle of emotional intelligence is that you can't manage emotions you aren't aware of or you don't understand. Therefore, you need to develop self-awareness. Arguably, this is the most important and most difficult of the four domains of emotional intelligence.

So how do you get better at self-awareness? Get to know yourself under stress. For example, think about how you react when your boss provides you with some performance improvement feedback. Do you feel the emotions building? Do you speak before thinking? Or maybe you see the feedback as an opportunity to grow and develop. Know what or who pushes your buttons. What makes you angry? Consider your values, then act with purpose and direction. Stop and ask yourself, why do you do the things you do? And be honest with yourself.

Practice mindfulness. Do you pay attention on purpose to what is happening in the present moment without judging whether it is right or wrong? You need to be able to control your own emotions so you can hear what's going on. Part of mindfulness is knowing what you are feeling as it happens. Being able to give the emotion you experience a name. This gives you the capacity to both register its impact and also trigger control. Mindfulness is an important element in emotional intelligence because it lets you know when your approach to dealing with others is getting skewed. And since we aren't often a good judge of ourselves, we may need to enlist the feedback of those we trust. Keep in mind if you ask for feedback, receive it graciously and keep an open mind.

It's critical to be self-aware. Think of the domains of emotional intelligence as building blocks. We are first self-aware, then we can self-manage based on that awareness.