When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.
- Dale Carnegie
Know Your Why
Your why is rooted in your happiness, your desires, what you really value - that's the root of your emotions, isn't it. And that's what's important in understanding emotional self awareness..... that it's not just about feeling happy, it's more importantly about why. It's not JUST what you're feeling, but why are you feeling what you're feeling.
Why are you anxious? Why are you excited? Why are you happy? The why defines your expectations and your emotions.
Learn Your Triggers
Learning abut your triggers help you learn how you are likely to respond to particular situations, and invite certain reactions from others. It helps you understand how these reactions and responses help you manage your emotions in that moment, and what impact they have long-term.
This process of learning your triggers requires two steps:
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Recognizing your emotions
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Recognizing the source of your emotion
The first step - recognizing your emotions just help you put a label to your experience, which overtime helps you notice the more subtle differences in what you're experiencing. It also helps you recognize the triggers sooner and sooner, which can really help you keep developing your emotional intelligence to higher and higher levels.
So don't just ignore your emotions - they can be a valuable resource of information, and can help you make rational decisions. I encourage you to download an emotional vocabulary guide that I prepared.
Practice empathy
You might be thinking "empathy"- isn't that something that you either have or not. And the answer is no - research has shown over and over again that empathy is a learned skill, and something you can develop as well - and pretty easily at that.
All it takes is putting yourself in other person's shoes - thinking about how you would feel if you were in that situation, or what might be some reasons why the other person is feeling or acting the way they are. And just like the other two ways, this one also gets easier with time, and you get better and better at it, as you keep practicing it.
Okay, I want to share a potential pitfall with you guys that's a very common reason why people fail in their efforts to develop emotional intelligence, and how you can avoid that. But first, if you're getting any value out of this video, then please let me know by hitting that like button, and consider sharing with your friends and loved ones.
Potential pitfalls
A potential pitfall I want to highlight in developing your emotional intelligence is to focus on just the emotional intelligence, but not focusing on the broader concept of self awareness. Emotional awareness is definitely about your understanding your emotions, but the process doesn't stop there - it's about getting clarity about yourself and others, the clarity about situation.
When you focus only on emotional intelligence, and not other aspects of self awareness, then you still become more aware of your emotions and develop "emotional intelligence," but you makes sense of these emotions based on limited understanding of the broader concept.
This is where you end-up blaming others around you, or feeling helpless in a situation, or putting the responsibility to making you feel better on others, which then translates into expectations - only to eventually lead to more frustration, sadness, and anger.
An easy solution to this is to work on your emotional intelligence, but also work on understanding yourself as a person - how you came to be who you are, what is that you desire in life and relationships, and what makes you happy and excited.
