How Enhancing Self-Awareness Increases Your Emotional IQ

Enhancing our self-awareness begins the journey to achieving higher emotional intelligence, or increasing our EQ. We simply must be aware of our own emotions before we can manage them effectively. Self-awareness of our emotions also helps us to empathize, so we can better understand what others are experiencing.

People with high emotional self-awareness know how they feel at any given time, can identify the source of those feelings and can recognize how the feelings manifest in physical symptoms, such as sweaty palms, headaches and panic attacks.

To begin enhancing emotional self-awareness start with these three steps:

1. “Check in” with yourself. Set aside time during your day to assess your emotional state. Ask yourself a series of questions and answer them honestly. You might ask: What am I feeling? What is the source? How are these feelings manifesting themselves in my body? Am I experiencing tenseness in my shoulders, clenched teeth, feeling fatigued, anxiety, fear or joy?
2. Identify your emotions. Once you determine what and how you feel, if you learn to identify these emotions, it can help you identify the source or “trigger” of negative feelings. Some common examples of labels for emotions include anger, fear and surprise. Write down the identified emotions, along with your thoughts on what you think triggered each specific emotion. Once you can identify the source of a feeling and see it on paper, what you need to do to improve your response to a trigger becomes clearer.
3. Be in the moment. “Listen” to what your emotions and feelings might be telling you at any given moment. You can learn to use the information you “hear” from within to gain added insight and guidance in working through an issue or problem.

From a goal-setting point of view, it is crucial for you to possess high levels of emotional self-awareness. In other words, effectively achieving your personal goals will require an acute understanding of how feelings can affect your behavior, mood and performance.

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