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Emotional Self-Awareness: The Cornerstone of Emotional Intelligence

Listen to full episode of Emotional Self-Awareness: The Cornerstone of Emotional Intelligence on the RMUpload.

Emotional self-awareness is just one part of many regarding emotional intelligence. Self-awareness is the foundation or one of the key building blocks of emotional intelligence. Without it, everything else is affected negatively.

Self-awareness is the ability of someone to recognize their emotions and to be able to tell what emotions they are experiencing, which can be very difficult. Think about it. How much during a day to you really say, ‘I’m angry, and I’m happy, and I’m sad?’ People don’t always know they are filling emotions 24-hours per day, seven days per week. But being able to understand what you’re feeling at the time can also change your behavior and the direction of the conversation or situation or your life in general.

Often, we find ourselves ashamed of our emotions. We don’t want to admit that we’re sad or we don’t want to admit that we’re angry. Today, we have emotions, we have to know what they are, and we need to feel them. It’s a lot of work. They impact us and they impact the people around us in situations that we find ourselves in.

When we talk about the five core feelings –anger, happiness, sadness, shame, fear – we can all describe them very easily. But being able to differentiate between them can be difficult. For example, it’s one thing to be annoyed, but it’s a totally different thing to be furious. They are both within anger. We might start out annoyed, which could be found within anger, but then we overreact and explode expressing full blown anger when it was just a small annoyance.

You’re going to have different levels of intensity. Being able to understand that helps you deal with the emotion rather than letting it stew and boil, giving you the chance to control your emotions. It lets you reinterpret the situation so you can present yourself in a better light and overcome the situation, whatever that might be.

It’s all about being conscious of your emotions so that you can act on it. What you don’t recognize, you can’t manage – if you can’t recognize the intensity of your emotion, you can’t really do anything about it.

But anger and fear being so primal is physical, it’s a physical response in your brain that we need to reinterpret. Anger and fear are so deeply ingrained in that primal response that it is sometimes the hardest to recognize and to change that behavior.

Regardless of the emotion, the importance of learning to control them is to have the recognition of what they are doing to the people around you. And when I say the situation around you, your emotions can really affect what’s happening in the outcome of how a whole situation plays out.

If you recognize what triggered an emotion, what made you upset in the first place, you can start thinking, “Okay, this is how I feel right now, and this is maybe how I should deal with it when I get home.” You need to pay attention to physical signs too. Maybe you have a lot of tension in your neck. Maybe you’re swearing under your breath at the drivers on the way home and you’re really extra angry and it’s just not that it’s out of the ordinary for you, it’s being able to recognize it that will help you deal with it when you walk in the door.

It’s not that you have to make it so you’re not angry anymore, you can remain angry – you have the right to feel anger. It’s the recognition that you’re angry and how it is going to affect the other people around you. For example, if you’re feeling angry when you get home due to a bad day, a good way to recognize and deal with the anger might be to say, “You know what? I had a bad day at work today. Can we please turn down the television, I really don’t need the noise that is going to feed some of this anger. This is not your fault. I probably just need an hour or two to calm down and this would help me through that.”

The ABCDs of emotional intelligence include A, an activating event that triggers your emotion, B, looking at your belief system, C, the consequences of your emotional status, and D, disputing your belief system. This helps you understand the steps of emotional response. Having the framework and the strategies in the back of your mind to be able to pull those out and say, okay, this is what I think I need to do is key. And that’s why emotional self-awareness is such a critical part because without it, everything else kind of falls apart.

Unless we put in the energy to maintain that, it’s never going to happen. But you put in enough energy into the change, all of a sudden it becomes your new normal and you’re not having to put in as much energy as you thought you did. It does take exercise. It does take a change. You’re just not going to listen to this podcast or read a book and make the change. You’re going to have to force yourself. And one way is to keep a notebook or a note on your phone and identify those five feelings.

What triggered me during the last week when I felt these? Find the triggers. Write down your physiological feelings when you are feeling those things so that you can recognize what’s going on. Sometimes we might not recognize our emotions and feelings, but we’ll recognize that you might be feeling sweaty, or breathing heavy, or blinking a lot. What does that mean to you? You’ll recognize what you’re doing physically. You’re fidgeting with your pin or tapping your foot. That will cue you into what you’re feeling? If you’re feeling anxious. Why? Does it make sense to feel anxious right now? No, it doesn’t. What can I do to calm down? Let’s do that. And you change your physiologic and your emotional outlook.

If you do that over 30 days, you’ll look back and you’re going to start to see patterns emerge.

Michael Nelson, DHSc, PA-C, Faculty, Master of Physician Assistant Studies

Mace Hamblin, DHSc, MPA, Faculty, Doctor of Medical Science