Boost your self-awareness

Self-awareness is the basis of each component of emotional intelligence. It refers to the capacity of persons to be aware of how they are feeling. Without recognizing what you are feeling, you cannot proceed to the next competencies.

Self-awareness involves three skills: Emotional self-awareness, accurate self-assessment and self-confidence. By having a firm grasp on these three skills or rather your emotions and an understanding of how they manifest, you can feel more self-assured and in control, which of course will be a boost to your self-confidence. Here are several suggestions for helping to increase your self-awareness.

Identify your emotions

To begin to identify your emotions, you’ll need to make time for doing so. At first, you will do this at regularly scheduled times in order to get in the habit of flexing your ‘identifying’ muscle. Eventually, you will be able to call on the skill anytime that you feel a strong, distressing, or other emotion. Sit quietly and if possible, close your eyes. Ask yourself several questions, and be sure to answer them honestly. There is no right or wrong answer. Just listen to your responses. Suggestions for questions to ask are: How am I feeling, or what am I feeling?

Identify your ‘triggers’

Once you are able to tell how you are feeling, you will want to be able to identify what started your negative feelings. Was there a particular ‘trigger’? As you get better at identifying your emotions, you can come up with your own labels for them. Some suggestions for labels might be single words like anger, joy, fear, or sadness. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help identify your triggers: When did the feeling first start? What was happening when the feeling started? Has the strength of the emotion changed at all?

Identify what your emotions are telling you

Besides, try to ‘hear’ your emotions as they happen. What are they telling you? Learn to notice your emotions as they happen and you will be able to get better at connecting emotions to their causes. In other words, acknowledging your emotions as they occur gives you more opportunities to learn about yourself.