If you’re trying to boost your emotional intelligence, self-awareness is the place to start
Self-awareness is your ability to recognize and understand emotions, thoughts, and values, and how they influence behavior.
It has both internal and external components. The internal is about how you perceive your own emotions, thoughts, and values, and the external is about how you’re perceived by others.
Dr. Tasha Eurich is my go-to on all things self-awareness. Her research shows that 95% of us think we’re self-aware while only 10-15% of us are. Ouch.
If you want to become more self-aware, try these approaches.
Tune In to Yourself
First, tune in to your emotions, feelings, beliefs, and motives. So many people think these are less important than facts and logic, but they aren’t. Trust your gut. Don’t suppress what it’s telling you, tune into it. There’s goodness there.
Any practices that help you get in touch with your emotions, feelings and beliefs are a good investment. Mindfulness and meditation are great for this. They help you isolate your emotions and realize that what you’re feeling is different than who you are. As you make this distinction, you gain control over how you choose to act.
Externalize Your Feelings
Writing (or painting, or composing) are great ways to externalize your feelings and hold them at arm’s length so you can interrogate them.
Understand Yourself in Relation to Others
Another really valuable investment is to use a psychometric test to understand where you fit relative to other people. I’m a big fan of the Birkman tool (you can watch my videos on it) but there are many other tools to choose from. The great thing about these assessments is they help you realize that not everyone thinks or experiences the world like you do. DOING! What?!?! It’s true.
And sometimes those tools help you realize that your needs are a bit out of the ordinary and that’s why the world responds the way it does to you.
Ask For Feedback (Yikes!)
One final tip… asking for feedback can be scary because you don’t know what’s going to come at you. But asking for feedback about a very specific issue can be both helpful and safe.
I call this the strike zone method and I’ll link to more information about it in the description. But basically, you pick an area where your self-awareness might be low and ask for help to illuminate you.
Like, “I feel like I’m a good listener but Josh made a sarcastic comment yesterday that made me think I might not be as good as I think. Could you pay attention for the next couple of meetings and let me know how I do on making people feel heard?”
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Even without getting feedback, just asking for it will make you more self-aware!
And that’s a good thing.