CHAPTER 3

Knowing yourself

Learning about emotional states

In this chapter you will go on to identify and explore your own emotions and how they affect you on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis. You will become more aware of how your emotions create the “moods” which you experience, and the impact that these “moods” have on yourself and others.

By regularly assessing what you are feeling, and identifying your mood, you will be in a better position to gauge your emotional “state” and to decide whether it is one that helps you to achieve a positive outcome – or not! If not, you will then be in a position to make a choice as to how you can change it.

Rookie Buster

By the end of this chapter you will:

• Know just how self-aware you are.

• Understand and recognize both positive and negative emotional states.

• Have a firm belief that you are in control of your emotional state, and that emotional states are changeable.

• Have identified your personal development plan.

With a greater level of self-awareness you’ll be more confident, more resourceful and better able to identify and use the appropriate techniques as and when you need them.

What is self-awareness?

Higgs and Dulewicz define self-awareness as: “The awareness of one’s own feelings and the capability to recognize and manage these feelings in a way which one feels that one can control. This factor includes a degree of self-belief in one’s capability to manage one’s emotions and to control their impact in a work environment.”

As you know, it is one thing to read and interpret a definition, but it’s quite another to understand it and apply it practically in one’s life. To do that, you need to take time to consider what is being said and why.

Take a moment here to reflect on this definition.

• What is it saying to you?

• Which are the key words or phrases that stand out?

• Why are they important to you?

It’s about knowing yourself

Self-awareness is about knowing what emotions you are feeling at any given time, and being fully aware of how they impact on yourself and others. It’s having the ability to “tune in” to your feelings whenever you choose to, and to recognize and understand that your feelings may have changed, and why. And it’s about having the ability to be conscious at any time of what you’re thinking, how you are feeling and how you are acting.

Rookie Buster

Having this level of self-knowledge gives you the ability to manage and control your life and the way you react to people and circumstances, and how you can affect the way others respond to you.

To bring this to life, the following scenario is an example of how someone with low self-awareness might behave…

• Crash!

The door is flung open and in crashes one of your colleagues.

• Wham!

Their mobile phone is thrown down in a temper on to the desk, just missing the computer screen.

• Bash!

They stomp around the room, shouting and cursing at no one in particular.

• Thump!

They proceed to throw themselves into their chair and through clenched teeth they start to yell for someone to bring them coffee.

Phew! Have you ever experienced something like that? Maybe not exactly that scenario, but at some stage in your life you will have experienced the repercussions of such behaviour. Whilst it may not have been directed at you personally, you would have had a personal reaction to it, to a greater or lesser extent.

Take a moment to think about the impact that this one person’s behaviour has had on you or your colleagues.

Firstly, they have disrupted any work in progress simply by crashing into the office. People are automatically thinking “What’s wrong? What’s up with them?”

Secondly, as the behaviour continues it may start to unsettle others. Some may perceive it as being aggressive and retreat internally, whilst others may be concerned about the distress of their colleague and will want to take action. Perceptions trigger emotions, and these emotions will be unique to each individual.

Replay the scenario in your head once again. Can you see what’s happening? Now, feel what’s happening. Has this feeling changed your mood?

Unease in the office caused by this sort of scenario can lead to a downturn in the overall mood. Your colleague may be totally unaware of the emotional and behavioural impact that they have caused with their outburst, but within minutes the atmosphere within the office has changed and individuals are in a state of emotional turmoil.

Exercise – Impact of behaviour

Think about a time when you have experienced a similar situation, when someone else’s behaviour has had a profound impact on you.

Using the prompts on the next page, make some notes, which you can refer back to later.

What was happening?

What were you seeing? What were you hearing?

What were you thinking at the time?

What were you saying to yourself?

How did it make you feel?

What emotions were you experiencing?

How did it make you behave?

Did you remove yourself from the situation? Did you just get on with what you were doing?

Having considered someone else’s impact on you, go on to think about a time when your behaviour might have had a significant impact on others. Using the same prompts as before, make a note of your thoughts and feelings.

Then, as a way of starting to open up your own perception, consider this additional prompt:

Were you aware of how others around you were behaving? If so, what were they doing?

Personal reflection: Lessons I have learned about myself

Finally take a few minutes to review your responses and identify three key lessons you have learned about yourself, and record them here.

1._____________________________________________________________________________

2._____________________________________________________________________________

3._____________________________________________________________________________

Why is self-awareness important?

Taking time out to reflect on past experiences is one of the key principles of self-awareness, as it provides you with a greater insight into your reactions and responses to people and circumstances. Having a greater level of knowledge about yourself provides you with the platform to progress from, to enhance your own personal performance, and to further improve your relationships with others. You will be more resourceful – in other words, you will have a deeper well of EI that you can draw on at any time.

Rookie Buster

By now you may be asking “What else can I do to become even more self-aware?”

In short, the answer is: through analysing yourself more and by asking for feedback from others. This chapter provides you with some practical tools to help you do just that.

What can affect your self-awareness?

Your self-awareness can be affected by your honesty, your courage, your curiosity and your willingness.

Honesty

You gain a much greater insight if you are honest with yourself about how you think, feel and act. Acknowledge your true feelings, even if they are painful. This provides you with “real” evidence for being able to develop your emotional intelligence.

Courage

Your self-awareness can also be affected by how courageous you are in asking for feedback from others. When you receive feedback, you may recognize some aspects of it already; others may surprise you. However, all of it is useful. Without the perception of others, you are never fully aware of your personal impact.

Curiosity

Having a restless curiosity about yourself and your performance helps you to seek answers as to why things happen, how and why you react the way you do in certain situations, and what you can do to improve yourself.

Willingness

Honesty, courage and curiosity alone are not enough. There also needs to be a willingness on your part to gather information, to learn from it and then to act upon it in order to develop your emotional intelligence.

Exercise – Assessing your willingness to learn

Rate your current feelings for these three factors on a scale of 1 to 10.

Multiply the three scores together (energy × openness × focus) and put this total in the box below:

This figure gives your “willingness to learn”. The maximum possible score is 1000 (10 × 10 × 10).

So, how willing are you to learn?

To make the most of your learning experience, your rating should be 700 and above.

If it is any lower, identify the possible factors which you think are causing this and consider ways in which you can improve your rating, thereby improving your overall willingness to learn.

If your energy score is low – have a refreshing drink; stand up; move around; get some fresh air; think positive!

If your openness score is low – ask yourself why? What are the reasons for your scepticism or doubt? If this can’t be overcome, stop reading this book now, and come back to it when you are in a more receptive state of mind.

If your focus score is low – create the right environment. Remove any distractions, both internal and external. (External distractions might include noise, location, comfort; internal ones could be concerns, outstanding actions, etc.)

How does your self-awareness affect others?

Changes in your behaviour are seen and felt by others. But without self-awareness, you won’t know how your behaviour may be affecting others. You could unknowingly be having a very negative impact, which will ultimately affect your long-term relationships.

For example, when you are under pressure you may be totally unaware of how you behave. You may become withdrawn, you may start to dictate what has to be done, you may be seen as moody. However you behave, others see and feel the difference.

To raise your awareness you need to know how others see you. With this insight you can change your behaviour and eliminate the negative impact that you have on others.

Knowing yourself: Bringing
self-awareness to life

Your starting point

1. Transfer into this box your self-awareness score from the EI self-perception questionnaire in Chapter 2.

2. Now that you know more about self-awareness, re-evaluate this score and plot it on the Knowing Yourself blade above. This score is an indicator of your level of self-awareness, and is based on your self-perception.

3. Reflect on your entries in your emotions diary (this is fully explained in the next section, “Personal development activities”), and if you recognize there is scope for strengthening your self-awareness, take some time here to jot down your ideas. You may like to think about this in terms of what you could start, stop and continue.

• Start – for example, start using positive language to change the way I’m feeling, when I recognize that I am in a “bad” or “sad” mood.

• Stop – for example, stop ignoring how my mood is affecting others, and instead ask them for feedback.

• Continue – for example, continue asking for more feedback, especially around how my behaviour makes people feel.

4. Use The Johari Window template in the Appendix and consider, in relation to self-awareness, how you behave and how you feel.

Jot down your behaviours (in Box 1) and your feelings (in Box 2).

A sample of the template is shown here.

(From Joseph Luft, Of Human Interaction, 1969, McGraw-Hill. Material is reproduced with permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies.)

5. Your self-awareness has an impact on others. To gain a true understanding of this, you need to ask others for their feedback. Identify four people who know you well in the workplace and use the five statements from the self-awareness section of the EI questionnaire (page 36 in Chapter 2) as prompts for discussion with each of them. Their perceptions will provide valuable data – some may confirm your own perception, while some may differ.

6. Go back to The Johari Window template, and in Box 1 capture the perceptions shared by you and others. Then complete Box 3 and record anything you had previously been unaware of. The real value of this exercise is in discovering things you don’t already know about yourself.

7. Based on your findings, revisit and, if necessary, revise your start, stop and continue actions.

You can now bring your self-awareness to life through the following personal development activities.

Personal development activities

1. Keeping an emotions diary

One of the most powerful ways of raising your self-awareness and gathering information about yourself is to keep an emotions diary. The emotions diary helps you to identify how your emotional intelligence affects you in the workplace.

Invest in a notebook. Use it as your emotions diary. Keep it with you for a two-week period, and use the prompts below to make a note of your feelings in different situations.

Be honest with yourself. This information is invaluable, as it provides you with the “real, live” data which you need as you progress through this book.

My emotions

• Identify the emotion you experienced.

• Describe the situation you were in.

• Identify what triggered the emotion.

• Did you notice how you were feeling or behaving, or did someone comment on your mood/behaviour?

• Record any physiological changes you experienced.

• How long did this emotion last?

• Did you perceive it as a positive or a negative emotion?

• If you perceived your emotion to be negative, how did you deal with it?

• How did you express or communicate your emotion? (For example, by shouting or screaming.)

• What impact did this have on others?

• If you perceived your emotion to be positive, how did you deal with it?

• How did you express or communicate your emotion? (For example, by singing or smiling.)

• What impact did this have on others?

Once you have completed three or four entries, read through them and make a note of any recurring trends or similarities.

If you have identified any specific emotional states, moods, responses and/or feelings that you experience more often than others, make a note of them in your diary.

Then ask yourself “What triggers these?” This will help you to identify any patterns or correlations between your emotional states and their triggers. For instance, is it a particular:

• Person?

• Activity?

• Time? (That “Monday morning” feeling, for example.)

As you move through the book you will find ways to address these emotions and triggers.

2. Becoming more resourceful

An “emotional state” is something that you are experiencing constantly throughout your life. But unlike moods your emotional state doesn’t stay around for long.

There are more resourceful, or positive, and less resourceful, or negative, states. A definition of “resourceful” in this context could be “states that help to make your life easy”.

Many people think that emotional states are created by situations which you can’t control, but it has been proved that you create your own state. This means that you have power to change it whenever you want to. You can move yourself from a less resourceful state to a more resourceful one.

Rookie Buster

Two of the most powerful ways of achieving a more resourceful state are to change what you actually say to yourself, and to strengthen your positive self-belief.

Your internal chatter

Your internal chatter is the dialogue that you constantly have with yourself, throughout the day.

Stop! Listen! Can you hear it?

Ask yourself, “Is what I’m hearing making me feel positive or negative?”

Some of the conversations that you have with yourself can be very unhelpful, as they generate negative emotions. These emotions then create your mood, and those moods dictate the way you behave. When you are in this state you are more likely to be using very intense language or phrases, such as “I’m really frightened by what they are thinking,” “I’m absolutely furious with the way this is going,” or “I’m stunned by what’s been said.”

Simply by changing the intensity of the words or the phrases that you say to yourself can change the impact that they have on your state.

Here are some examples of minimizing your negative impact:

From		To
Fearful		Cautious
Furious		Callenged
Stunned		Taken aback

Think about your internal chatter. What negative phrases or words do you hear on a regular basis? Record them in the “From” column below. Then brainstorm some other words which would realistically express how you are feeling, but in a more constructive way, and record them in the “To” column.

From		To
______		______
______		______
______		______

Here are some examples of maximizing your positive impact:

From		To
Enthusiastic		Eager!
Motivated		Excited!
Good		Fabulous!

Now take yourself through the same process as before, but this time looking at increasing the impact of the positive words that you say to yourself.

From		To
______		______
______		______
______		______

Now, here’s the fun part! Try them out for size. Say them out loud; how do they sound; how do you feel?

Strengthening your self-belief

Self-belief is everything. The loss of self-belief diminishes your selfesteem, self-confidence and ability to remain positive and focused.

Rookie Buster

An example of this is what can happen when you are on your way to a business meeting.

You are feeling confident because you are well prepared. You feel positive and, based on your previous experience, you believe that you can have a successful meeting. You start to rehearse the meeting in your mind: you can see yourself and the other person, and you can “hear” what you are saying to each other.

At this stage, you are already anticipating a positive outcome.

However, something starts to happen. You are aware that you are starting to feel uneasy. You’re not sure why, but the feeling is definitely there. As you continue on your journey you hear some negative internal chatter creeping in. You start to ask yourself:

• “What if they don’t like me?”

• “What if they disagree with my proposal?”

• “What if I don’t achieve my objective?”

By this point you are probably beginning to think about the implications of this becoming an unsuccessful meeting, even to the point of believing that you could lose your job over it!

These thoughts appear to come from nowhere, and the trouble begins when you start to believe them. Before you know it, you have gone from a very positive state to a very negative state. You no longer believe in yourself!

You feel worried, demotivated and frustrated, and in only a few minutes you will be walking into the meeting. You try to think more positively, but it doesn’t seem to be working. All that you can hear in your mind is “Help!”

What can you do?

You can take yourself around the self-belief cycle, which is illustrated on the next page. This enables you to change the way you are thinking, feeling and behaving, and as a result you are more likely to achieve the outcomes you want.

1. To prevent any negative thoughts and/or doubt in your mind, you need to have a clear objective from the outset.

Once you have decided your objective, visualize the outcome; imagine how it will feel when you are successful. Store this image in your mind. You can call on it whenever you need to strengthen your self-belief. (This visualization technique is covered in more detail in Chapter 5.)

Listen to your internal chatter. If it’s negative, identify similar situations where you have been successful. Ask yourself, “What went well, and why?” This provides you with evidence to help to keep things in perspective. It creates more balanced thinking.

Self-belief cycle

Start to think in words and phrases which are more motivational and positive.

Whenever you hear a negative thought, push it away and call upon your past positive evidence to replace it.

2. Perceptions change! Continue to check your perception of the situation. Is anything different which could have caused this change? For example, you may have had some feedback which has caused you to doubt your own ability. If this has happened, find someone whom you trust, and talk it through with them; ask them for feedback; re-align your perception of yourself and the situation.

If you address 1 and 2, you will directly influence your emotional state (stage 3 in the diagram). This in turn will change your behaviour in a positive way, enabling you to achieve your desired outcome (stage 5).

To put this into practice, identify a situation in which your self-belief is called into question. Then take yourself through the self-belief cycle: make any adjustments necessary; review your thinking, feeling and behaviour, and acknowledge any effect that it has.

This is not a technique which brings change about immediately: you may have to keep coming back to it in order to make a breakthrough.

Coach’s notes