Chapter 2

Emotional Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the foundational skill of emotional intelligence. It is the base from which all other EI competencies arise. Self-awareness means tuning in to what's going on with you emotionally: recognizing and acknowledging your emotional state. Without an awareness of your emotions, you cannot begin to harness their power toward your hoped-for outcome in any situation. Without an awareness of your emotions, your EI is nonexistent.

As mentioned in the Preface, throughout this text, occasionally we are going to be inviting you into our classroom experience as trainers of EI, allowing you to live vicariously through those who have joined us for training in this content. Imagine yourself sitting there with us, exploring this material with a group of other interested participants and consider how the discussion of these EI discoveries unfolds.

A Glimpse into the Classroom: Self-Awareness

“So, how are you feeling today?” We ask this of the group of participants gathered in the classroom. A simple question and yet they stare back at us blankly. They're not used to this question, often posed so superficially, being asked with the expectation of an actual thoughtful response. We anticipated this and have come prepared. We refer them to a chart of funny faces, each expressing a different emotion. “Find the face that best captures your emotional state at this moment and put a circle around it.” With some reluctance, the group gets busy tuning in to their emotional self-awareness.

Two or so minutes tick by and the participants are starting to share their responses. Marjorie says that she feels hopeful. “Great! What are you hopeful about?” She's hopeful that this course will offer some meaning and value to her, that it will help her assess her EI skills. Bill shares that he's feeling a little anxious today. “Anxious, huh? How come?” He paints a picture of the pile of work he needs to get done in preparation for an important presentation at the end of the week. James raises a somewhat reluctant hand and tells us all that he's feeling a little suspicious this morning. “Suspicious?” we respond. “That's an interesting one. Tell us more.” He talks about the email he received last week from his boss telling him, without further explanation, that he had been registered for this course. He says he's not sure why he's here. Perhaps a little more work in self-awareness will help James connect with why his boss wanted him to attend our course.

So how are you feeling?

Go on, answer the question for yourself right now. How are you feeling at this moment as you sit with your nose in this book? What emotional state would you describe for yourself?

Notice that in the Glimpse into the Classroom exercise on self-awareness, we asked not only what people were feeling but also why they were feeling it. The second part of this question is very important. It's not enough to simply label your emotional state and then go about your business. Recognizing what you feel is just the starting point of self-awareness. This recognition is only useful when you take it to deeper levels where you are

   seeking to understand your emotions

   identifying where your emotions are coming from

   uncovering the drivers of your emotions

   recognizing the effect your emotions are having on your performance.

For some people, self-awareness comes easily. There are those who just seem to have a natural connection with their emotional selves and are tuned in to the ever-shifting emotional currents that run through their bodies. Then there are those who truly struggle to connect with their emotional states. They have to focus significant energy to uncover the emotions that lie within. Which way does it tend to be for you?

Whether you are someone who struggles with tuning in to your own emotional state or someone who does so naturally and finds it difficult to understand why everyone around you seems so disconnected, bear in mind that true self-awareness is not an easy thing to pull off. We live in a culture that values outward action (often in the form of reaction) but places little emphasis on the reflection required for self-attunement. The speed of our lives rarely allows for introspection. Even when we happen on quiet moments, we are often too exhausted from maintaining our frenetic pace to put them to good, self-reflective use.

DEFINING SELF-AWARENESS

Psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey are often credited with coining the term “emotional intelligence” (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). In a series of articles written in the early 1990s, Mayer and Salovey defined self-awareness as an understanding of both your moods and your thoughts about your moods. In addition, they emphasized that this awareness contributes not only to better decision making but also relates to your ability to understand and interact effectively with others.

Mayer and Salovey's work was built on and popularized by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995). Goleman supports Mayer and Salovey's core definition of self-awareness, but he also broadens the definition to include accurate self-assessment and self-confidence. Goleman's definition of self-awareness therefore includes three basic competencies:

1. Emotional self-awareness: Reading one's own emotions and recognizing the potential impact of those emotions upon individual performance.

2. Accurate self-assessment: Knowing one's individual strengths and limits.

3. Self-confidence: A sound sense of one's self-worth and capabilities.

In the next chapter, where we explore self-esteem and confidence, we will highlight those aspects of self-awareness that connect with Goleman's competencies of accurate self-assessment and self-confidence. But for our purposes here, we are defining self-awareness in its simplest form, remaining true to the core of self-awareness as defined by Mayer and Salovey, Goleman, and others.

Emotional Self-Awareness

Emotional self-awareness requires that you recognize and tune in to your emotional state and go beyond mere recognition of your emotions to a deeper exploration of why you are experiencing that emotion.

FROM SELF-AWARENESS TO SELF-MANAGEMENT

This definition of self-awareness clarifies the importance of going beyond mere recognition of your emotions to a deeper exploration of why the emotion is present. It is this analysis that offers the true value of being self-aware. Recognition coupled with understanding leads to choice. You cannot manage emotions you are not aware of or do not fully understand. When you understand your emotions, a pathway begins to develop that leads from self-awareness to self-management. There are four stepping-stones along this pathway: attunement, understanding, acceptance, and attending.

Attunement: Your ability to tune in to your emotional state at any given moment. This would be like having a Doppler radar view of your inner weather systems.

Understanding: Your ability to unearth the root of a recognized emotional state, to come to know objectively why you are feeling the way you are.

Acceptance: Your willingness to accept whatever emotions—good, bad, or ugly—you discover within yourself. These emotions arose for one reason or another; denying or repressing them is not going to serve you.

Attending: Your ability and willingness to give your emotions a voice, to express them in an appropriate way. This ability falls under the realm of emotional self-management, which we will explore in greater depth a bit later.

SELF-AWARENESS AND PERFORMANCE

American Express Financial Advisors is often touted as one of the early adopters of emotional intelligence training as a performance tool. In the early 1990s, just as researchers were beginning to look into and publish articles about EI, AmEx discovered that they had a problem getting their financial advisors to sell life insurance policies successfully, even to those clients whose financial plans clearly called for it. Now, life insurance is one of those issues fraught with emotion to begin with, but AmEx's challenge lay not in overcoming the emotions expressed by their clients, but rather with the emotions the AmEx financial advisors were experiencing themselves.

When the issue of sluggish sales of life insurance policies reached the desk of a high-level executive at American Express's insurance arm, he commissioned a team to look into the root cause. It turns out that client emotions did play a role in the sluggish sale of life insurance policies, but not in the way one might think. This was a classic case of Freudian countertransference! Heightened client emotions caused by the thought of purchasing life insurance policies transferred to sympathetic emotional responses among American Express's financial advisors. These emotional responses in turn made it difficult for advisors to sell policies. Advisors reported feeling shameful, guilty, untruthful, and at times, unethical when they encouraged clients to purchase policies from them. These emotions, often lurking beneath the surface during client interactions, compromised the financial advisors' effectiveness in selling life insurance.

But not all financial advisors at AmEx were experiencing difficulties in selling life insurance. A small cadre of advisors seemed to be consistently successful in closing sales. Why were these financial advisors effective when so many of their colleagues were not? In the end, it all came down to self-awareness. Interviews with these successful advisors revealed that they had developed strategies for being aware of and managing the potentially derailing internal emotions that may emerge during a client interaction. Armed with this insight, AmEx launched a series of experimental training, some of the first corporate training targeting the development of emotional competencies. This training focused primarily on competencies related to self-awareness and self-management skills. At the end of the first round of training, 90 percent of the participants reported a significant improvement in sales performance.

FIRST STEPS TOWARD SELF-AWARENESS

Think of all that you do that is affected by your emotional state: your decision-making, your actions, and your interactions. Indeed, as pointed out with the AmEx experience, your overall performance and often your very success are outcomes of your emotional responses and your ability to manage them effectively. This, of course, highlights the point we're trying to make here: Emotional self-awareness is critical to your capacity for seeking successful, joyful, fulfilled lives.

So what do you do if you come to realize that you're not very good at this self-awareness thing? If you recognize that self-awareness is an area in which you need to grow, a skill you need to develop more fully, how exactly do you do that?

The first step to building self-awareness, as is the case with any challenging journey, is to make a commitment. Understand that self-awareness is not easy. Taking a good, hard, honest look inside can be scary and sometimes downright painful. There may be a lot of self-denial to overcome, a lot of excuses to wade through, before you reach your true, rock-bottom self. And of course, once there, when in touch with your unfiltered self, if you find something you know needs to change, well, then there's only more hard work ahead. We believe it's an important and worthwhile journey despite these challenges. Ultimately, the decision to make this effort rests with you, and the commitment to doing so is yours alone to make.

People in our courses often suggest that there is no time for self-awareness in their lives. They say they'd like to do it and they understand the importance of it, but they just can't fit it in. That's a bit of a cop out, especially given that self-awareness doesn't really require all that much time. No one spends hours sitting around being self-aware. It's one of those things that can be built into the small, spare moments of your busy day.

EQuip Yourself with Self-Awareness

If you are committed to deepening your self-awareness, here are some techniques to try.

Set an awareness trigger.

   Set a watch alarm or use your email program to send yourself a note a handful of times through the day. When the alarm goes off, or when the email chimes in your in-box, it's time to check in with your self-awareness.

   Ask yourself two simple questions: How am I feeling? Why am I feeling it?

   Tune in to your emotion in the moment and decide if it s serving you well. Choose what to do with it, if anything.

   Build awareness into the free moments in your day, between the day's events. Use the time you spend commuting. Take a quick stroll following lunch. (One of the authors has a coaching client who has created some self-reflective time by spending an extra minute or two sitting in the stall after using the bathroom. At least it's relatively safe from interruption!)

Reflect on behaviors instead of emotions.

   Connect with your emotions through the back door of your external behaviors. Some people really struggle to connect with what s going on with them emotionally, so digging around inside of themselves may not work so well at first. Because behaviors are driven by emotions, you can practice connecting with your emotions by reflecting on your behaviors.

   Imagine being followed around by someone with a video camera who is capturing on tape all of your actions and interactions through the day. Now imagine that at the end of each day, you get to sit and watch the tape. You d be observing your own behaviors through the course of the day's events, and in the viewing, you'd be able to reconnect with the emotion you were experiencing at each point along the way.

   Rewind the mental video you have of yourself and your interactions through the day and reflect on that. Use your calendar and computer to remind you of the meetings you had, the phone calls you made, the emails you sent.

   Notice emotional patterns or identify events or people that trigger certain emotional responses in you. Even the simple act of connecting to your emotions, albeit in the past tense, provides you practice in doing so, practice that eventually will allow you to become more emotionally self-aware in the moment.

Keep a self-awareness log.

   Chart your emotions using a notebook, your computer, or perhaps on a large, wall-mounted calendar. Not only does this technique push you to tune in and connect with your emotions at least once a day, but it also provides you with a map or historical reference of your emotional journeys, a record that could offer interesting insight over time.

   Ask yourself: What mood do you awake with? How does it change through the day? What causes it to change?

Go to the balcony.

   See yourself as if looking down from a balcony over a stage. From this vantage point, you are able to be a momentary observer of what is happening both around you and within you.

   Use a few quick questions to help you connect, tune in, and choose appropriate action: “What's the situation down there?” “What am I feeling about that situation?” “How are those feelings supporting or getting in the way of what I want in this situation?”

Develop your feeling vocabulary.

   Use the list of feelings in Table 2-1 to help you identify and describe what you are feeling.

   Rate the intensity of your feeling. The feeling words on the table are ordered in intensity from lowest to highest.

   Exercise precision in describing your emotional state to help fine-tune your emotional self-awareness.

Table 2-1. Words that Express Feelings