Intrapersonal/Self-Awareness/Emotional Awareness

✓ Emotional literacy, which involves the ability to understand and communicate your emotions in a linguistic system, which means recognizing and understanding emotions, but also knowing what those emotions are called.

✓ The ability to recognize and really understand your individual character, emotions, mood and also how these affect the people around you.

✓ The awareness of your own emotions, desires, and motivations. This self-awareness is exhibited by a profound knowledge of your feelings as they come in real time.

✓ Not ignoring emotions, especially those that are deemed unpleasant, scary, unproductive, or somehow shameful.

✓ Emotional literacy which involves the ability to recognize, understand and communicate your emotions in a linguistic system.

✓ People with high intrapersonal awareness insist on “dancing to the beat of their own drums,” while those with a low awareness allows others to heavily influence their thoughts, feelings and even behaviors.

How To Improve Self-Awareness

• Begin to really get to know yourself and look at yourself objectively, introspection is key for complete self-awareness. Check in with yourself regularly. Ask yourself how you are doing and pay attention to the answer that you give.

• Meditation and mindfulness are key practices in learning and mastering self-awareness.

• Engage with different people, who may have different vocabularies or different ways of expressing their thoughts and feelings.

• Learn how to recognize and name the emotions that you are experiencing. Review a list of emotions and their meanings.

• Identify what is causing your emotions.

• Understand the difference between having an emotion and acting on one.

• Determine your tolerance for frustration and know when to remove yourself from a situation. The same goes for anger

• Reflect how various emotions apply in your life, how they feel, the effect they have on you and what triggers them in your life.

• Read literature, especially poetry, which deals with a wide range of emotions with a vocabulary as varied as the author or poet.

• Journaling and keeping an emotions diary can help you gain great awareness into your emotional states, and how they apply in your own life.

• When you feel something that society might tell you to ignore — like sorrow, anger, or fear – take a moment to appreciate that you are having that emotion and ask yourself why or what you can do about it rather than just ignoring it. Never deny the emotion and take the time to process it before communicating it.

• Brainstorm scenarios. Consider various situations and then predict how you might feel. Practice naming those feelings, and accepting them, both of which put you in control of your emotions and your emotional state. Then consider appropriate reactions to those feelings, think proactive versus reactive.

Self-Regulation

✓ The ability to manage and regulate your own emotions.

✓ This component is rooted in understanding how and being able to express emotions in appropriate ways. Sometimes this may be as simple as waiting for the right time and place. Self-regulation means taking responsibility for your own behaviors and how you
communicate your emotions.

✓ Avoidance is not self-regulation. When you avoid difficult feelings, you are denying the truth about your life, as well, which is never a healthy coping strategy. This is not helpful to finding solutions, nor does it allow you to take control of your emotional state or learn from your experiences.

✓ Only with awareness, direct acknowledgment and facing all your feelings head on can you achieve a proper level of self-regulation.

✓ When you focus on being proactive in how you handle your difficult emotions, you pay attention to how you can take action in your life, rather than blaming others or trying to ignore the cause of your strong feelings.

✓ People with good self-regulation skills are highly adaptable to the changes around them as well as flexible in their thinking and behaviors. They excel at conflict management and dealing with difficult situations.

✓ Self-regulating people are aware of their influence on people around them, and they own their actions.

How To Improve Self-Regulation

• Realize that it’s your choice how you react to your feelings.

• Stop blaming others for how you feel. Your feelings are your own, no one “makes you” anything, a popular way of phrasing emotions in our society that only serves a selfdestructive purpose and hinders interpersonal communication.

• Determine your tolerance for frustration and know when to remove yourself from a situation. The same goes for anger.

• Tackle your self-destructive behaviors

• Practice positive affirmations

• Play to your strengths

• Be accountable

• Eat a well-balanced diet, as what you put into your body has a huge impact over your emotional state.

• Implement activities that funnel your emotional energy, such as exercise and productive activities, which help prevent overwhelm and stress which fuels emotional outbursts.

• Practice acceptance. Out of control behavior and thoughts are often rooted in a lack of acceptance. This means that if you cannot accept certain emotions you will fight them every step of the way. For some fear and anger are often those that trigger the need to evade, but once accepted and welcomed as a normal part of your emotional state and feelings that you will feel on occasion you can take back control and regulate instead of going into a flight or panic mode when these feelings come.

Social Skills And Interpersonal Awareness

✓ Interpersonal awareness is the ability to understand the emotions of other people and where they come from

✓ Important for effectively communicating with other people

✓ The level of understanding that comes from high interpersonal awareness is key in forming relationships with people, whether romantic, platonic, or professional

✓ Effective communication, collaboration and listening skills

✓ The ability to unify others

How To Improve Social Skills

• Social skills can be greatly improved with practice, practice and more practice. Put yourself out there.

• Get off social media and get back to being with people in person and face to face, after all this is true socialization. Get out there, you cannot learn social skills into you start socializing.

• Observe and follow someone you know with great social skills. This is an ideal way to improve social skills, and even control of emotions, and then mimicking their behavior in your own life.

• Really listen to other people when they talk about their emotions. If someone complains about their day at work, pay attention rather than thinking about your own day or trying to think of a similar story that you can tell about yourself next.

• When you casually ask someone how they are doing, and they say, “I’ve been better,” or “things are going great,” ask them why they feel that way.

Empathy

✓ Empathy is understanding another’s emotions

✓ Where sympathy focuses on your understanding of the emotion that the other person is feeling, empathy focuses on your understanding of the human capacity to feel emotions. It has less to do with experience and more to do with understanding

✓ Rather than treating the other person as someone similar to yourself as sympathy does, empathy is treating the other person as a unique individual with unique needs and experiences

✓ Empathy is safer than sympathy in that empathy does not involve the comparison of emotions. It can also offer solutions like sympathy can, but in a more round-about way – largely because empathy does not require you to have been in the same situation.

How To Improve Empathy Skills

• Be approachable

• Helping through empathy usually involves a strategy called “reflective listening” also known as radical listening where you help the person to interpret their own emotions rather than telling them about your own emotions

• Think about the people in your day, like the person who pours your coffee at the café, or the person who cleans the building you work in

• Take the time to care about and think of others

• Put yourself in other’s shoes

Motivation

✓ Motivation is resilience, and in terms of emotional intelligence it is the ability to persevere regardless of challenges, failures or setbacks

✓ Self-motivation describes an inner drive to remain committed to goals along with a readiness to act as needed to their end

✓ People with high emotional intelligence push forward regardless of failures faced along the way never allowing frustrations to impede their progress

✓ Commitment and initiative constantly move them towards the goal

How To Improve Motivation

• Set one small goal to start, put it in writing, make it SMART (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria) and go after it. Decide that nothing will stand in your way. Keep adding goals that will serve as practice but build up to grander goals as you become practiced

• Maintain a positive mindset

• Begin to see problems, obstacles and setbacks as learning opportunities and not as failures but stepping stones

• Spend time with highly motivated people

• Ask for help as needed

• Be open to leaving your comfort zone

• Stay aware of your fear and tackle them head on

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