The first step is to strengthen your emotional Self-awareness

Stop thinking that emotions are irrelevant. This is a false belief. Your emotions are an essential source of valuable information and to develop your Social and Emotional Skills, the very first step is to strengthen your emotional Self-awareness.

It is extremely important to know yourself and recognize your emotions and their effects: noticing and being able to label feelings, emotions, gut level instincts, reactions and connect these to their source, using all of this as a valuable source of information about you, others, situations.

Emotions refer to mental and physiological states characterized as feelings. It is often hard to put a name on what we are experiencing. There are many. The brain processes more than one reaction to circumstance and there are hundreds of emotions which differ in gradation and intensity.

In general, people with this skill: know which emotion they feel and why; realize, in the now, the links between what they feel and what you think, say, do; recognize how feelings affect their performance and are able to articulate feelings and appropriately express them.

People lacking this skill fail to gain insight/information from what their body might be trying to tell them. In other words, they may receive messages from their body, but do not pay attention or connect to the source of physical symptoms (e.g. lower back pain, chronic headache, neck or shoulder pain, heart racing, sweaty palms, anxiety attacks…).

Moreover, they fail to see that what they are doing or being asked to do might not be aligned with their personal goals and values. They often feel stressed and out of balance in terms of health, life, family and get easily irritated, frustrated and angry, causing them to treat people badly.

Obviously, you cannot develop empathy if you do not understand your own feelings and you cannot possibly manage your emotions if you are not aware.

So, the first step is to strengthen your emotional awareness.

A good emotion vocabulary and self reflection can help you become more conscious of your emotions.

As an exercise, write down a list of emotions (as many as you can) or download a list from the internet and start to regularly check in on your feelings during the course of the day. Keep a journal and, at least once a day for two weeks, write down the emotions you felt. If you want to do more, a timer can help you: every two hours, check in on your emotional state and your body sensations.

Just notice your emotions and feelings as as starting point. The goal is to expand your awareness and ability to name the emotions.

Do you want to discover your strengths and development opportunities to improve your social and emotional intelligence? Start here!

“Social and Emotional Intelligence (SEI) is the ability to be aware of your own emotions, and those of others, in the moment, and to use that information to manage ourselves and our relationships.” ―The Institute for Social and Emotional Intelligence