Feeling Misunderstood? Developing Emotional Self-Awareness Could Help.

If you have ever encountered someone with a shocking lack of empathy (and we all have), chances are good that they also struggle with Emotional Self-Awareness. They can’t relate to how you might feel because they are not very aware of how they, themselves feel. It’s hard to recognize in others what you cannot recognize in yourself.

Emotional Self-Awareness, along with Self-Regard and Self-Actualization, is part of the Self-Perception composite in the EQ-i 2.0™ model of emotional intelligence.

What is Emotional Self-Awareness?

No need to complicate things, Emotional Self-Awareness means exactly what you might expect: it is the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions. Emotional Self-Awareness allows you to differentiate between subtleties in your own emotions while also understanding the cause of these emotions and the impact they have not only on your own thoughts and actions, but those of others as well.

Those with high Emotional Self-Awareness give consistent attention to their needs, feelings, and emotional triggers. They are well-attuned to their inner emotional states, and they understand how those emotions affect their behavior.

A person who lacks Emotional Self-Awareness can struggle to differentiate between their feelings and their logical sources, often because they avoid introspection and reflection. They might frequently find themselves surprised by the reactions and emotional states of others, while often feeling misunderstood themselves.

Well-developed Emotional Self-Awareness means you are usually in touch with yourself. You know what you are feeling and why.

Two things you can do to improve Emotional Self-Awareness right now:

1. Do more of what you are already doing right now! Understanding the concepts and theories of emotional intelligence can help you better understand your own emotions and how to manage them. We cannot recognize that which we cannot name.
2. Set an "emotional check-in" alarm for yourself at random times. When it goes off, stop and simply ask yourself, what am I feeling right now?

Too much of a good thing:

When Emotional Self-Awareness is out of balance relative to other dimensions of emotional intelligence, you might occur to others as self-absorbed and insensitive to the needs of others. You might reach inaccurate conclusions about situations because you are viewing them only through your own emotional filters.

As always, the solution is not to ignore your Emotional Self-Awareness, but rather to do more of those behaviors that create balance. These include focusing more attention on EI dimensions like Empathy, Social Responsibility, and Reality Testing.

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more on emotional intelligence. In this series, we will be doing a deep dive into each EQ–i 2.0 sub-scale, explaining how it plays into overall EI, and looking at actionable opportunities for developing it further. In the meantime, you can subscribe to our newsletter via email to make sure you don’t miss future articles like this one, and you can click here if you are interested in taking the EQ–i 2.0 assessment.