Accurate self-awareness

Professionals with an accurate self-awareness are able to know which emotions they are feeling, at any time, and why they are feeling them, without judgment. They can connect the dots and build the links between their feelings and what they think, do, and say. Therefore, they can easily recognize how their emotions and feelings are affecting their performance and the teamwork or the environment--as emotions are a contagious virus.

Professionals who lack emotional self-awareness often feel stressed and overwhelmed, because they don't know how to establish priorities--health, family, and a balanced work life. Therefore, they easily get irritated, frustrated, or angry, and even treat others in an abrasive manner. Emotions are a virus and only one person can badly infect the whole workplace. I know that you have someone with these traits in your workplace.

Now, let's see how to improve self-awareness:

• Check in your emotions: Schedule a time to practice checking in your emotions regularly, in order to get in to the habit of flexing your identifying muscles. Bedtime would be a good time to start. It's just like going to the gym, flexing your muscles. At the beginning it's difficult and frustrating but with consistent daily practice the results will show up. Sit quietly, close your eyes, and take a deep breath. Ask yourself the following questions and be sure to answer them honestly. There is no right or wrong answer. Just listen to your responses. Use a self-awareness journal to write the answers down:
  
• As a consequence of increasing the awareness of your own feelings and emotions you increase your ability to self-reflect, and to understand the emotional drivers of your behavior. Self-reflection is a typical activity of people with high emotional intelligence.
• Label your emotions: Once you are able to tell how you are feeling, you will be able to identify what triggered your feelings. Remember that not all emotions are negative--practice recognizing and labeling the positive ones too. Some suggestions for labels might be single words such as anger, joy, fear, or sadness. Or you can give shades of meaning to your labels by using phrases such as fed up, tired, and worn out, or whatever rings truest for you. The next questions help you to identify your triggers:

• Be in the moment: Try to hear your emotions as they happen. What are they telling you? For example, if you have to take on a challenging new project at work but you, suddenly, feel angry or irritated - what does that tell you? You might really be feeling that you are taking on more than your share of work and you need to revisit the decision to accept the project. Try to verbalize the emotion--"OK, I am feeling really angry right now. I can feel it in my stomach and my back. What's the anger trying to tell me?". Acknowledging your emotions as they occur gives you more opportunities to learn about yourself by connecting emotions to their causes.
• Explore the root of the emotion: First you identified your emotion with a label now you are exploring what the emotion is telling you, though you need to make sure that you are dealing with the full emotional story. Often, we feel an emotion that is only the tip of everything that we are feeling. For instance, if you are feeling angry:

All of these roots of your anger are different, but the resulting emotion is the same. So you need to be willing to look beyond the initial emotion and explore what else you might be feeling, in order to be able to manage your emotions. Otherwise, you are just addressing a symptom, not the root cause.