Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (8 page)
Read Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Online
Authors: Travis Bradberry,Jean Greaves,Patrick Lencioni
Review the strategies for the EQ skill you selected, and list up to three that you will practice below.
1.
2.
3.
Who do you know who is gifted in your new chosen EQ skill and willing to provide feedback and advice throughout your journey?
My New EQ mentor is: __________________________
5
SELF-AWARENESS STRATEGIES
S
imply put, to be self-aware is to know yourself as you really are. Initially, self-awareness can come across as a somewhat ambiguous concept. There is no finish line where someone is going to slap a medal on you and deem you “self-aware.” In addition, awareness of yourself is not just knowing that you prefer oranges over apples or telling people that you are a morning person instead of a night owl. It’s deeper than that. Getting to know yourself inside and out is a continuous journey of peeling back the layers of the onion and becoming more and more comfortable with what is in the middle—the true essence of you.
imply put, to be self-aware is to know yourself as you really are. Initially, self-awareness can come across as a somewhat ambiguous concept. There is no finish line where someone is going to slap a medal on you and deem you “self-aware.” In addition, awareness of yourself is not just knowing that you prefer oranges over apples or telling people that you are a morning person instead of a night owl. It’s deeper than that. Getting to know yourself inside and out is a continuous journey of peeling back the layers of the onion and becoming more and more comfortable with what is in the middle—the true essence of you.
Your hard-wired emotional reactions to anything come before you even have a chance to respond. Since it isn’t possible to leave your emotions out of the equation, managing yourself and your relationships means you first need to be aware of the full range of your feelings, both positive and negative.
When you don’t take time out to notice and understand your emotions, they have a strange way of resurfacing when you least expect or want them to. It’s their way of trying to bring something important to your attention. They will persist, and the damage will mount, until you take notice.
Facing the truth about who you are can at times be unsettling. Getting in touch with your emotions and tendencies takes honesty and courage. Be patient and give yourself credit for even the smallest bits of forward momentum. As you start noticing things about yourself that you weren’t previously aware of (things you aren’t always going to like), you are progressing.
The remainder of this chapter introduces you to 15 original strategies, which were designed to help you maximize your self-awareness to create positive changes in your life. The strategies are straightforward and packed full of insights and examples that will help your self-awareness grow.
It’s human nature to want to create two simple and easy piles of emotions: the good ones and the bad ones. For instance, most people would automatically classify guilt as
bad
. You don’t want to feel it—you might even beat yourself up about it—and you do whatever you can to get rid of it. Likewise, we tend to let
good
emotions like excitement run wild. We pump ourselves up and feed off the energy.
bad
. You don’t want to feel it—you might even beat yourself up about it—and you do whatever you can to get rid of it. Likewise, we tend to let
good
emotions like excitement run wild. We pump ourselves up and feed off the energy.
Suspending judgment of emotions allows them to run their course and vanish.
The downfall of attaching such labels to your emotions is that judging your emotions keeps you from really understanding what it is that you are feeling. When you allow yourself to sit with an emotion and become fully aware of it, you can understand what is causing it. Suspending judgment of emotions allows them to run their course and vanish. Passing judgment on whether you should or shouldn’t be feeling what you are feeling just heaps more emotions on top of the pile and prevents the original feeling from running its course.
So, the next time you feel an emotion begin to build, take notice of it immediately. Refrain from putting it into the good or bad pile and remind yourself that the feeling is there to help you understand something important.
Consider for a moment what happens when you drop a stone into water. The stone’s swift plummet pierces the water’s surface, sending ripples in all directions. Your outpourings of emotion are like stones that send ripples through the people in your life. Since emotions are the primary drivers of your behavior, it’s important you understand the effect they have on other people.
Let’s say a manager loses his cool and berates an employee in front of the rest of the team. When the lashing happens, it may seem that the manager’s target is the only one whose feelings get bruised, but the ripple effect from the manager’s explosion affects all who witnessed it. As the rest of the team members wander back to their desks, the others, too, feel the manager’s wrath. They go back to work with a pit in their stomachs, each one wondering when his or her turn will come up.
The manager thinks his tirade was good for productivity because the rant “scared people straight,” but their fear soon settles into caution. To perform at their best, the team members need to take risks, stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone, and even make some mistakes along the way. No one on the team wants to be the manager’s next target, so the team members play it safe and do only as they are told. When the manager gets docked a year later for leading a team that fails to take initiative, he wonders what’s wrong with
the team.
the team.
Your emotions are powerful weapons, and continuing to think that their effects are instant and minimal will only do you a disservice. The key to observing the ripple effects of your emotions is to watch closely how they impact other people immediately, and then use that information as a guide for how your emotions are bound to affect a wider circle long after you unleash the emotion. To fully understand the ripple effects of your emotions, you’ll need to spend some time reflecting upon your behavior. You’ll also need to ask other people how they are affected by your emotions. The more you understand how your emotions ripple outward, the better equipped you’ll be to choose the type of ripples that you want to create.
The biggest obstacle to increasing your self-awareness is the tendency to avoid the discomfort that comes from seeing yourself as you really are. Things you do not think about are off your radar for a reason: they can sting when they surface. Avoiding this pain creates problems, because it is merely a short-term fix. You’ll never be able to manage yourself effectively if you ignore what you need to do to change.
Rather than avoiding a feeling, your goal should be to move toward the emotion, into it, and eventually through it.
Rather than avoiding a feeling, your goal should be to move toward the emotion, into it, and eventually through it. This can be said for even mild emotional discomfort, such as boredom, confusion, or anticipation. When you ignore or minimize an emotion, no matter how small or insignificant, you miss the opportunity to do something productive with that feeling. Even worse, ignoring your feelings does not make them go away; it just helps them to surface again when you least expect them.
To be effective in life, we all need to discover our own arrogance—those things we don’t bother to learn about and dismiss as unimportant. One person thinks apologies are for sissies, so she never learns to recognize when one is needed. Another person hates feeling down, so he constantly distracts himself with meaningless activity and never really feels content. Both people need to take the bold step of leaning into the feelings that will motivate them to change. Otherwise, they will continue down an unproductive, unsatisfying path, repeating the same patterns over and over again.
After the first few times you lean into your discomfort, you will quickly find that the discomfort isn’t so bad, it doesn’t ruin you, and it reaps rewards. The surprising thing about increasing your self-awareness is that just thinking about it will help you change, even though much of your focus will initially be on the things you do “wrong.” Don’t be afraid of your emotional “mistakes.” They tell you what you should be doing differently and provide the steady stream of information you need to understand yourself as life unfolds.
When you experience an emotion, electric signals course through your brain and trigger physical sensations in your body. The physical sensations can be as varied as your stomach muscles tightening, your heart rate increasing, your breathing quickening, or your mouth going dry. Because your mind and body are so tightly connected, one of the most effective ways to understand your emotions as they are happening is to learn how to spot the physical changes that accompany your emotions.
To better understand the physical effects of your emotions, try closing your eyes the next time you have a few moments alone. Feel how fast or slow your heart is beating. Notice the pace of your breathing. Determine how tense or relaxed the muscles are in your arms, legs, neck, and back. Now, think of a couple of events from your life—one positive and one negative—that generate strong emotions. Think through one of these events in enough detail that you can feel your emotions stir. Take note of the physical changes that accompany the feelings. Do they make your breathing or heart rate change? Do your muscles grow tense? Do you feel hotter or colder? Repeat this process with the other event, and take note of the physical differences in the emotions from the positive and negative experiences.
Closing your eyes and thinking of emotionally arousing events is simply training for the real thing—spotting the physical signs of your emotions on the fly. In the beginning, try not to think too hard—simply open your mind to noticing the sensations. As you improve at this, you’ll find that you’re often physically aware of an emotion long before you’re mentally aware of it.
We all have buttons—pet peeves, triggers, whatever you want to call them—that, when pushed, just irritate and irk us until we want to scream. Perhaps you have a coworker who lives her life as if she were constantly on stage. Her entrance into meetings is dramatic and flaring, and she feeds off the energy from everyone’s attention and uses that energy to take control of the room. Her voice is louder than most, and her contributions to the meetings are always l ong-winded novels, as if she just loves to hear herself talk.
If your modus operandi is more subtle (or you really would like part of that stage yourself), a person like that may really eat at you. When you go into a meeting with great ideas and a readiness to just sit down and get straight to the point, a drama queen who is creating a stage in the boardroom is bound to flip your switches for frustration and rage. Even if you aren’t the type to blurt out impulsive comments or otherwise go on the attack, your body language may give you away, or you may find yourself on the drive home obsessing over your lingering frustration.
Knowing who pushes your buttons and how they do it is critical to developing the ability to take control of these situations, maintain your poise, and calm yourself down. To use this strategy, you can’t think about things generally. You need to pinpoint the specific people and situations that trigger your emotions. Your buttons are bound to get pushed by a wide range of people and things. It could be certain people (like drama queens), particular situations (like feeling scared or caught off guard), or conditions in the environment (like noisy offices). Having a clear understanding of who and what pushes your buttons makes these people and situations a bit less difficult because they come as less of a surprise.
You can take your self-awareness a big step further by discovering the source of your buttons. That is, why do these people and situations irk you so much when other, equally annoying people and situations don’t bother you at all? Perhaps the stage hog reminds you of your sister who got all the attention when you were younger. You lived many years in her shadow, vowing to never let it happen again. Now you sit beside her clone in every meeting. No wonder she’s a trigger for your emotions.
Knowing why your buttons are what they are opens doors to managing your reactions to your triggers. For now, your tasks are simple—find the sources of your buttons and jot down a list. Knowing your buttons is essential to using the self- and relationship management strategies that come later in the book.
Hawks have the distinct advantage of soaring hundreds of feet above the ground, looking down upon the Earth and seeing all that happens below them. The creatures on the ground go about their lives with narrow tunnel vision, not even realizing that the hawk is soaring above them predicting their every move. Wouldn’t it be great to be the hawk, looking down upon yourself in those sticky situations that tend to get the better of you? Think of all the things you would be able to see and understand from above. Your objectivity would allow you to step out from under the control of your emotions and know exactly what needed to be done to create a positive outcome.
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