Leadership, Management & Etiquette

With Seyi Osuntayo 
Emotional Intelligence: Increasing Your Self Awareness       
In Emotional Intelligence, increasing self awareness is very important. Because you are at the centre of your universe, you must understand what it is that makes you do what you do before you can begin to alter your behaviour for better result. You must understand what is important to you, how you experience things, what you want, how you feel, and how you come across others. Without self awareness, your effectiveness in the workplace will be taunted. Has explained in the last discourse, self awareness has five components, namely intentions, senses, appraisals, feelings, actions.
The first action to be taken in developing your emotional intelligence is to increase your self-awareness skills. You really need to work towards increasing your self-awareness skills. How will you do this?  Let me share these tips with you in this edition.
One, you need to always engage in positive inner dialogue. Always make your inner dialogue as positive as you can.  Make it more optimistic and less critical; remove inner thought of insecurity, poverty, doubts, fraud, and uncertainty, as these can affect your dealings with others. Often times your inner dialogue sends you a signal, which when not guided could make you to lose your emotion.
Two, tune in to your senses.   Your senses, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching provide us with data about the world, ourselves, other people and situations. Frequently, this data is filtered and transformed by our inner dialogue or silent appraisals. But it is easy to misinterpret sensory date, for example, frowning may not necessarily indicate anger, nor tapping of foot impatience. It is therefore important for us to clarify and amend our thinking to provide more accurate appraisal.
Three, get in touch with your feelings. Our feelings are our spontaneous emotional response to the interpretations we make and the expectations we have. Manage your feelings well in any situation and move on. This will help you not to transfer aggression.
Four, Know what your intentions are. Intentions primarily refer to our immediate desires ? what we would like to accomplish in a specific situation. High self-awareness means that you recognize the true intention of your actions. It is important we are fully aware of our intentions.  
Five, Pay Attention to your actions. Our actions are physical, so others observe them. If your want your actions to work better for us, we should be aware of the signals they give out. Monitor your actions, you speech patterns, body language, and nonverbal behaviour. All these can have others judging you inaccurately  
Self awareness means becoming fully aware of the wealth of information you have about who you are. 
(To be continued)
Seyi Osuntayo
[email protected]
www.theschoolofetiquette.org