Self-Awareness: The Foundation of Emotional Intelligence
Do you know how to use self-awareness to improve your performance?
Emotional intelligence helps you to understand your emotional state, notice strong emotions and overcome negative feelings. Self-awareness influences on your performance because your ability to track your mood is an important factor. It includes accurate insight about your strong sides and weaknesses, how to work on them. Emotional intelligence brings you a clear vision of your mission, so you may be more resolute when you assign a course of action.
Researchers proved that self-aware leaders create teams with great performance. Successful leaders make a positive climate that motivates employees to achieve more.
Discover your self-awareness
Emotional intelligence is an important element in successful leadership. For gaining emotional intelligence, we need to know how to use our brain and its functions. For example, social skills are mediated by specific circuits in the brain. If you are aware of how emotions influence your cooperating with other people, reasoning, and thinking — you have self-awareness. Your brain helps you to be aware of your mental world to respond accordingly. This ability helps us to be more empathic and better work with different people by understanding their feelings.
You may gain self-awareness and become more flexible in your life, give people around what they need. For instance, our brain judges people who are different but you can make a habit to understand each person and be focused on the similarity to build relationships.
Develop self-awareness
Self-awareness helps to see when negative emotions prevent your work and productivity. Sometimes, you just need to change your habits and reactions to get a better result. For example, you become angry when something didn’t happen as you planned. You may waste your time and energy worrying or figure out actions to fix the problems and reach the goals.
Self-aware leaders have openness and trust to lead the team. Ask your peers to give you feedback to develop your emotional intelligence skills. Look for the deep and honest feedback at work and let your colleagues feel free to share their opinions. After that, you can filter out good critique and biases about you.
Start writing your emotions each day to better understand your emotions and their effects. Also, when you experience negative feelings, reflect on the reasons and track the same situations to eliminate the wrong behavior.
You may tell your story as well to understand yourself better. It helps to observe the past, learn from mistakes and benefits, and be mindful in using your time and talents. After that, emphasize your future goals according to your values and past achievements. Self-awareness helps you to plan better with understanding your abilities and time that you need to achieve something.
Work on your thoughts as well. Professor Davidson advises controlling our thoughts because they influence on your physical state and health. Neuroscientists call the ability to track internal signals of the body — interoception. Providing a body scan is a useful approach for creating your skills to notice the bodily changes that accompany feelings.
Become a great leader
Self-aware leaders admit their mistakes and are open to constructive criticism. The study shows that many leaders suffer from the overestimation their skills, lack of flexibility, and they aren’t innovative. They also can’t think broadly about the company and cooperate well with others. Self-awareness helps to achieve emotional intelligence and to succeed.
Scientists advise listening to your inner voice and understanding your life story. Maybe, you need to understand the reason connected with past experience to change your behavior. The more you know about your life story, the better you can adapt to the life changes that fit your needs. When you gather data about yourself, you may provide good improvement.
The article in “The New York Times” described the double-loop learning that requires checking each aspect of your strategy: deep biases, fears, hypothesis and so on. Self-examination helps to exclude wrong beliefs and gain fresh ways of thinking.
Also, start reflecting about the other people’s motivation and preferences to collaborate with them effectively. You can use their interests to engage them and keep motivated.
Develop self-awareness that helps to see when negative emotions prevent your work and productivity. Sometimes, you just need to change your habits and reactions to get a better result. For example, you become angry when something didn’t happen as you planned. You may waste your time and energy worrying or figure out actions to fix the problems and reach the goals.
Self-awareness is important to smart leadership. It helps you lead and cooperate better because you know how well you perform now. You will make the right decisions because you know your weaknesses and achievements. Self-awareness helps you work better because you take into account past setbacks and avoid them.
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