How to start building emotional intelligence?

The challenges we are facing these days have raised the importance of understanding our emotional dynamics. People start to realize that how they feel matters. It is more and more important to understand emotions and develop our abilities to cope efficiently with unexpected changes, situations and environments.

Self awareness and emotional intelligence are closely related. Some call self-awareness the foundation of emotional intelligence. Recognizing and embracing our emotions and our emotional identity is definitely an important part of the process of improving emotional intelligence. This area – within the topic of EQ – focuses on: self-knowledge, emotional wellbeing and satisfaction, and a healthy sense of purpose.

In this guide:

• In short about mindfulness, self awareness and emotional identity
• What to do to improve self-awareness ?
• Developing the skills – MINDFULNESS & SELF-AWARNESS
• 5 levels of emotional awareness

What is self awareness? Definition and summary

Emotional self-awareness starts with knowing the difference between what “I think” and what “I feel”. That seems like and easy thing, right? But think for a moment, how often do you tent to say “I think” instead of “I feel” when you are talking about your emotions? Often times when we speak about how we feel about a person we would say : ” I think he/she is nice”. That behavior is a protection mechanism that serves important purposes, but it also leaves you with tones of unexpressed emotions. In my opinion, it is one of the first steps to learn to differentiate what you THINK about a situation, about a person, about a job and what you FEEL about the situation, the person and the job.

The other steps for improving mindfulness and self-awareness are: recognizing your emotional dynamics, discovering how emotion shoes up in the body and discovering your current emotional identity.

What to do to improve Self-Awareness ?

• (Re)Connect with your feelings and your sensory experiences
• Identify what you are feeling – develop emotional literacy
• Embrace your emotions : accept and become comfortable with your emotions
• (Re)Discover your why’s – triggers, purposes and motivations

(Re)Connect with your feelings and practice observing how you feel

“If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.”

Eckhart Tolle

For those who feel disconnected from their emotions it is hard to make the difference between what they think and what they feel. Connecting with your feelings happens when you can move out of your head and into your heart. This sounds deep and spiritual, but in reality it is more practical than one would think. Allowing the feeling to surface, connecting to your feelings simply means honesty.

People with underdeveloped coping mechanisms (low EQ) tend to burry their feelings below the level of conscious attention and try to fake their true emotional personality. They will always use rational, thinking words when talking about emotions. The adjectives they use also tend to be a little too extreme. People with high EQ however, will sense how that person actually feels, even if they cannot logically explain what they see. Empathic people decipher the emotional signals.

The one disconnected from their feelings will not always agree with the emphatic persons observation, because their brains work hard to keep those emotions aside and in hiding. It is a form of self-sabotage. It is a way of lying to yourself. It is not that you are disconnected from feelings and you don’t know how to feel, rather you do not want to know. An important step in improving emotional intelligence and self-awareness is developing the understanding that denying, ignoring or numbing our feelings will not make them go away.

So start saying “I feel” sentences a lot more and see the disturbing truth that comes up. Self-awareness is about taking responsibility, it is about growing up and becoming truthful with yourself. Connecting to your feelings can only happen in a state of integrity.

Identify what you are feeling – develop emotional literacy

Emotional Literacy is the skills of identifying, naming and understanding feelings and emotions. Emotional literacy is important because it can minimize the feeling of chaos and being out of control. There are lots of fun ways to discover the emotional adjectives to describe how you feel. ( See Emotion Wheels)

This step is important because we as adult, grown up persons do not typically feel individual feelings. We feel a mixture of emotions. Feeling emotions is a dynamic experience. Emotions flow forward moving from one state to another. Even if we have a solid emotional experience with a person/ a workplace that experience is not rigid. It is changing. It can be changing back to the same feeling, which makes it seem solid, but in reality there are 50 shades to it. At a workplace one can feel bad, meaning: exhausted, bored, dissatisfied, frustrated, disappointed. Each shade of “bad” signals a different thought pattern behind it. Knowing how we feel is a first step to cope with impulses, triggers and emotional stressors inside and outside.

Embrace your emotions : accept and become comfortable with your emotions

Realize that emotions are a flow and you are not your emotions. Just because you feel anger temporarily, you are not anger all the time. You are freely moving in and out of emotions, but sometimes you are going in circles so much in the same emotion that it starts to feel like it is You. But that is not the only you.

For example, when you are spending too much time in negativity, positivity will feel like being a foreigner in a unknow city. It seems nice, but you also feel like you don’t belong there. What if you can move there? What if you can belong to the nicer feeling emotional ranges?

Your emotional character is influenced big time by the survival instinct. The job of one part of your brain is to keep you alive, so this part will constantly move your attention to focus on the possible trouble around you. It will look for the negative to keep you safe. When we don’t learn how to practice mindfulness, than that survival mechanism will be the only major influential drive behind conscious focus and attention. Habitually looking for the negative will make us feel down and feeling that way over and over again can trick us into thinking that we are like that. It becomes the norm. It becomes normal.

We even generate versions of our memories, stories to support that feeling, to explain it and to put the blame for it somewhere outside, somewhere else. With the help of self-awareness and mindfulness we can move out of that negative momentum, like we move from one room to another. It is important to realize that emotions are important indication of what is going on inside our mind. That is the nature of emotions and by accepting them for what they are, we can start to benefit from the whole range of emotions instead of being overwhelmed by them.

The way we are as a person has an emotional imprint, an emotional aspect to it. We can characterize people using emotional words that describes how we perceive them. We can say that they are joyous, peaceful or they are sad or grumpy. We generalize how we perceive them based on their emotional behavior. We have one such emotional character too, that we are not always recognizing so easily.

(Re)Discover your why’s – triggers, purposes and motivations

If you ignore your feelings, you’re ignoring important information. When you connect with your emotional side, emotional self, you become aware of who you really are and what you want out of life.

Motivations can come out of lack or out of joy. Much of the negative emotions have to do with desires, aspirations and motivations. Much of what we feel emotionally is rooted in what we desire, or better said in the fear that we are not getting what we desire. The root of most negative feelings is the lack ( the separation from ) a desire. Health, peace of mind, joy, love, appreciation, freedom, easy life are all positive magnets that draw us towards them. The trouble comes from the huge complexity they add up to. We don’t want them separately. We want them together. In most cases some of it is working out and some of it is not. Things become even more difficult emotionally, when we make us believe that we need to give up what is working out, to get what is still missing. Gratitude practice is a strong help in getting us back on track.

Developing the skills – MINDFULNESS & SELF-AWARNESS

Do Body Scan Meditation

Mindfulness and body scan meditations can help you establish a moment-to-moment connection with your changing emotional experience. Paying attention on how emotions show up in the body is an easily accessible starting point to anyone who wants to improve their emotional intelligence.

Body scan meditations are easy to practice even for those who never meditated before. Take a deep breath and starting from the top of your head slowly let your attention move down to your toes while you are noticing how you are feeling emotionally. Do it slowly. How does your forehead feel? How does your jaw feel? How are your shoulders feeling?

Pay attention to the feeling in your body and what the sensation feels like. Emotion is showing up as a physical sensation in your body. For example sadness often feels like heaviness ( like having a weight on the chest or limbs), while love and joy feels like you are light, without weight and almost flying. Paying attention to yourself in the present moment brings into focus, into awareness the emotions. Breathing and letting the emotion be helps in letting the emotion sit in the spotlight of your attention without wanting to jump into problem solving or planning.

Do not want to change anything, this exercise is about raising awareness only. You mind your breathing and let the emotion come and be what it is. You just feel and notice yourself feeling. As you get some practice, you can start to watch what thoughts appear along the feelings and emotions? Don’t judge yourself for whatever thought shows up—simply allow them to show up without getting swept away by them. Our mind and body are not individual entities but they are part of one big system that is working intertwined. Emotions play a key role in this back and forth dance.

Set a timer for various points during the day

Observe how your emotions and attitudes are connected by setting a timer for various points during the day. Set a week as a target for tracking emotions and attitudes and when the timer goes off take a minute to tune into your own emotions and reflect on how you are feeling in the moment. Put your attention on yourself no matter how strong and influential the other environmental impulses are. Disconnect your attention from the OUTSIDE and connect to the INSIDE. Give yourself a minute to grasp what is going on within you. Self-awareness is basically the ability of being able to focus attention on yourself, on your true needs and your real feelings no matter what other expect of you and what is going on around you.

Use Emotion wheels and emotion trackers to improve your emotional literacy

Emotional literacy and your capacity to tune into your own emotions are a form of emotional intelligence. If your emotional experiences as a child/ young adult were confusing, threatening or painful, it’s likely that you’ve tried to distance yourself from your emotions. It is a natural tendency to escape the more complicated negative emotions, but that incapacitates us from feeling the good ones. As we grow older we become capable to deal with complex and confusing emotional situations. Emotional wheels can navigate you on the seas of complex emotions. For example, how does guilt feel different from shame? How do I experience disappointment different than sadness?

Notice patterns and keep a diary

Journaling and recognizing patterns is one of the efficient methods to build your EQ. Emotional health is when you are capable to connect with your emotions, accept what you are feeling and embrace that experience without judgment. It is not enough to identify how you feel, it is also necessary to become comfortable with that feeling as a real life experience. Accepting it is the first step towards improving your ability in coordinating your emotional life.

Every emotion you have is valid and it can be useful information. Take for example envy and jealousy. These are feelings we rarely want to acknowledge, yet we all experience them throughout our life. There is a tendency to judge the emotion and think that you are weak or not mature enough if you feel jealous. However, the issue is not that you feel it, the question is what you do about it. Jealousy and envy tell you that you are missing something. The idea is to avoid judging your emotions so they can surface and you can become aware of what you are missing. You are just a human being like all of us and we all have emotional reactions to situations.

Journaling can be your safe place where you discuss emotional questions with yourself. Spend some time writing down your emotional experiences and reactions to day-to-day events. You can categorize emotions and differentiate between them as you write. “Today I felt pleasant” isn’t a journal entry that will add much to your EQ. Understanding the emotion, how it is triggered, how it is mirrored brings you closer to gathering useful information and increasing awareness.

Plan and visualize

Plan and visualize to clarify how your emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards. How clearly you see your own values, passions, aspirations? This has to do with feelings of anxiousness, frustration, depression or satisfaction, self-empowerment, gratitude. Identify how you view the world, is it a helpful place or is it against you? Do you believe that you have a good or bad luck, or none? What about fate? How you see your experiences and skill fit what you desire? Emotional intelligence involves understanding how your core beliefs, your core emotions and your aspirations relate to each other. Emotionally intelligent people are relaxed and content with what they already have and they are open to future improvements.

Read and learn – new experiences can be a source of novel stimuli, new feelings and new thoughts. This is also true when we learn new information. Reading personal development books, affirmations, listening to podcasts and youtube channels on the topic of emotional health and intelligence can give you new stimuli daily. We are living in good times to learn about our emotional life and how to deal with emotional situations in healthy and efficient ways.

Seek counseling and talk to others. Don’t be afraid to share your emotional reactions in counseling sessions with a professional. You can also engage in conversation and ask your friends, colleagues how they perceived some shared experience, to see those life experiences from other perspectives too. Thoughtful communication can help you identify, manage, and express your feelings and can improve your overall self-knowledge and emotional intelligence.

! Important to Note ! – Introspection doesn’t always Improve emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Incorrect introspection can lead you to a state of feeling stuck. You might feel like you are in a rat wheel where you are moving logically around thoughts, but you are getting nowhere. It can be exhausting and basically useless. To improve emotional intelligence and use introspection efficiently it is recommended to focus on the emotional rather than the mental aspects.

5 Levels of Emotional Awareness

The Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) is a performance measure that differentiates 5 levels of emotional awareness. The test measures a persons ability to conceptualize and describe one’s own emotions and those of others. The model presents five levels of emotional awareness : awareness of physical sensations, action tendencies, single emotions, blends of emotions, and blends of blends of emotional experience.

• Physical sensations: at this level the emotional awareness one is limited to recognizing the physical bodily changes, the physical sensations that are associated with the changing emotions.
• Action tendencies: at this level you become aware that emotions ‘make’ you want to do things. You feel impulses to act one way or another.
• Single emotions: at this level of emotional awareness one can differentiate between the core emotions in themselves and in others.
• Blends of emotions: At this level one can differentiate between the intensities of the same emotions, they can recognize the more specific emotions also in others.
• Blends of blends of emotion: At the highest level of emotional awareness one can correctly identify their complex emotions and the emotional complexities of others.

Resources/Credits /Other useful links : Thinking vs feeling ; LEAS test, Featured photo