Emotional Intelligence: 10 ways to improve self awareness

Self-awareness is an essential step of emotional intelligence that teaches the ways to identify one's emotions and to be mindful of their triggers and impacts.

New Delhi: Emotional intelligence tends to fuel ones performance on the personal front as well as professionally. Right from your self-assurance, empathy and positivity to your social skills and self-discipline, comprehending and handling your own emotions can speed up success in all capacities of your life. Self-awareness is an essential step of emotional intelligence that teaches the ways to identify one’s emotions and to be mindful of their triggers and impacts.

Kanchan Rai, Mental and Emotional Wellbeing Coach, Founder – Let Us Talk shares ten tips to discover the basics of your emotional intelligence, thus improving your self-assurance levels.

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Learning to identify your triggers: Identifying your triggers can lead to an improved emotional intelligence. This is because it lets you develop the skill to manage the outcome. It could bestow you the ability to calm down and take charge of your actions.

Never judge your feelings: It is human nature to label one’s feelings as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. By being judgmental about your feelings you tend to lose the ability to regard them and be mindful of them. By looking at the emotion just as what it is, will lend you an opportunity to apprehend it and find out what your mind has been trying to tell you.

You must question your opinions: Living in today’s era, it is easy to fall into an ‘opinion bubble’. This is a state of existence wherein your own opinions are continually re-enforced by people sharing alike perspectives. It is suggested to take ample time to read the other side of the story and have your views tested. This will help you to be more open to new ideas.

Pay attention to your behaviour patterns: While you are practicing your emotional awareness, you must consider observing your behaviour too. Note the way you tend to act when you are undergoing certain feelings, and the way that affects your daily life. Handling our emotions becomes effortless once we become more aware of the way we react to them.

Always celebrate the positive: An important aspect of improving self-awareness is to celebrate and reflect on the optimistic life moments. People who tend to experience, encouraging emotions become resilient. Also, reflecting on negative emotions is equally vital to deal with undesirable issues in the future.

Meditate your mind: Mindfulness meditation can help increase your level of self-awareness. Particularly this method is one of the finest ways to learn more about how your thoughts function.

Have faith in your intuition: If you are still hesitant about which path to take, you must believe your instinct. This will allow your subconscious mind to guide you through the right path.

Look at yourself objectively: It is difficult to know yourself completely, hence getting to comprehend yourself from those who know you is vital. Ask them about your strong points and weaknesses and compare it yourself.

Come out of your comfort zone: Not challenging yourself frequently is one of the greatest barriers to achieving your complete potential. Instead of pushing the emotion away, you must guide yourself to it and through it. Overlooking feelings would only make them appear when least anticipated.

Identifying cognitive distortions: A major source of an absence of self-awareness is incorrect emotional habits. By learning to recognize these patterns of inaccurate thinking, we can become more self-aware.

The above-mentioned tips will guide you to work on your emotional intelligence helping you to make a positive difference in your life.