Emotional Intelligence 2.3 Self Awareness Contd..

Look back in your life. You would certainly have some memories when you had very strong emotions. Try to figure out 3 or 4 most prominent ones. Include the ones that you have disciplined yourself to never think about. The ones you do not want to think about.

In your past have you been subjected to any of the following –

1. In childhood did you get too embarrassed by some action of yours which was innocent mistake but you had to face lot of overreaction from parents or teachers?
2. Were you ridiculed by friends, colleagues or family members for something you didn't do right?
3. Did you think that your parents loved your sibling more than they loved you?
4. Did you feel that your parents did not love you enough(as much as you wanted them to)?
5. Did someone ditch you?
6. Did you ditch someone?
7. Were you made to feel that you were not ‘OK’ in some dimension and if you didn't behave in a certain way, you may loose out in life?
8. Did your partner overreact to certain behaviour of yours?
9. Did you stop expressing yourself to avoid yourself getting into a conflict?
10. Do you think that you are guilty of not being a good son/daughter and that you haven’t fulfilled your obligations to your parents?
11. Do you think that you do not spend enough time with your children?
12. Do you feel that you are not as good a parent as your parents were?
13. Do you think that you aren’t smart enough to have capitalized on the opportunities that came in your life?
14. Do you think that to be successful in life you have to be on guard always when you are in your office?
15. Do you think that you do not show your real self to people otherwise they may get offended?

Experiences like these really screw up our lives. The society in which we grow up along with the education systems always try to teach us that we are not ‘OK’ and to be ‘OK’, we need to behave in a ‘certain way’. All of us are subjected to this trauma for at least first two decades of our lives, leading us to become distant from our own inner beauty and we start wearing so many masks that we finally get disconnected with our emotions and rather than living through or using our emotions in a positive way, we start ignoring and avoiding our emotions. We feel that certain emotions are ‘bad emotions’ that we should not have. This compounds the problem. One, we do not do justice to our emotions, two we start feeling that something is wrong with us since we are having such emotions.

What can be done about this?

I find that there are four steps that you can take to get out of this unhealthy situation.

Step 01 : Take out ‘quiet time’ for yourself everyday of your life. Anywhere between 15 mins to 30 mins would be absolutely fine. This can be anytime during the day. In that quite time, think about the situations in your life which created strong emotions. Understand that the context in which those things happened also had a huge role to play in the way things turned out. May be you blamed yourself too much unnecessarily and changed yourself wrongly. If you started behaving in a ‘certain way’ to avoid making some mistake again in your life, may be you made a mistake. If you stopped doing the things that you enjoyed doing because of any of such events, just start doing them again. Just start enjoying your natural self. Re discover yourself. Express yourself. Reconnect with your childhood friends.

Today onwards, start ‘feeling’ your emotions as you go through them. You probably get 50,000 thoughts a day and each of these trigger as many emotions. Let those emotions come and go. It is a matter of few seconds every time.


To understand this, you need to understand the way thoughts travel in our brains. Everything we experience passes first through the emotional part of our brains, called the limbic system. A trigger event, such as a new deadline to meet, is “felt” by the limbic system before we have any rational reaction to the circumstance. So, we fully experience the anxiety, exuberance, or irritation of a moment before the rational part of the brain gets a crack at choosing the direction to head in response to the situation.

They ‘Key’ is to hold yourself for a couple of seconds when your emotions are overpowering you. After a few seconds, the rational part of our brain starts working. And naturally the clarity which rational thinking brings settles the emotion. This happens ‘naturally’. You just need to stop interfering with this natural process.

Have a nice weekend.

Emotional Intelligence 2.2 Self Awareness contd..

How Self Awareness Affect Our Lives

You cannot change or control your emotions. You can learn to accept or release them; this would need self awareness.

Emotions control our thinking, behavior and actions. They also affect our bodies. When you have an emotion you know that you can feel it in your bodies. If you ignore it, it stays stuck in your bodies until free yourself from it.

Most of us have been raised to repress our emotions and this is the way we live our lives. We were raised to believe that certain emotions are bad and they have to remain hidden. Then when we became adults we do not even know how we are feeling, we lack self awareness.

I lived most of my life repressing emotions and the day that I decided to sit down and feel them. I could not do it. I didn't know the difference. How do I feel? Angry? No, sad? No, I do not know.

Your emotions control your thinking, behaviour and actions. What are the results of your actions? Have you ever regretted and action you have taken? Why? because you usually take action according to the predominant emotion you are having.

We are afraid of our feelings, because we do not want to loose control, or we do not want to feel the pain. How do we repress our emotions? Have you noticed that when we experience a situation that is painful or difficult we look for something else to do? Like get busy, think about something else, eat something, etc? When we do this, what we are doing is avoiding the emotion and replacing it with something else.

The emotion remains in our bodies until we finally find a healthy way to release them.

Six ways to avoid feeling emotions:

1. Ignoring the feeling,
2. Over eating
3. Over exercising
4. Using tranquilizers
5. Excessive drink of alcohol
6. Excessive reading or TV
7. Excessive Smoking

Anything that takes us away from the pain will do it. So, you need self awareness to finally gain emotional freedom? Because, if you don't release them, they will control your lives.

Nobody will make us to feel better except ourselves. Have you ever noticed that people with a lot of negative emotions like anger, envy, revenge, etc don't have any energy? People who are able to release these emotions are lighter and expanded and have a lot of energy within.

Have you ever noticed that when you are happy you have a lot of energy within you? You can think more clearly, you can be present, etc. I think this is the main reason why we need emotional freedom. We cannot go around being angry and trying to smile and appear to be happy because we won't be able to do that, and if we try it will take a lot of energy and we will end up exhausted.

Most of the problems you face and keep you always in the same place is because you are not able to deal with you emotions. Have you ever listened to somebody talking about a past hurt, and when you asked when did that happen?, they said: Oh! Around 20 years ago. How can you live a fulfilling life is your are still stuck in a 20 years ago hurt, full of resentment and revenge?

Emotional Intelligence 2.1 Self Awareness Contd..

Here are two examples of common life. The following two people are the kind of people we come across in our everyday life. Take a look. Do you see yourself in one of the following two characters -

What Self Awareness Looks Like

Ravish B, Country Services Manager
Self Awareness: High

What people who work with him say about him:

“Ravish has very high clarity on long term goals and he doesn't make sacrifices for short term gains. Ravish is an ‘up-front’ kind of a guy who doesn't play ‘mind games’ with people. I have witnessed this so many times at company meetings and in meetings with customers.”

“In every situation that I have been involved with, good or bad, Ravish has always remained calm, cool and collected – even at times when I know he must have felt frustrated or angry. Ravish is really honest about what he is feeling without getting bent out of shape about it. During challenging situations with employees, Ravish is very aware of his tone and makes an effort to keep the conversation appropriate.”

“In short, Ravish manages his emotions; they don't manage him. I’ve seen him accept difficult business news with a brief frown and then he quickly moves beyond that and partners with his team to find solutions to improve the situation.”

What Lack of Self Awareness Looks Like

MK Singh, Operations Director
Self Awareness: Low

What people who work with him say about him:

“MK is very much in his ‘own world.’ He obviously does care about his co workers, but he doesn't seem to know where to draw a line. His personality can be overwhelming, but he doesn't notice when the other person is feeling annoyed, frustrated, or overwhelmed by him. It would be good for him to understand how his behaviour affects other’s work and emotional stress. Also he sometimes comes across as defensive or aggressive, so for him to be more aware of his tone and language would be helpful.”

“When working with customers, he is very good at talking about the products and services we offer. On group projects, sometimes he gets so focused on the outcome, the process is missed. If he were to take a moment and let all the emotions settle, then take a look at the options to reach the desired outcome, things would go more smoothly.”
“MK is passionate about what he does. Sometime that passion gets in the way. He might not notice that I am busy with something else before he jumps in and starts talking to me. When he is excited, he talks over you, and it is hard to get a word in edgewise. He doesn't mean to; he just is excited about what he does.”

Emotional Intelligence 2 (Self Awareness)

Self Awareness is about recognizing and understanding your emotions as they happen. This sounds simple but the fact is that majority of us either fail to recognize our emotions or ignore them. High self awareness means having a handle on our emotions as and when they happen and being aware of their effect on ourselves.

How do we recognize our emotions?

Emotions typically produce physical sensations that you can use to identify what you are feeling. The physical signs that accompany our feelings can be blatant, such as heavy breathing or sweating, or more subtle, such as increased heartbeat or sweaty palms. Learning how you respond physically to your emotions is important to becoming more emotionally intelligent.

Think about the last time you experienced strong feelings.

• Did you sweat?
• Did your heart beat fast?
• Did you feel tense?
• Did your thoughts race?
• Did your throat get tight?
• Did you get tunnel vision?
• Did your mind go blank?
• Did you shake?
• Did you feel numb?

Now think back in time and go through events when you had one or more of the above. What did you do immediately after you had such strong feelings?

The answer to this question comes in the next part of EI…

Emotional Intelligence

EQ has been around since the inception of the term by Daniel Goleman in 1980s. However as I was trying to understand the concept for nearly two years now, I wasn't able to make much headway till very recent weeks. Then it happened! I could see through the complex web of information on the subject and look at it simply. On gaining clarity on the concept, I wondered how the world is full of books and stuff that makes understanding of simple concepts as difficult as it can be. Further Last week I was able to internalize EQ for the first time in life.

Let me attempt a simplistic view of EI and see if you can gain something by implementing the concept in your life.

Step 1 : What is Emotional Intelligence?

EI is the ability of an individual to understand his emotions, manage his reactions to these emotions, understand others emotions and manage good relationships

Step 2 : How does it apply in my life?

We typically ignore what our emotions are telling us. All emotions are accompanied by physiological changes. By being open to reading these signals from our body, we can easily understand what our emotions are doing to us. After recognizing the emotion we can standby for couple of seconds and respond (using our brains). When we are with others, we can be aware of what the other is feeling and accordingly behave with him/her. This will give us lasting relationships.

Step 3 : Can we improve our EI?

EI is a variable. We are born with some of it. Over the years we set up our beliefs and habits which form our EI. The EQ changes with our experiences. In fact our EQ today is the result of the way we have decided to lead our lives over the years. While we can improve our EQ, we can easily let it decrease as well. Having a good EQ is like maintain a good physique and needs regular tuning.