EI 4.1 Social Awareness : Introduction

Do you have someone in your team with whom you feel very comfortable? Martha was one such person in John’s team. She seemed to know, every time, what he is going through. If he would be back from a very tough meeting, she would sense it and not interfere. Rather she would give him space and time to cool off. So many times when John needed something, she seemed to know it already. It was so easy to communicate with her. A meeting with her always seemed like she was joining you in a relay race running at your speed ready to take the baton. The conversation used to look like she running at your speed and passing the baton back and forth between them. It was such a delight to have her in the team. Just her presence used to make him relaxed.

Salim was a waiter in a restaurant. Many times he would be handling multiple tables with customers having entirely different preferences. Some would not like to be disturbed and would expect him to silently serve them. Some others would like to have a pep talk. Others would like service to be faster while some others would like it to go slow. Somehow Salim was able to sense these preferences and serve the customers accordingly. His customers always left delighted and gave him heavy tips. For so many of them, he would remember their names and welcome them with “Good evening Mr. XXX …”

For the owner of the restaurant, Salim was an asset to have.

Martha and Salim are ‘high’ on Social Awareness. It is the ability of the individual to understand what is going on with others. This means that one gives enough sensitivity, time and effort to understand what is going on with people around them. Both Martha and Salim are able to look past the words someone is saying and gain an understanding of

the thoughts and emotions the other person is feeling beneath the surface. Understanding what kinds of thoughts and emotions the other person is feeling will help you unlock the true meaning of what the other person is saying and gain a better understanding of where the person is coming from.

The best way to be socially aware is to put yourself in the other person's shoes. This isn't always the easiest thing to do, but the following tips will help you do just that –

1. When you are with other people, focus your thoughts on the other person's perspective by spending some extra time to fully observe the situation, listening closely to how and what is being said, and asking questions that will help you gain a better understanding.

2. Try not to let your own thoughts and feelings disturb the interaction. You will be surprised by what you notice about others when your mind is more on them than it is on you.

EI 3.3 Improving Self Management

If you reflect back in your life, do you find some incidents where you created problems for yourself by speaking too much? are there some moments in your life where you could have rather stayed quiet and things would have been better if you had not blurted out things?

The last part of Self Management today covers three valuable techniques to improve self management skills. These are simple, yet effective and have a great potential to make your life happier.

1. Sleep over It: As a rule, do not try to solve things after 8 pm in the night. If something is bothering you too much and you want to discuss it with someone so that you may get over with it, take my advice and postpone it till next morning. A large number of our issues, situations and problems get sorted out more easily and quickly if we allow it some more time. You must have come across some people who will be stressed out as if heavens are going to fall. Most of these people try to fix things in the evening hours. Follow the rule of nature. Evenings are for relaxing and doing work peacefully. Sometimes situations that require our patience can feel so uncomfortable, dissatisfying, and filled with anxiety that we jump to action just to alleviate the internal turmoil. But more often than not, giving yourself that extra day to digest the situation before moving forward is all you need to stay in control. And sometimes, while you're waiting, things may surface that make your decision that much easier to make.

2. Count to Ten: This is something that you would have learnt a long time ago perhaps in your primary school. You teacher would have told you this technique when you were a child to control you anger. It is amazing that such a simple technique like this can really help you big time in managing yourself well in emotionally challenging situations. The next time you are in a meeting and are finding it difficult to stop yourself from interrupting someone who is speaking. Or if you are getting red with anger on your child for something that he/she has been doing repeatedly in spite of you having explained many times that it shouldn't be done. Or if there is an irritating person, who is going on and on with his irritating behaviour, tempting you to explode, try this. Start counting from one to ten and exhale with every count. I can bet that if you can stop yourself from exploding till the time you reach ten, you will not be able to explode. In fact, you will be able to think peacefully and may be you will see an alternate, more amicable way to settle it.

3. Focus on the freedom rather than the restriction: We are brought up in such a manner that we learn to focus on the restrictions which we are not supposed to break. So much of our attention sometimes gets diverted on maintaining discipline that we miss out enjoying the fun. When we are in a difficult situation, we tend to focus so much on the difficulty that we miss out the fact that we have a say in the situation in terms of our perspective of the situation. In fact however big the difficulty you face, your own outlook towards it is a major force that you can use to overcome that. If you can shift your focus to the things and variables that you can influence, every difficulty has a way out. So be aware of the restrictions, be aware of the difficulties, but focus on the area within where you have leverage. This is the golden rule of self management.

EI3.2 : Activity for Self Management

The problem with self management is that we want to be correct all the time. At the basic level, self management means being aware of our emotions and actively choosing to say or do. There is an element of 'active choice' here. If we do not exercise this choice, the emotions start controlling what we speak and do. This is slippery wicket. When our emotions ‘hijack’ our actions and words, we end up feeling miserable, out of control and victimized. The stronger the emotion we feel, the more difficult it becomes to think. It is a delicate balancing act which can give you very rich rewards. So much of stress in our lives gets reduced once we start exercising the choice to read our emotions and ‘decide’ what to say or do. This also is the most important step towards a balanced state of being.

The task is also made difficult on account of abundance of people and situations which keep throwing us off our balance. Irritating characters surround us from all sides. The society breeds competition and hence the majority of crowd around us is in some race or the other. Prudence lies in deciding how much to share and with whom.

As you start practicing self management, a slip here and a slip there will keep happening. There is no human being on earth who has ‘perfect’ self management capability. Important thing is to strive for coming back to your balanced state every time you are thrown off track.

When you start getting grip on the awareness of where your emotions are trying to throw you towards, you can act and re gain balance. If you can see yourself being pushed by an emotion (like anger) and see where it is directing you to behave, you can quickly hold the reins of yourself and avoid landing up in a wrong direction of behaviour. This will give you magical power to control difficult situations. And you will emerge as a natural leader among your peers. You will be respected for your restraint and looked up to for your leadership.

Activity

(One – Two Technique for Self Management)

Next time you experience a strong emotion, count one-two, one-two a couple of times and try to visualize where is your emotion pushing you towards? Is it making you speak agitatedly? Is it making you ignore what is happening in the room? Just try to sense which direction your emotion taking you towards. Then say one-two and decide what to say or do, irrespective of your tendency at that time. Try it. I promise it will be fun and of course, very rewarding.

EI 3.1 Examples of Self Management

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

What Self Management Looks Like in Real Life

Girish Mathur, GM Customer Care
Self Management: High

What people who work with him say about him:

“Girish handles stressful and confrontational situations very well. No matter how harshly the customers and his sales counterparts hammer him, he never loses his cool! This gives him lot of acceptance and respect from colleagues. He is able to work with people who have a very different style of working. In his job, getting stuffed with complaints and blames is quite often. This can be really overwhelming at times. But I have never seen him lose his patience.”

“Many times people are quick to blame customer care for the fault of some other flaws in other departments. But I have never seen him ruffled by this. He makes his views in spite of the barrage of arguments thrown at him. I have never seen him reacting to absurd allegations and pointing fingers. He deals with them politely and professionally.”

“I have seen him handle some very frustrating situations where the organization directed against his personal views. He is able to maintain an objective view and aligns very fast with the organization goals.”

“I have never seen Girish speaking negatively about issue even about issues about which he feels very strongly. You will never find him speaking ill about anyone behind his back! He just never does it.”


What Lack of Self Management Looks Like in Real Life

Jacob Mathew, Sales Manager
Self Management: Low

What people who work with him say about him:

“In stressful situations Jacob sometimes responds too quickly and disjointedly. He is very emotional. When he is under stress, he almost always reacts to situations rather than thinking and responding. I wish he could take some time to cool off and slow down before responding. Sometimes it is impossible to recognize him when he is under stress. He becomes an absolutely different person. Otherwise he is generally a cool guy.”
“Jacob should be more aware of his behaviour and his outbursts when he is upset. He doesn't seem to recognize that it has a huge impact on his team’s morale. He definitely cares for people. However when he is upset, he can be very damaging. I remember when one of his subordinates Alan had made a mistake. Jacob just lost his temper. He shouted at him in full visibility of other co workers. The whole atmosphere of the office became much tensed after that. Poor Alan couldn't look into the eyes of others for a very long time. I wish someone could teach Jacob to count till ten when he is angry”

“Jacob is a good guy. But I don't like one habit of his. Sometimes late in the evening he will call me and would be desperate to discuss and issue with me in detail. The fact is that I sit very close to him in office. He may not speak to me or say Hi to me the whole day. But just while I would reach home and would be dying to spend some time with my children, he would call me and would keep talking. Almost in all instances, he could have waited to discuss the same with me the next morning. Nothing on earth would have moved otherwise if he could. I think it would be good if he learns to ‘sleep over’ some issues rather than trying to solve it late nights and disturbing people.”

Emotional Intelligence

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Emotional Intelligence

View more presentations from shuktij.

EI 3.0 Self Management Intro...

Self Management is the second major part of personal intelligence.

Self Management is dependent upon your level of self-awareness. Your skills of self awareness build the foundation of your self management skills.

'Self management is what happens when you act, or do not act after becoming aware of your emotions and how you act.'

Let me give you an example. It is like what happens when you are angry. Do you express your anger? If you do, how do you express your anger? Are you able to remain composed while expressing anger? Do you get out of control when you are angry? Do you speak things which you later regret? Do you shout? Do you hit people when you are angry? Do you absorb the anger? Do you try to divert your attention to something else? Do you try to hide your anger?

We don't experience emotions in a vacuum; if we did, managing them would be easy. We experience them with people around us. Many of these people and their actions trigger emotions in us. These emotions vary in intensity. Most of us are good at managing mild emotions. The place where most people fail to manage themselves successfully is during an emotionally arousing situation. Whether it is a heated debate between colleagues or a deadline, situations that elicit high-intensity feelings put your true self-management skills to the test.

Self-management is your ability to use your awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and direct your behaviour positively. This would mean managing your emotional reactions to situations and people. Some emotions create paralyzing fear that makes your thinking so cloudy that the best course of action is nowhere to be found. In these cases, self management is revealed by your ability to tolerate the uncertainty as you explore your emotions and options. Once you understand and build comfort with what you are feeling, the best course of action will automatically show itself.

Self management is much more than resisting explosive behaviour. The biggest challenge that people face is managing their tendencies over time and applying their skills in a variety of situations. Obvious and momentary opportunities for self-control (i.e., “I’m so mad at that x&#@....!”) are the easiest to spot and manage.

Real results come from putting your momentary needs on hold to pursue larger, more important goals. The realization of such goals is often delayed, meaning that your commitment to self-management will be tested over and over again. Those who manage themselves the best are able to see things through without cracking.

Success comes to those who can put their needs on hold and continually manage their tendencies.

EI 2.6:Improving Self Awareness

What makes you go Berserk?

Key 4: Know who or what pushes your buttons

All of us have buttons – triggers, pet peeves, whatever you may call them – that, when pushed, just irritate us until we want to scream. Perhaps you have a co worker who lives his life as if he is constantly at war with others to prove that his point of view is right. He will go to any length to prove his point. His voice is louder than the most and once he starts speaking he will continue to go on and on. Whatever point he makes, he will fight till the end to prove that it is right. He will make sure that he is in a battle for proving his point even if not a single person in the room agrees with him. He just refuses to see a point from others point of view. In short he is stubborn to the core about his views and generally believes he is always right. Even if he has to agree to others, he will do it showing that for the sake of saving time or for sake of moving forward he is ok to park his views for some time. But he will continue to bother everyone with his persistence. Let us call him Mr Stubborn.

Now, if you are a more subtle person yourself, a person like that may eat at you. When you go into a meeting with great ideas and a readiness to sit down and get straight to the point, Mr Stubborn who wants to draw attention towards himself, may flip your switches for frustration and rage. Even if you are not a sort of person who blurts out impulsive comments or otherwise go on the attack, your body language may give you away or you may find yourself spending the rest of your day obsessing over your lingering frustration.

Knowing what or who pushes your buttons and how they do it is critical to developing the ability to take control of these situations, maintain your poise, and calm yourself down. For this, you cannot think about things generally. You need to pinpoint the specific people and situations that trigger your emotions. Your buttons are bound to get pushed by a wide range of people and things. It could be certain people (Mr Stubborn), particular situations( like feeling scared or caught off guard), or conditions in the environment(noisy office colleagues). Having a clear understanding of who and what pushes your buttons makes these people and situations a bit less difficult because they come as less of a surprise.

Your self-awareness takes a quantum leap when you identify and discover the sourse of your buttons. You will have to find out why do these people and situations irritate you so much, when other, equally annoying people and situations do not bother you at all? Perhaps Mr Stubborn reminds you of your father who never listened to your point of view. You lived in the constant shadow for many years till you could find your space in the world and got people who cared for your views. Now, you sit beside his clone in every meeting. No wonder he is a trigger for your emotions.

When you know why your buttons are what they are opens doors to managing your reactions to your triggers.

Activity

Find out the sources of your buttons and jot down a list. Then spend some time thinking deeper into each. Ask yourself why so these people or situations irritate you? Is there a connection with your past. If there is one, try to objectively see the past without blaming you or the other person or situation. Accept that those things were bound to happen. They happened. Forgive and forget. You will be amazed how happy and energetic you will become by addressing this.

EI 2.5 : Self Awareness Embrace Emotional Discomfort

Improving Self Awareness

Key Action 3 :Embrace Emotional Discomfort

The biggest obstacle to increasing your self-awareness is your tendency to avoid the discomfort that comes from seeing yourself as you really are.

There are things that you do not like to think about. And you do that, for a reason. The reason is that you may not like what you may see. You may not like to see your real self. It can make you feel insufficient, lesser than others and may conflict with what you believe about yourself. You have been brought up in a society which frowns upon the ordinary. You do not want to be an ordinary person in any dimension.

Hence you do not like to face this pain. Rather you avoid it. Avoiding this pain creates problems, because it is merely a short term fix. You will never be able to manage yourself effectively if you ignore what you need to do to change.

The fact is that ‘it is OK to be ordinary. It is OK to loose. It is OK to ‘NOT WIN’.

Rather than avoiding a feeling, your goal should be to move toward the emotion, into it, and eventually through it. This should be done for even mild emotional discomfort such as boredom, confusion or anticipation. When you ignore an emotion, however small or insignificant, you miss the opportunity to do something productive with that feeling. Your ignoring or avoiding the feelings does not make it go away. In fact, they get stored in your subconscious and they surface again when you least expect them.

Whenever you are feeling strong emotion, lot of things from the past start flashing in our minds. When you are feeling very sad, you suddenly start remembering previous things that caused you sadness before. In fact many of those you wouldn't have thought about for many many years. Why does this happen? This happens because those are the emotions we avoided or ignored in the past. Hence they are stored inside us and surface again when a similar event happens, making us feel more miserable. This is the reason why people respond differently to similar events and to different degree of anger, sadness etc.

To be effective in life, we all need to discover our own set of things – those that we do not bother to learn about and dismiss as unimportant. One person thinks apologies are for sissies so he never learns to recognize when one is needed.

Another person hates feeling low, so he constantly distracts himself with other activities, however meaningless. He never really feels content. Yet another person finds it very embarrassing to be insulted for anything. So he goes to any length to avoid being insulted. In fact his whole behaviour patter may start getting directed by this avoidance.

All three of these people need to take a bold step of embracing the discomfort and lean into the feelings that will motivate them to change. They need to move into the emotion and travel through it. That way the emotion will be felt and an appropriate action may be triggered.

Most of the people, however, continue to avoid and ignore the emotions that they do not like and hence keep walking on an unproductive, unsatisfying path, repeating the same patterns over and over again.

After the first few times that you embrace emotional discomfort, you will quickly find that the discomfort isn’t so bad, it doesn't ruin you and it reaps rewards.

The good news about self awareness is that just thinking about it will help you change, even though much of your initial focus would be on the things that you do ‘wrong.’ Do not be afraid of your emotional ‘mistakes’. They alone tell you what you should be doing differently and provide you with a steady stream of information that you need to understand yourself as life unfolds itself.

Have a nice day..

EI 2.4:Improving Self Awareness

Key Action 2:Improving Self Awareness

In the previous post we saw the first Key step for Improving Self Awareness was to have some 'Quite Time' for yourself.

Here is the second step -

Feel your emotions Physically

When you experience an emotion, electric signals course through your brain and trigger physical sensations in your body. The physical sensations can be as varied as your stomach muscles tightening, your heart rate increasing, your breathing quickening, or your mouth getting dry. Because your mind and body are tightly connected, one of the most effective ways to understand your emotions as they are happening is to learn to spot the physical changes that accompany your emotions.

Activity

To better understand the physical effects of your emotions, try closing your eyes the next time you have a few moments alone. Feel how fast or slow your heart is beating. Notice the pace of your breathing. Determine how tense or relaxed the muscles are in your arms, legs, neck and back. Now think of a couple of events from your life – one positive and one negative – that generate strong emotions. Think through one of these events in enough detail that you can feel your emotions stir. Take note of the physical changes that accompany the feelings. Do they make your breathing or heart rate change? Do your muscles grow tense? Do you feel hotter or colder? Repeat this process with the other event, and take note of the physical differences in the emotions from the positive and negative experiences.

Closing your eyes and thinking of emotionally arousing events is simply training for the real thing – spotting the physical signs of your emotions on the fly. In the beginning, try not to think too hard – simply open your mind to noticing the sensations.

As you improve at this, you’ll find that you’re often physically aware of an emotion long before you’re mentally aware of it.

This will establish an 'instant' connection with your inner self. As you do this everyday, this connection will provide stability and you will start radiating peace and calmness.

This is a trick which starts giving very fast results. In a matter of two days you can start feeling the calmness in yourself.

so long...