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..