LEARNING SELF-AWARENESS

• Lets learn more about Self-Awareness and Empathy. They are important life skills needed to be developed in oneself and it would also be helpful to one. 

• Self-Awareness

Self awareness is knowledge about ourselves. It has to do with paying ongoing attention to our internal state such as our moods and feelings, our beliefs and values, our behaviour, attitude, etc., and having an impartial hold over them. It is not something that has you getting carried away by your emotions. It is neither reactive nor judgemental. Self awareness involves a complicated set of information, an overarching knowledge pertaining to several areas of our life such as our emotions, our preferences, intentions and goals and values, our behaviour, etc. It also includes awareness about our locus or control, about our personality type and even about our social competence. Self awareness being very crucial not only to our personality and character but also to our personal empowerment, we need to know more about it. We shall therefore deliberate here some of the most pertinent aspects on which we need to build up our self-awareness.

• Emotional self-awareness

The realm of our moods and emotions is one of the areas where we need to build up awareness. Emotional self awareness implies an awareness of what we think and feel and how we act in the present. Our moods and emotions playa vital role in our lives. Emotions are an inseparable part of our everyday life. Emotions, as Frijda (1993) notes, are intense feelings that are directed at someone or something. They are object-specific. Emotions differ from moods. Moods, as Robbins (2003) observes, are feelings that tend to be less intense than emotions. Moods, unlike feelings, lack a contextual stimulus. While emotions are directed at something or someone, moods are not directed to any object. Emotions can turn into moods when they lose focus and contextual objects.

Emotional self awareness is crucial as it opens up a way to self management. Self-awareness, as Dann (2000) puts it, is awareness about what they think and feel in the present, name the emotions they presently experience and manage and direct energy towards accomplishment of goals. As Gardiner and Hatch (1989) observe, self-awareness gives access to one's own feelings and the ability to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide behaviour. This intra personal intelligence is the key to self-knowledge. People with this ability can have control over their emotions and create the right sort of disposition for continuous work. However, there are some people who have severe difficulty not only in expressing their own emotions but also in understanding the emotions of people around them. Psychologists call this emotional inability "alexithimia" which means lack of emotions. People with this disability are not in a position to discriminate among their different emotions. They find it extremely difficult to understand what others around them feel. This is not the case with most of us. Provided that we pay attention to our ongoing thoughts and feelings, we will be able to get sufficient clues as to their identity and build up awareness about the emotions we experience.

People with the competence of emotional self-awareness, as Goleman (1998) notes, would be able to:

• Know which emotions they are feeling and why;
• Recognize the link between their feelings and what they think, do and say;
• Recognize how their feelings affect their performance; and
• Have a guiding awareness about their values and goals.

Emotional self-awareness thus gives us awareness about what feelings are going through our mind and the reason for their arousal. It can also give us an understanding as to how our thinking and feelings affect what we say and do. This awareness can be our guide in functioning on our job performance of every kind, in managing our unruly feelings, in keeping ourselves motivated, in turning in with accuracy to the feelings of those around us. This awareness about our feelings helps us develop work related social skills.

The more emotionally self-aware we are, as Sterrett (2004) notes, the more easily we can adjust our responses with those of others and the more we can make our interactions and transactions mutually satisfying. In addition, this awareness can also enable us to make a conscious choice about how to respond or how not to respond at all to our emotions. Thus, emotional self-awareness opens up new possibilities for understanding and behaving in ways that are pro-social as well as self-rewarding. All this is possible only when we are aware of our emotions and the impacts they bring upon us in case we fail to manage them appropriately. Being self-aware is the key to self-control and freedom of acting. In the event of our failure to build our awareness concerning our emotions, our responses would become automatic as they are not guided by reason or intuition. This awareness also can help us in bringing about a certain balance between our reasons and emotional considerations. This can also help us to be more adaptable by preventing emotional outbursts as well as emotional over-stifling. In fact, any emotion in the extreme, whether positive or negative, whether self-directed or other directed, can be dangerous. Hence we need to do all that is within our capacity to build emotional self-awareness so that we can put a check on our emotions when they are found to be going astray and get them back on track.