Improving Self-awareness and EI
Responding intelligently and not judging coworkers
To improve your self-awareness, you will need to evaluate your current state of EI around responding intelligently to emotional triggers and not judging coworkers.
Your answers to the questions in this an subsequent articles will help you determine the areas you need to work on to improve your level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. This will require some honest soul searching as it can be tough to admit the truth. If you can be honest with yourself and open to discovering aspects of your behaviors that are detrimental to your career, you'll be on the path to developing your potential professional self.
The answers to these questions will depend on your awareness of your psychological pre-programming and ability to work through emotional triggers. If you can recognize a trigger and understand why it triggers you, you'll be able to find a way to decrease the intensity of your response. It may be necessary to work with a counselor to uncover the root causes of these triggers.
1. Do I react with my gut or respond with my head when faced with an emotional trigger at work?
Reacting with your gut is reacting when you are at an emotional peak. Try to take the time needed to regain emotional composure so that you can respond from your head i.e. allow time for the adrenalin and other chemicals to subside so that you are at a place of logic and reason. Generally this takes about 20 minutes. In some circumstances however, you may need to sleep on things and look at them fresh the next morning.
2. Am I judging the actions of my coworkers and communicating my judgments to others?
The tendency to judge others is based on fear. Usually we are frightened by seeing our negative qualities reflected in the other person. Lose the judgments by realizing that the person is functioning to the best of their ability with the tools they have from the parenting and environment they experienced.
The next article will discuss:
3. Do I become a blamer when faced with an emotional trigger?
4. Do I live in a fantasy world that management, my work culture and the company I work for will be perfect?
5. Do I spend a lot of time focusing how the company or my boss could treat me better and feeling battered?
If you have comments or suggestions on this article, please use the link below to start a discussion.
If you liked this article, try
- Self-awarness at Work: How Reacting to Emotional Triggers Affects Professional Performance and your Level of Emotional Intelligence (EI)
- Evaluating Self-awareness and EI: Blaming others, fantasizing of the perfect office environment and being a corporate victim
- Assessing Self-Awareness and EI: Handling criticism, emotional outbursts, creating political problems and moodiness
Copyright © 2006, Joni Rose and Suite 101. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized use will constitute an infringement of copyright.
