Self-awareness at Work
How Reacting to Emotional Triggers Affects Professional Performance and your Level of Emotional Intelligence (EI)
Aug 7, 2006
Employers no longer just look for a set of industry related skills. They look for leadership potential and that includes a high level of emotional intelligence (EI). The competencies that make up EI include self-awareness, social awareness, self management and relationship management.
Being aware of your emotional triggers and why they trigger you is key to practicing emotional intelligence principles. Emotional triggers are events or personality types that cause an intense emotional response.
Common emotional triggers are:
- Blatant incompetence
- Poor executive leadership (no demonstration of values, inconsistent, poor decision making, unavailable or unapproachable)
- Being overlooked for credit, accolades or promotions
- Arrogance or inflated egos
- Patronization or micro-management of subordinates
- Back stabbing
- Verbal attacks
- Lack of communication
These are things that will frustrate and upset the best of us. The important point here is to see if they trigger intense, long-lasting reactions with ramifications that make it difficult to remain rational.
If one or more of these emotional triggers affects you, take some time to sole search or work with a counselor to uncover the root cause behind your powerful emotional responses to these triggers. A look back to your family of origin could reveal relationship issues with parents, authorities or other key figures that have manifested themselves in your professional life.
Once you identify why you are so triggered by, for example, blatant incompetence, you can then catch yourself responding with your gut instead of staying in your head and responding with intelligence and rationality to the work situation.
It is crucial to your professional development that you deal with these triggers head-on. They can cause major career derailment, severe stress and emotional burn out if not taken seriously.
The next three articles on self-awareness will ask questions to evaluate your level of self-awareness and offer suggestions for ways of improving your EI.
- Improving Self Awareness and EI: Responding intelligently and judging coworkers
- 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
If you have comments or suggestions on this article, please start a discussion
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Copyright © 2006, Joni Rose and Suite 101. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized use will constitute an infringement of copyright.
