Combining thinking with feelings to make quality decisions and build authentic relationships, underpins your emotional intelligence, and self-awareness is a key component of this.

Beyond the obvious awareness of your strengths and liabilities, along with how they play out and the impact that they have, is an awareness of how your attitude can impact upon your emotional intelligence. That’s your state of mind around a situation, events or state of affairs.

To a certain extent, everyone’s selfish, everyone has prejudices and everyone is narrow minded, but your self awareness around this can make you much more emotionally intelligent.

Let’s have a look at being selfish.  Being selfish is completely different from being self-centred – caring only about your own needs, wants and priorities.  Looking after and taking care of your physical health and psychological well-being by engaging in good eating habits, exercise, sleep, relaxation and enjoyable activities will mean that you’ll be well enough to help and take care of others. This puts you in a better position to benefit others.  As flight attendants tell passengers in the event of the cabin depressurising, secure your own oxygen mask, first before helping others.  If you don’t look after yourself in appropriate ways first, you’re not going to be capable of providing the best support to others.

Let’s have a look at being prejudiced. Biases are prejudice in favour of, or against, something that’s considered to be unfair.  This could be a person or a group or just something.  Biases may be conscious, they’re explicit, or unconscious, they’re implicit. Unconscious bias is, by its very definition, something that you’re not consciously aware of, and so it’s not easily open to you to examine or observe in yourself. Your awareness and acceptance of this means that you can be alert to unconscious bias and so constantly check for it. Having cognitive strategies such as engaging perspectives and opinions that are different from yours, checking your assumptions and listening
will help to reduce unconscious bias.

Finally, let’s have a look at being narrow minded. You pay attention to certain things in order to create your moment to moment perception of reality.  Your brain can’t possibly process every element of an experience. It has to prioritise what it believes to be important.  Everything else is just lost or blurred. Recognising that your mind is susceptible to blindness, narrowly focusing on only a small part of what’s happening is a good start. Asking good quality questions enables you to remove any arrogance around what you experience and to continually enquire about what you’re missing or may have overlooked.

Accepting that you are selfish, prejudiced, narrow minded will help you to reduce any misconceptions that you may have about yourself and how emotionally intelligent you are.  By continually checking and adapting to what you learn, you can increase your self awareness, and this then drives your emotional intelligence.

Ei4Change has the most comprehensive range of online courses based on emotional intelligence available on the internet. The video forms a part of the Ei4Change course – Applying Emotional Intelligence: Going Beyond The Basics. This is a more advanced course that investigates emotional intelligence at a deeper level.