Self awareness One of the major four tenets of emotional intelligence (EQ). Self Awareness - the key to increased personal and organisational performance. It is the ability to recognize your emotions and their effects.

SELF AWARNESS Emotional intelligence beings only when affective information enters the perceptual system. A lot of people tend to analyze others more frequently than they try to understand themselves. We feel we know ourselves well,but in actuality we don’t or do we? Skill of mindfulness One should be mindful about the environment and what is going on in the moment- Thoughts,feelings, actions, and sensations. Appreciate what is happening now rather than focus on past or the future. It has been said that there is no thinking without feeling and vice versa.

Emotions activate and chemically stimulate the brain. They are a critical source of learning and memory. Individuals who are high in emotional self awareness : 1)Know what they are feeling and why 2)Understand the connection between their feelings and what they think,say and do. 3)Know how their feeling directly affects performance. 4)Are aware of their values and goals. By Lacking self awareness you lack sufficient information to make effective decisions.

Daniel Goleman Theories Self Awareness : “The art of Waking up” Of realizing who you are and why do you do things you do and in the way you do them. Perhaps the most important emotional competence is that of Self Awareness - Knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions. Or as one psychotherapist puts it "bringing to the conscious mind an understanding of the compulsions that push us around". According to Daniel Goleman (Leading authors in this field) emotional intelligence is twice as important as IQ and technical skills Quote : “The higher up the organization you go the more important emotional intelligence becomes”

It was also discovered in a recent survey that Chairman and CEO’s have higher level of emotional intelligence than their subordinates. Development of Self Awareness For all of us, we grow up in life learning to cope as best as possible with less than perfect formative environments - provided through parents, teachers, significant others etc. And these coping mechanisms, some good, some not so good, get us through to adulthood one way or another. But for most people these mechanisms then move with us into adulthood and push us around in much the same way as when we were children. So the 'good little boy' who grew up believing that the only way to elicit loving strokes from his father was by succeeding at whatever he did, becomes a highly trained achiever - successfully running many different projects, departments, businesses; acquiring much material wealth through his material successes, projecting an image of success & achievement, to the point of not really knowing why he is doing this - simply to gain his positive strokes; to feel worthwhile. He lives by the inner rule which says that the task must be accomplished, at any cost

Consider an example of a businessman and his burning drive for success leads him to contract some serious illness, a break up of loving relationships and the signing of the 'deal of all deals' which ends up breaking the business; let alone the many broken business relationships along the way. Now you may start to ask "why did he do it? Why didn't he stop at the 3rd multi-million pound venture?" The truth is that he probably was not aware of what he was doing. And so, he couldn't stop. He had no choice. Like many of the things we do, we simply don't know why we do them; we just carry on doing them. Increasing our own levels of self awareness therefore, empowers us to make different choices. Not that we will automatically do things differently. After all, some habits die hard! But over time, as we build up these levels of catching ourselves doing things, we will have the choice to alter our behaviour, eventually, before the next repetition.

To increase self awareness we don’t need any extensive psychotherapy Things like before making a presentation do not think “ This is going to be a disaster” By becoming aware of your thoughts, you learn how to influence your feelings actions, and how you can alter them accordingly. In the case of a presentation,the impression you have of yourself is that you cant handle the situation Expected outcome is that it will be a complete failure. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because of the fear of not doing well and you will not be in control of the facts or situation and blow it up. Instead have a positive frame of mind or give a positive spin to your inner dialogue “I am going to do just fine I have all the facts and the points are in order”. This will enable you to reassure yourself, relax and make the presentation clearly and effectively.

Always engage yourself with an inner dialogue. Self talk is always the best pep-talk. Variation in self awareness emerge from over estimation or under estimation of ones self about his/her abilities.