Self Awareness

Self Awareness
(Emotional Management for Personal & Professional Growth Series)

 

The first step in improving emotional intelligence at the workplace is self-awareness. Self-awareness is more of knowing self in terms of strengths, limitations, beliefs, values, purpose, passion, and feelings/ emotions at a deeper level.
 Why is Self-awareness required?

When we are aware of ourselves, we choose the right field to play to win and be prepared to improve.

Let me give you some real examples which will bring more understanding about the power of self-awareness in personal and professional growth.

1. One of my known business heads realized that he frequently stuck in a meeting and not able to ask the questions to his team. That is the moment of self-awareness of his limitation. After realizing that, he has been consciously learning the art of questioning in different circumstances.
2. One of my colleagues who was working as a senior manager identified his strength lies in people management than in detailed engineering. That moment of realization made him shift into a general management area and been successful for the last decade.
3. One of my friends recently identified his limitations in dealing with the online webinar format of learning, particularly on listening ability and coping up. Now he is working on improving the listening capability as suggested to him.
4. Personally, when i became aware of my limitations on my writing skill without grammatical errors, now I am using grammatical software to improve the writing quality and still working on it.
 The real problem is not with the strengths or limitations, but not aware of those strengths/ limitations and leading a suboptimal life with suffering self and others.
When you know more about yourselves, it will improve your leadership effectiveness and relationship qualities.

But the strange fact is that most of us think that we know about ourselves very well. That is not TRUE. One of the studies conducted by Carnegie Mellon University researchers among the leaders of many organizations found that only 15 % of the people are aware of themselves very well and remaining either overestimated or underestimated themselves.

When I was working in an organization, as part of the leadership development process, the HR team asked me to rate myself on some of the leadership attributes. Also, they asked my peers and junior colleagues to rate me on the same attributes. To my surprise, in all the attributes, I have rated high about myself than others. That is a blindspot. That is the moment of self-awareness about myself.

We will learn the structured way of knowing ourselves in the coming weeks, and as of now, to get an overview of your judgment about yourself, suggest you take the following action this week.

 

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 quick action on self-awareness 

• Reach out 3 people who are very close to you and know more about you. They can be your partner, colleagues  &  friends.
• Ask them to give feedback on TOP 3 POSITIVE qualities of you and TOP  3 AREAS OF LIMITATIONS of you as they feel.
• Summarise the responses and calibrate yourself on what do you think about yourself and others' feedback are matching or not.

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Pl do not get into justification or defend. Just be aware of yourself.
 Self-awareness is the first step in improving your emotional stability and leadership qualities.

 

Indicators of Low Emotional Intelligence (EI)

Indicators of Low Emotional Intelligence (EI) 
(Emotional Management for Personal & Professional Growth Series)

 

How to measure our current emotional intelligence level?  Many agencies in the market are administrating psychometric assessments to measure EI level and it is up to the individual to take it if it is affordable, keen on the quantitative metrics, and the development plan.

Alternatively, let us reflect on some of the habits that we demonstrate on a day to day activities. Those habits will give some ideas about our current capability of managing emotions and the gaps to bridge.

Given below, some of the habits/behaviors in the workplace. If you relate more points with your behavior, then you need to realize that you should work on emotional management aspects.

Some of the indicators of low emotional management skill 
 

1. Accepting to other’s obligation to complete a task by saying YES, then internally feeling bad about ourselves for not saying NO and finding difficulty to complete the task as per commitment and developing internal stress.
2. Getting into arguments for silly issues with colleagues or external people even though they admit the mistake. Just to prove our stand, keep on talking.
3. Criticizing others even though we do not have a direct influence and not relevant to personal, professional, business growth. ( For example, by  criticizing the player’s performance who are actually in the field or criticizing the people who are in the hot seat and no way we connect with them and no way they can hear our voice.)
4. Frequently losing coolness and shouting in high decibels with colleagues, junior colleagues, and at the end of the drama, the purpose is never met!
5. Taking “Impulsive decisions” due to overjoy or anger or frustration which sometimes backfires by way of monetary loss, time loss and the friction in the relationship.
6. Not having the patience to listen to others, interrupting with personal views.
7. Blaming others when things go wrong and not realizing the self’s contribution to the failure
8. Frequently going in a self-sabotaging mode for all the failures without logically analyzing the causes.
9. Not able to focus and prioritize. Keep on changing the priorities or even jobs or business.
10. Not able to look at the issues from other’s perspectives and more self-centered.

You can add the list based on your experience and relate your selves.

We need not regret today’s level of managing emotions effectively as it is the effect of many variables like your values, beliefs, awareness of self and others which we discuss later with counteractions. But awareness is essential for progress.

Moving towards higher-level emotional management is possible with awareness and practice.

Let us discuss more on this aspect.

Emotional management and its effect

Emotional management and its effect (Emotional Management for Personal & Professional Growth Series)

As we discussed the importance of emotional management in the workplace, let us see a typical example of different emotional management for a particular event and how it is affecting the quality of the relationship and impacting the performance.

For example, one of your teammates prepared a presentation which you suppose to present it to your customer. The presentation content seems to be as good as you expected.
 
Now you have three choices on managing your emotions in terms of recognizing and expressing.
 
Choice 1: Recognizing your feeling of happiness and expressing to your teammate
 
Since you have a high level of emotional intelligence, at that moment, you realize the feeling of happiness. Also, you express your happiness to your teammate by appreciating the work, giving some more positive feedback about the presentation.

Consequence:

First, you are feeling happy and at a high level of a positive state. Second, your teammate feels happy, motivated with your appreciation, and learns some more tips on the presentation from you. There is a chance of development in his/her capability and an increase in the quality of the relationship.
 
Choice 2: Recognizing the feeling of happiness, but not expressing to your teammate.
 
You may feel happy and ending the discussion with the teammate with a simple gesture of thankfulness.
 
Consequence:

your teammate is not getting any clue about your feeling. He/she may get disappointed, doubtful about his / her quality of work, feeling not learning much from work. The quality of the relationship is neutral and not much scope for development.
 
Choice 3: Not recognizing your feeling of happiness and not expressing to your teammate
 
As you are with low EQ, you are not in a position to recognize your feeling at that moment and concern about other’s work.

Consequence:

Nothing fulfills you, and your teammate feels low for a thankless job and not getting any clue about the work, and there may be chances of poor relationship building and learning.
 
We are not concluding which choice is right or wrong. It is up to the individual to decide. The point to realize is that, knowingly or unknowingly, we are displaying either one of the choices in our interactions, and each choice has a different consequence on either relationship building or managerial/ leading capability in the workplace. 
 
Going forward, let us discuss the process of developing awareness of emotional management.

Why is emotional management required in the workplace?

Why is emotional management required in the workplace?
(Emotional Management for Personal & Professional Growth Series)

 

Emotional management at work is all about managing your emotions or feelings within yourself, expressing well, understanding other's emotions, regulating your response in line with both yours and others.

When we learn to master the emotions through awareness and practices, it brings the following personal and professional benefits.
 

1. Being in a peaceful state  
2. Feeling complete
3. Being productive
4. Taking timely and right decisions
5. Enabling growth in the profession
6. Nurturing a good relationship with others 

 For example, you might have seen some people who are qualified with educations and technical/functional skills (IQ), but not being happy inside, not achieved much growth in the profession and not sought after person. But some people without much educational qualification, low intelligence on technical/functional aspects are living a fulfilled life, having a good relationship with others and consistently grown in professions. The main reason for the contradiction is emotional intelligence (EQ) or emotional management skill only.
 
Even at the business level, some business is quite successful and grown consistently because the leaders are good at managing the emotions well at self-level and managing the people's feelings very well. People could be employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

Most of the organizational problems are related to people management only. The executive leaders who are good at managing the people well can drive the business results also very well. That calls for effective emotional management skills.

What is meant by emotions?

Psychologists suggest the six dominant emotions that we are experiencing most of the time, namely happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Under each, there may be many sub-elements.

When we manage those emotions very well in terms of recognizing and expressing, we become a better person in dealing with emotions.

For example,

one of your teammates prepared a presentation which you suppose to present it to your customer. You are happy with the presentation quality. The way you are recognizing your emotions at the moment and expressing with others will have a consequence on your quality of self and relationship. Let us discuss the various scenario next week that will give you the idea of our emotional management.

Learning Emotional Intelligence

Some time back, i requested feedback on the topic to be discussed for our personal and professional growth. Some have expressed  the requirements indirectly the struggles they have at a personal level and the workplace as follows

• dealing with the decision dilemma
• managing the boss and the colleagues
• how do we know we are on the right path?
• developing charisma
• improving interpersonal skill
• managing the conflict and difficult people
• overcoming stress

When we observe all the struggles, most of them are related to emotional management only.

Emotional management can be defined as the ability to recognize and regulate emotions in ourselves and others to make effective decisions.

When we are aware of ourselves in terms of our values, beliefs, strengths, areas of improvement, and if we learn to know how to deal with the emotions of others, we can become a better person. That awareness brings the ability to manage all the challenges in the workplace.
 
 For the last 30 years, the modern business world packaged emotions related aspects into a new theory, termed as Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Quotient and a lot of researches and books have been written on that subject. When we go in-depth of those theories and researches, one after study either supports or counters previous findings, and some of them are not considering cultural differences.

One thing I had realized that reasonable emotional management is already in our culture as we encourage more family systems and our ancient mythologies also insist upon emotional management. The Bhagavat Gita starts with the emotional conflict of Arjuna, and Krishna taught more to bring emotional stability as part of his teachings.
 
Hence, we need a holistic approach to look at our personal and organizational challenges in dealing with emotions from our culture, a combination of emotions, and a spiritual perspective. Also, to bring a transformation at an individual level on emotion management, just theory alone is not sufficient, we need to experiment, and self-realization is required.
 
With that context only, we are going to discuss "Emotional Management for Personal and Professional Growth" in the coming weeks with an in-depth explanation of some of the concepts, real-life examples, small actions, and sharing the personal experiences. We focus more on our discussions with reference to workplace challenges only.
 
Given below the broad area of coverage.
 

• Knowing self – Strengths / Values / Beliefs / purpose /balancing in all aspects of life
• Controlling and Managing our emotions for positive turnout
• Achievement drive – self-motivation/ finding passion/ taking responsibility / being in energetic mode / Looking at the work and people from a karma perspective
• Managing Others – background/understanding and  sensitizing emotions  /developing others
• Leveraging relationship to achieve results – Leading change / Influencing / Building Team/ Improving communication

 
Look forward to your views and sharing your experiences.