In partnership with

Mastering the Self

Welcome to the second issue of our emotional intelligence series! We’re going to explore self-awareness this week, including some practical tips to help you increase and leverage your self-awareness capabilities to succeed in business and life.

We’ve had a bunch of new subscribers since we kicked off our series last week. Here’s a link to last week’s post if you want to catch up or just need a refresher. This issue will focus on one element of EQ, self-awareness, and we’ll explore the benefits of self-awareness as well as tips to help you enhance your self-awareness.

What do I care if I’m self-aware?

Becoming more self-aware won’t directly reduce your stress or make your life inherently easier. But becoming more self-aware will help you manage stress, anxiety, and your reactions to the stressors of everyday life. You can begin to deliberately alter your behaviors when you understand your emotional triggers and normal responses to everyday situations. In short, self-awareness allows you to become a better version of yourself than you were the day before.

The Benefits of Self-awareness

• Better emotional regulation allows you to be better equipped to handle everyday and increasingly stressful situations.

• An open mind capable of seeking and listening to the perspectives of others while discerning what feedback is valid and relevant.

• Enhance people and leadership skills that help you navigate business and personal relationships.

• Better verbal and non-verbal communication skills can help you interact more effectively in various social settings and situations.

Becoming more self-aware allows you to understand how others perceive you. It may shock you to learn that your view of yourself can be significantly different than those around you, even close friends and family.

Deciding to embark on a self-awareness journey can be exciting and terrifying, as you’re bound to uncover things about yourself that you may have never thought of before. Such as how your beliefs impact your decisions, or how your beliefs were shaped by others and merely adopted by you.

Remember, self-awareness is a journey! You don’t have to have core values or guiding beliefs to start understanding yourself. I’m going to give you a few tips you can use to begin enhancing your self-awareness.

How to grow your self-awareness capability:

The best way to begin is to start recording your emotions. You can begin to understand your natural patterns and tendencies once you have a solid record of your daily feelings. For example, you may start to notice that you get cranky if you don’t have a second cup of coffee before lunch. You may discover you lack motivation when you start the day off running 15 minutes late.

Here’s how it works:

• Set a timer to go off 5-7 times per work day randomly. Record your feelings, actions, and context each time the timer goes off. You should explain why you feel a certain way and take note of any significant event or decision that is causing those feelings.

• Look through the data to identify patterns about yourself, your emotional triggers, and your decision-making process. Begin to record your findings, such as “I am abrupt and terse in morning meetings more so than afternoon meetings.”

• Take your findings and solicit feedback from your close friends and peers. Being abrupt may not be a bad thing in your line of work. In fact, it could be something that people appreciate: “I really enjoy how she gets down to business and doesn’t mince words.”

• Begin to examine all the feedback for specific patterns and determine if the feedback is valid and relevant.

• Make a plan to accept the feedback and alter your behaviors accordingly.

• Grab a journal and repeat!

This is the process I recommend for anyone new to emotional intelligence or self-awareness. It takes time to understand yourself, and it really is a journey that continues as long as you want it to.

If you want to take this a step further, you can check out an article I wrote for The Training Industry a few months back. It covers four tips to enhance your self-awareness as a leader. If you want to dive deep into the world of EQ, I recommend two books for you to check out:

• Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis, and Annie McKee.

• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Dr. Travis Bradberry and Dr. Jean Greaves.

Before you leave:

Good luck on your self-awareness journey. I’m always here to help you out should you ever be in need. In fact, here are some additional resources I can provide to help you on your leadership journey!

• Be sure to check out my YouTube channel for more content. I’ll be releasing a weekly newsletter recap video where I’ll cover everything in this edition in much greater detail. Be sure to check it out on Thursday!

• Discover the MASA Framework and the power of Leadership Alignment!

Get ready for the next issue of our emotional intelligence series coming out next Tuesday. We’ll take a look at how you can leverage your self-awareness skills to impact your actions and behaviors as we explore self-management!

To thine own self be true,

-Rick

Find out why 1M+ professionals read Superhuman AI daily.

In 2 years you will be working for AI

Or an AI will be working for you

Here's how you can future-proof yourself:

1. Join the Superhuman AI newsletter – read by 1M+ people at top companies

2. Master AI tools, tutorials, and news in just 3 minutes a day

3. Become 10X more productive using AI

Join 1,000,000+ pros at companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon that are using AI to get ahead.

Sign up and start learning AI