Last week we kicked off our 6-week series with the role emotional intelligence has in your business. If you missed that post don’t worry — check it out here. In this post, we’re going to touch on how you can improve self-awareness as it relates to the topic of EI.
Knowing where you stand emotionally can be very helpful as an entrepreneur. Being able to identify and express healthfully your own emotions acts as a buffer against your emotions running wild and distorting your perception. Improving your emotional intelligence can help you make better decisions.
And, as a leader, business owner and/or network marketer learning to improve your self-awareness will help you become more successful.
How to Improve Self-Awareness Today
Let’s talk about a handful of ways that will help you improve self-awareness in your every day life. See, although this series was focused mostly around business — you will find their are a ton of parallels that will help you day-to-day. This will include your personal and professional relationships including, the one with yourself.
First, start with being aware of what bothers you about other people. Strange place to start, right? But what we know is that often the things we don’t like about other people is a reflection of some quality we don’t particularly love about ourselves. So, the next time you find yourself irritated with what someone else is doing, pause — take a moment and be aware if this is mirroring something you don’t love about you.
Don’t Hate, Meditate!
Meditation has proven time and time again the benefits it has in both learning how to improve self-awareness and, how to manage our thoughts, feelings and emotions. A regular mindfulness practice will open your eyes to how the thinking mind works and how much more there is to you than the simple content of your thoughts.
Mindfulness work can be intimidating, can feel strange at first and may not be for everybody however, we encourage you begin to incorporate even 5 minutes a day of meditation type exercises. Your teams and your business will thank you.
Let’s Talk about Feedback
Asking for feedback (and incorporating it well) has proven to help improve self-awareness in the grand picture of emotional intelligence. While there are many aspects of ourselves that we can see need improvement, it’s the parts of ourselves we can’t see—you might call them our blind spots—that are the real problem.
And other people are positioned to notice these and help us see them. We would encourage you to seek out people that you respect and trust — this isn’t the place for those yes people in our lives. We want real feedback delivered with grace to help us improve. Often, being too close to the subject, in this case ourselves, we miss things that others may notice.
Becoming in tune with these critiques is important and implementing them is imperative.
Take the Time to Become Clearer
What may or may not surprise you is that a lot of the time when we set goals we are inundated with what society thinks they should look like. We should add — social media is a major culprit for this. Are your goals truly serving you?
A special form of self-awareness involves becoming aware of and clear about the things that really matter to us:
Why are we here?
What are we called to do?
What makes for a fulfilling life that we can be truly proud of?
Get clear on these answers and set your goals accordingly. This macro way of thinking is a great way to improve self-awareness and in turn, achieve levels of success that we may have never imagined possible because we weren’t truly in touch with those needs.
Self-awareness is simply the ability to observe our selves—to take notice of and pay attention to patterns within our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And it’s a skill that we all have. Now how will you put it to use?
