Sonya Moore-Wells

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Self Awareness: To Know Thyself is the Beginning of Wisdom

Sonya Moore-Wells

I remember a pivotal moment in my life when I was 22 years old. I had pulled my car into a random parking lot after a pretty big fight with my father.  I sat alone;  racked with sobs stemming from  deep,  uncontrollable emotions.  I was broken and  searching for something to ease the pain, sadness, and sorrow that had been building for 22 years.  The conflict with my dad wasn’t the sole source of my unhappiness.  I just didn’t know how to live with the pain that came from experiences and challenges from my childhood.  I had become  adept at hiding the darkness I was experiencing on the inside. Most specifically, the feeling of never being good enough.  I was getting good at faking it, putting on my best, buttoned-up, external facade to cover what was happening inside.

After crying, contemplating, thinking: I went home.  I then decided I needed to get some help.  Thankfully, my mother was always comforting and able to see right through my facade.  She knew my pain. She often supplied me with popular “self help” books that piled up, unread.  She supported me in finding a good counselor.  That’s when I began actually reading some of those books and, since, have never stopped in my pursuit of self awareness. 

I’m thankful for that night because  I now realize now that the recognition of the emotions I was feeling and people to communicate them with was a gift. Stuffing them away for so long caused an implosion.  What powerful personal insight I have gained from  examining why I was feeling that way, identifying what had caused my pain, and making decisions for how I wanted to live my life without being sabotaged by those emotions for ever.   

I share my personal story as an example of the importance of understanding and labeling one’s emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes us uniquely human and  complex.  It is also why I love working with others to help identify and remove some of those emotional barriers that can get in the way of leading our best life.   

The field of study of emotions and behaviors known as “Emotional Intelligence” became more mainstream in the 1990’s when businesses began identifying the relationship between leader success and their emotional intelligence in the workplace. After two decades of organizational behavior work, it is still one of the most important and valued sets of skills I teach clients and we can all learn them - no matter what profession or position we hold.    


What is Emotional Intelligence?

“Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.” 

Drs. Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves

There are four key skills to Emotional Intelligence.

In this Blogpost, I will focus on the areas of Personal Competence:  Self Awareness & Self Management.   

These are the most powerful and challenging set of skills because it takes hard work to really look at one’s self, often to see things you may not like.  It can also be very difficult because you may have blind spots for behaviors that you aren’t even aware of, yet they might be getting in the way of your happiness and productivity.  Here’s the good news:  Emotional Intelligence is a set of skills that can be learned, no matter how old you are.  This is different from your IQ.

Let’s start with Self Awareness, which is the ability to accurately perceive your own emotions AND be able to understand your patterns and tendencies.   It is the most important of the four EI skills because when you are unaware of what’s happening with yourself, you aren’t able to adjust if needed and see how your thoughts and feelings are blocking your ability to be clear-headed!  Not only do you have to be very intentional about looking at your emotions and behaviors, you also get feedback from the world to help build this skill.

So, are you self aware?  Even though most people believe they are self aware, only 10-15% of  people studied actually are (see the Harvard Business Review article here).  

There are many actual skills to building Self Awareness and to start understanding how your behaviors are being influenced by your emotions.  Let’s talk about emotions.  Your emotions aren’t necessarily good or bad.  You experience a vast range of emotions all day, every day - it’s what makes you human.  In fact, each of us experiences about 27 emotions per waking hour, according to Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves, authors of Emotional Intelligence 2.0.  

Having Emotional Intelligence means not allowing any one of these emotions to “hijack” you by taking control over your behavior.  For example, do you notice how your anxiety and fear can increase after watching news or social media?  All emotions are important sources of information about what you are reacting to.  Multiple senses bring us information from your body, your mind, and the outside world - feeding it to  your brain to be processed and analyzed.  

Think back to the last time you watched the news or logged onto social media. Maybe you noticed a rise in anxiety or fear or even outrage.  Feeling outraged actually gives you information that something is going against your values.  But, when the outrage lasts for a prolonged time, the state of outrage and anger “hijack” your cognitive thinking and it can become very difficult to focus.  If you were to stay in a negative emotional state, it becomes very difficult to get done what you need to and the negativity “leaks” into your behavior -  perhaps by being impatient or acting frustrated.  

Staying in the feeling of outrage for a prolonged time can be quite unhealthy.  However, if you can QUICKLY examine what caused the outrage and discover what personal value might be at risk (data), you might get more clear on your values - again, knowing more about yourself and what’s important to you.  

Similarly, feeling grief helps you to see how much you loved something (data).  Fear tells you there’s a threat or danger.  Feeling delighted reminds you what matters most to you.  Being inspired tells you what makes you want to soar.  This is good personal data collection.

Take a moment right now to determine which of these emotions you may have experienced in the past 24 hours.  Most of us don’t realize there are that many different emotions.  When you can identify the event or stimulus that triggered these emotions, you start to build Self Awareness by understanding and labeling those feelings and anticipating what triggers the emotion.  The first skill-building activity is identifying and examining what causes certain emotions for you.  Sometimes just labeling the emotion, you can diminish its impact on you.  There’s a saying, “If you can name it, you can tame it,” meaning, take a look at it rather than ignoring or stuffing it away, and give it less power. When we keep it inside, there’s nowhere for it to go except in your body which can cause physical illness like headaches, insomnia and high blood pressure. 

 If Self Awareness is a skill, how do you begin to build it?  The first step is to begin taking a closer look at what causes your negative emotions.  This is not easy work.  With clients, I use various assessments and guidance to help identify how thoughts, patterns, perceptions, feelings, and voices in the head negatively influence behaviors, productivity, relationships, and happiness.   Knowing yourself through Self Awareness is the most important of the four skills because, if you aren’t willing to take a closer look at your emotions, you won’t see what’s creating barriers and challenges in your life.

In the United States, we spend billions of dollars in healthcare dollars trying to “fix” mental health.  In my opinion, we could be working with people to increase their Self Awareness and emotional well being to help prevent rather than treat conditions like mild depression or anxiety.  Imagine if we were teaching more Social and Emotional Learning in schools to develop Self Awareness skills to help children understand that emotions like shame, blame, guilt, and anxiety are part of life, and how to recognize and communicate their emotions.    

How to build Self Awareness skills:

Avoid judging your emotions.

Labeling emotions as good or bad isn’t helpful.  We all may feel envy, disappointment, loneliness, shame, and anger at some point in our lives.  Most of us also feel joy, delight, and contentment.  Some emotions you might like to feel more than others, but they aren’t good or bad.  Suspending judgement on the ones you may not want to feel can help them to run the course and move on more quickly.  What is this telling you when you respond with anger to something or someone? Being curious, rather than critical of yourself, can save adding additional emotions to what you are already experiencing.

Identify your self-sabotaging behaviors.

In five minutes, you can learn about your “Saboteurs” by taking this assessment.  Our Saboteurs’ patterns of thinking, feeling, and reacting become soft-coded in our brain through neural pathways. When these neural pathways are triggered, we are “hijacked” by our Saboteurs and feel, think, and act using their patterns.  These can cause havoc in the way we see ourselves and impact our personal and professional relationships with others.

Lean in to the discomfort of taking a closer look.

You can’t build Self Awareness if you’re avoiding, criticizing, or stuffing the tough stuff down.  Be aware of your numbing patterns like alcohol, drugs, and social media.  When you find yourself in a moment of needing to “numb” something, that’s the best time to ask: Why am I trying to escape this?  Am I putting it away temporarily? When will I examine what’s actually happening?

Sometimes you will experience surface level, or default emotions, that show on the outside- like when we are angry at others and yelling.   Take a moment to go a layer deeper, to understand. What’s really driving this frustration? Is it more embarrassment or disappointment?  This is where the hard but very rewarding work comes in.  The reason to look a little closer is that it actually RELEASES the POWER those emotions can have over you. 

Notice the ripple effect of your emotional energy.

Your emotions can be powerful.  Notice how your emotions impact others and can be contagious.  Both positive and negative.  Emotional Intelligence is about being choiceful in the types of ripples you create.  If you have children, this is a great time to model and share things like anxiety, fear, gratitude, joyfulness.  Start a culture of sharing these and learning how they feel.  Discussing your highs/lows, ups/downs, roses/thorns with children lets them know that it’s ok to feel ashamed or disappointed as well as joyful and excited.  

Know who and what pushes your buttons.

When you feel an emotion at a high intensity, stop and ask “what was the trigger?”  We all have pet peeves, annoyances, irritations.  Knowing this is key to self managing.  Notice what you are paying attention to.  How do you feel after spending time on Social Media, perusing news outlets, flipping through notifications, being with others who feed on negativity?  Sometimes we have to set boundaries against our emotional triggers.  

Get to know yourself under stress.

What does your body do when presented with stress?  What data and information does your body use to signal you to stop and breathe? Where do you feel it?  Headaches, stomachaches, insomnia. If you recognize any of these symptoms, take some time to begin the process to know thyself. It’s worth the work.

Once you begin to build the Self Awareness muscles, the second skill becomes how to strengthen the required muscles to resist the sabotaging emotions the prevent you from being your best self (stress, anger, anxiety, disappointment, shame). The world is always going to throw you challenges and obstacles. The good news is you actually have a tremendous amount of control how you choose to respond to them In my next Blogpost, I will examine Self Management. Stay tuned!


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