Emotional Awareness Training For Managers and Professionals
Mastering Emotional Intelligence
Transformative Learning
Cultivate practical skills and confidence to navigate real-world challenges with our supportive training.
Empathy Enhancement
Master EQ for improved communication and stronger relationships in both your personal and professional life.
Sustained Growth
Benefit from continuous feedback and one-to-one coaching for lasting behavioural improvements.Refine your communication skills by learning to harness your emotional intelligence with one of the UK's most acclaimed management training courses.
Why Choose This Training?
More Than Just A Course Of Lectures
What gets in the way of developing and holding on to new communication skills are old habits of thinking and speaking. Even if the advice is very good the reason why it rarely sticks are the mental habits people inevitably revert to, especially under pressure.
Unlearning those old habits and internalising a more effective and lasting approach to communication needs more than a short course of lectures on how to do it.
What Makes This Training Stand Out?
What makes this training stand out is the exceptional support through one-to-one coaching sessions and continuous feedback. Changing behaviour is not an easy task as old habits are hard to break.
With a 40-year track record we can help you cultivate practical skills, and build your confidence to so you can successfully navigate real-world challenges, ensuring lasting behavioural improvements.
Testimonials
Join thousands of participants getting results
"What I love about this course is that I didn't just learn about the topic, this course is about ME. I'm confident I can reliably use my new skills, even when under pressure".
"A lesson for life! The power of effective communication is incredible when one masters the skills "listening with empathy" and "speaking assertively"
Clients We Have Worked With
Well-known companies who have used this course again and again, over many years
Course Summary
Training Objectives
This course is designed to help you develop emotional awareness. This involves recognising and understanding your own emotions and those of others, which is important for cultivating healthy relationships and better managing difficult situations. It means tuning in to your cognitive, behavioural, and physiological responses to events and interactions. Enhancing your emotional awareness can help with managing relationships better and making more informed decisions. Studies show that emotional awareness has implications for health, communication patterns, family dynamics, conflict resolution, and professional success. Practicing self-management and emotion regulation strategies can help with managing disruptive behaviours and difficult conversations or relationships.
Develop Your Emotional Intelligence
You will learn a set of powerful emotional intelligence communication techniques so that you can manage difficult conversations, handle challenging situations, build relationships and set firm boundaries.
Transferable Skills
The goal of this training is to equip you with the tools they need to build strong, lasting relationships in your professional life, although because these skills are so transferable many clients report vast improvements in their personal relationships as well.
Develop Skills
This is a skills development rather than just a theoretical programme, so the emphasis throughout will be on you taking turn after turn, practising your skills, while receiving feedback and coaching about your effect on others.
Repeated Practice and Feedback
In your coaching sessions you will be helped to practise dealing with the kinds of situation you find challenging, again and again, until you are confident you can do it successfully.
Video Analysis
We'll combine practical, hands-on experience with video replay and analysis and discussion of the principles involved to help you gain both skills and understanding. Special attention is paid to your individual training needs, so you can practise your skills in real-life situations that you have to handle at work.
Sustained Change
That's why as well as your place in a small group, this training includes a generous amount of private and confidential one-to-one coaching sessions online, spread over several months, ensuring an exceptional level of support. This will ensure the changes you make are sustained over a longer period of time and any obstacles are overcome. Choose between online training available worldwide, or in-person face-to-face courses in the UK.
Course Dates and Price
For a list of upcoming course dates (for online coaching and face-to-face training), the locations of the next 3-day public courses in the UK and pricing Click here.
Free Initial Session
This initial coaching session serves as an introduction to the "Skills with People" course, allowing you to understand the course's relevance and effectiveness for your specific needs before committing to it.
How Aware Are You?
Have you ever noticed how some people seem to have strong relationships, handle disagreements with ease and manage stress better than others? It's likely the result of high emotional intelligence, or EQ.
Emotional awareness is one of the main components of EQ and it involves understanding your own emotions as well as being able to recognise and empathise with other people’s feelings. Being emotionally aware will not only help build strong relationships but also allows us to make better decisions in life.
What Is Emotional Awareness And Why Is It Important?
Emotional awareness is the ability to recognise and understand your own emotions, as well as those of others. It helps us cultivate healthy relationships and better manage difficult situations.
Definition Of Emotional Awareness
Emotional awareness refers to the capability of recognising and understanding one's own emotions as well as those of others. It involves knowing when certain actions trigger particular responses within ourselves, from others around us, and to situations we find ourselves in.
It means perceiving our cognitive, behavioural and physiological responses during these moments. Enhancing emotional awareness can help with managing relationships better by recognising how different events or interactions influence emotions while bringing greater insight into oneself.
Practicing self-awareness can improve your emotional intelligence since being aware of your feelings helps you identify triggers behind them. You can then examine their impacts on performance, which leads towards more informed decisions about which steps should be taken for better results.
Importance Of Emotional Awareness
Emotional awareness is an understanding and recognition of one’s own emotions and the ability to respond to them in a constructive fashion. It involves the capacity to monitor our inner emotional state, accurately perceive other people’s feelings, and understand how these affect our interactions with them.
Studies show that emotional awareness has far-reaching implications for health, communication patterns family dynamics, conflict resolution within relationships and professional success.
Successful completion of tasks requires us to pay attention not just on thoughts but also on emotions which can provide motivation when faced with challenging situations.
By avoiding unnecessary outbursts during heightened levels stress, by letting off steam safely, practicing self-empathy you can learn to manage disruptive behaviours. These kinds of self management and emotion regulation strategies mean you take responsibility for your self, so you can learn to manage difficult conversations and relationships more easily.
The Benefits Of Becoming More Emotionally Aware
Gaining emotional awareness can provide you with tangible benefits in your personal and professional life, such as improved self-awareness and better relationships with others.
Improved Self-Awareness And Self-Regulation
Having a better understanding of one’s emotions can lead to increased self-awareness and insights into how they can act, think and respond in different situations. On our training course we can teach you how to develop your emotional awareness. This can help you understand your own feelings, recognise physical sensations associated with those feelings, identify triggers that catalyse the emotions, and use effective strategies for managing them.
With this newfound knowledge of your underlying thoughts and motivations, you gain improved control over your actions, allowing you to handle stress more effectively.
Being able to take personal responsibility for your emotions is essential for managing relationships in both personal or professional settings. Understanding what drives your responses to difficult situations, being able to balance empathy with objectivity, while avoiding blaming others, through clearly seeing your own mistakes, allows you to make wiser choices when dealing with challenges life throws your way.
Better Communication And Relationships
Developing emotional awareness can be a powerful tool for improving communication and forming stronger relationships. Having an understanding of your own emotions helps us regulate them, meaning we are better equipped to handle conflict or difficult conversations in a productive way.
Emotional intelligence also involves being able to recognise the emotions and needs of others, and responding with empathy.
As well as regulating your own emotions, developing emotional awareness helps you pick up on subtle emotional cues from those around you which mean you can better understand their perspectives and needs - essential for effective communication.
By using the communication skills and techniques we teach on our emotional intelligence training course, you can learn to manage your emotions more successfully. For example, when you feel overwhelmed or agitated, or when you begin to recognising physical symptoms associated with certain feelings (e.g., sweaty palms), or by learning that one emotion may indicate another (fear may lead to anger), it can enable you to increase your emotional self-awareness, and eventually not lose control of your self-control.
Increased Empathy And Understanding Of Others
Developing emotional awareness is linked to improved understanding of one's own emotions and the ability to recognise, interpret, and respond appropriately to the emotional states of others.
Empathy is key in gaining insight into not just our own emotions but those of other people as well. By recognising how different situations affect our moods and behavior, and by learning to intuit how others are feeling based on their facial expressions or mannerisms, we can become more emotionally intelligent and better equipped for both personal relationships and professional settings.
Practicing empathy is a learned skill that involves recognising how someone else might be feeling in a given situation. It is highly beneficial for developing better communication skills. This enabling you to understand the reasoning behind certain behaviours or statements and anticipate other people’s reactions through inferring what kind of emotion may have led up to them.
For example, if prompted with an abrupt response from a friend during conversation you would look at the context instead of immediately interpreting it negatively. You may ask yourself, “Was your friend preoccupied because they had work-related stress? Had they received bad news prior?” Practicing empathy helps foster mutual respect and understanding which paves way for peaceful resolution when conflicts arise among loved ones, colleagues at work or even total strangers.
Enhanced Decision-Making Skills
Emotional awareness can be a major factor when it comes to making decisions. Having control over your own emotions and the ability to understand the feelings of others can help ensure that any decisions you make are logical, balanced, and in-line with your core values rather than being clouded by negative emotions or biases.
Studies show that having emotional awareness can increased decision accuracy and lead to better outcomes. For example, research has found that emotionally aware people tend to draw more accurate conclusions when presented with situations designed to test their inductive reasoning skills compared with those who have lower levels of emotional awareness.
5 Scientific Steps To Raise Your Emotional Awareness
Mindfulness Practices
Mindfulness practices have become increasingly popular tools used to help individuals develop emotional awareness. By incorporating techniques such as mindful breathing exercises, guided imagery, and other stress-reducing techniques, mindfulness can help reduce levels of stress while also improving self-awareness and regulating emotions.
Mindfulness has been shown to increase the capacity for both empathy and understanding in relationships with others by helping individuals gain insight into their feelings and reactions.
For example, when you are feeling overwhelmed or stressed, even just taking a few moments to pause on your breath helps you step back from situations that trigger negative emotions so that you can be more aware of them. This allows you to make better decisions throughout our day.
Practicing mindfulness can enable you to recognise patterns in how you respond emotionally - both constructively and destructively - giving you greater control over your own responses and an increased ability to understand those around you better too.
Journaling
Journaling can be an effective way to help increase emotional awareness. By definition, journaling is the act of writing down thoughts and feelings in a diary or notebook.
Writing about your emotions and experiences gives you insight into your attitudes, behaviours, and feelings, helping you become more aware of your thought patterns. This understanding can lead to improved mental wellbeing by allowing you to better manage stress, anxiety levels, depression symptoms, physical and mental health problems and issues related to emotions such as increased blood pressure levels due to prolonged exposure to negative (and often misunderstood) emotions.
It promotes self-reflection which leads to forming healthier relationships with others by teaching you how to make mindful decisions based on facts rather than impulses when it comes managing differences between you when dealing with interpersonal disputes.
Journaling is a useful tool for enhancing both communication skills and ability for empathy. Knowing yourself lets you understand others better.
Seeking Feedback From Others
Asking for feedback from someone you trust is a very useful way to build your emotional awareness. Feedback can come in the form of constructive criticism, compliments, or even just a fresh perspective that helps to open up new areas of insight.
This can be particularly useful when you are feeling overwhelmed and struggling to gain insight into our own core emotions or when you’ve become too close an observer to really understand how everything fits together.
When choosing people who will offer such input, it’s important to ask those who are willing and able but not necessarily totally invested in your success both personally and professionally.
People who aren’t so emotionally involved may have more honest perspectives on what works best for you in certain situations versus others less involved ones whose advice might be clouded slightly by bias.
Identifying Triggers And Patterns
Identifying triggers and patterns of emotions is an important aspect of developing emotional awareness. By learning to recognise what causes feelings, you’re able to better regulate your own emotions and even anticipate how others may react in different situations.
Recognising triggers and patterns can help you develop effective strategies for managing them when they arise or understanding how people around you may feel.
Common emotional triggers include both positive (happiness, excitement) and negative (sadness, anger) events coupled with physical sensations that signal overwhelming emotion like pressure on the chest or tension in the neck or shoulders.
Everyday situations such as conversations at work about colleagues, or being in close proximity with certain people can all trigger extreme reactions either positive or negative.
Tracking these relationships requires paying attention to moments in which strong emotions arise so you can begin piecing together common behaviours across many incidents over time. This information then reveals peculiarities that explain why certain situations cause a particular reaction within yourself, and helps build increased empathy towards others affected by similar stimuli when they confront it. It also enables you to make more logical decisions rather than basing choices off pure emotionality.
Practicing Self-Compassion
Self-compassion is an important tool to use when developing one’s emotional awareness, as it helps you understand and manage your emotions. Self-compassion involves allowing yourself to acknowledge negative thoughts and feelings without judgement or criticism but instead simply accepting them as part of being human.
It means treating yourself with kindness, understanding that nobody is perfect, and being gentle with yourself in difficult situations.
There are several different techniques for practicing self-compassion. These include:-
- cultivating gratitude for the present moment,
- writing a letter to oneself expressing compassion,
- mindful meditation focusing on sounds, smells, tastes and physical sensations,
- talking back against unhelpful internal dialogue in which negative statements are challenged by more affirming ones,
- repeating phrases such as “May I be happy”or “I accept myself just as I am”,
- reflecting upon shared human experiences of joy suffering during adversities rather than focusing solely on personal imperfections.
- Engaging in acts of service where one carries out unpaid acts like helping another person in difficulty,
- engaging often enough with friends who support us through tough times,
- Keeping affirmations close including mantras like ˜you got this” etc.
- finding moments each day to make something beautiful be it through art music etc.
- connecting regularly with nature (walking bare feet on sand/grass),
- embracing adventure & journey
Techniques And Activities For Developing Emotional Awareness
Techniques for developing emotional awareness include Mindful Breathing Exercises, Gratitude Journaling, Identifying and Labelling Emotions, Practicing Empathy and Reflection & Self-Evaluation.
Mindful Breathing Exercises
Mindful breathing techniques have been proven to be helpful in developing emotional awareness and managing emotions. It involves taking deep breaths with the intention to relax and replenish the body, while keeping focus on the present moment. By taking deep breaths, a you can better control your body during times of stress, allowing you to remain calm and level-headed when faced with difficult or challenging situations. Mindful breathing can also help in reducing stress levels, which is especially useful for people who suffer from mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Mindfulness-based practices are often coupled with breath-work, guided imagery and meditation which can help in becoming more aware of your own emotions as well as being able to interpret the emotions of others observed externally.
Mindful breathing exercises can be beneficial for anyone looking to become more emotionally aware, or if you seek to increase your ability to regulate responses in varying situations. For example, if a you feel overwhelmed by an emotion such as aggression or sadness, taking slow breaths and focusing on your immediate environment may bring down negative feelings, while still keeping awareness of what caused it in the first place. This insight is key when dealing with long-term unhealthy patterns of behaviour or emotions that might otherwise be suppressed without mindful breathing techniques being applied frequently over time.
Through mindful breathing practices you can become more attuned to your physical sensations, thoughts and emotions while regulating them more effectively. This helps you make better decisions regarding your mental health that not only positively affects you but others too. In your relationships this may mean staying calmer when faced with disagreements, and having a deeper understanding of why other people feel the way they do.
Practicing mindful breathing techniques is an effective way increase emotional awareness which provides both short term relief from stressful situations and benefits for longer lasting life changes brought about through becoming aware of oneself physically, mentally and emotionally.
Gratitude Journaling
Gratitude journaling is a simple but effective practice that encourages you to record your positive experiences and express appreciation towards others. This technique helps you become aware of the good things in your life, intentionally focus on them and appreciate them.
Studies have demonstrated that practicing gratitude through writing can improve physical health, mental well-being, happiness levels and overall life satisfaction. Gratitude has been found to be strongly correlated with personality attributes related to well-being such as resilience and optimism.
People who regularly keep gratitude journals tend to relish the good experiences they have and build strong relationships with the people around them due their attitude of constant appreciation despite difficulties experienced at times during life's journey.
Identifying And Labelling Emotions
Being able to accurately identify and label emotions is a key part of developing emotional awareness. Identifying and labelling your feelings involves recognising and naming the particular emotion within you at any given moment so that we can understand how it affects you.
When you are aware of your emotions, you become better equipped to regulate them effectively.
Accurately identifying your emotions gives you insight into why you may be experiencing certain behaviours or impulses in response to different situations. By reflecting upon another person’s emotional state, it can help you decipher the message behind what is being communicated through subtle signs such as facial expressions or body language. This can lead to increased understanding between people.
With greater knowledge about other’s past experiences, troubles, and beliefs, comes more empathy for those around you.
Practicing Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and share someone else's emotions, thoughts, and perspectives. It involves being able to recognise others' feelings and emotional experiences and relate those experiences to our own.
We teach several techniques that can help practice empathy towards others such as:-
- active listening,
- shadowing or mirroring another person’s movements,
- simulation or role play exercises,
- deciding not to talk for an extended period of time so you get better at recognising non-verbal cues from other people.
All these activities provide insight into what someone else may be feeling without them having to articulate their feelings.
Practicing empathy can also lead to deeper levels of understanding, which creates stronger connections within relationships leading to improved communication between you, which in turn results in more effective decision making.
Reflection And Self-Evaluation
Reflection and self-evaluation can be powerful tools for developing emotional awareness. Reflection helps with gaining insight into your own emotions and understanding how they interact with your thoughts, behaviours, and relationships.
Self-evaluation allows you to objectively assess the areas in which you’re doing well and those that require further attention with some emotional intelligence skills training, such as managing stress, communicating effectively, problem solving, or staying calm during difficult situations.
Being honest with yourself is key when engaging in self-reflection and evaluation. Examine your feelings rather than trying to make sense of them on an intellectual level. This requires considering your physical response (heart rate increase? Sweaty palms?), mental processes (are you replaying a conversation over again?) as well as what kind of thoughts accompany the feelings (am I being harsh or negative?).
Self-reflection can easily become part of your daily routine by setting aside time each day to think about how things went throughout the day;-
- What were some successes?
- What could have gone better?
- How did different emotions show up for me today?
This daily assessment can also include an inventory check on consistency:-
- How does my current behaviour compare against my values or goals for myself e.g., Is my energy level balanced throughout the day?
Practicing these constructive habits can help you gain more control over your own thinking patterns and reactions towards life events. Something helpful when becoming emotionally aware.
Overcoming Barriers To Emotional Awareness
In order to increase emotional awareness, it is important to identify and work on common barriers such as lack of self-confidence, social anxiety, negative thought patterns, and mental health issues.
Common Barriers To Emotional Awareness
When it comes to emotional awareness and control, barriers can arise for many people. These barriers prevent us from achieving optimal mental health, communication skills and relationships with those around us. Being aware of the common barriers to emotional awareness allows you to identify any issues that may be affecting your personal or professional life. Here are some of the most common barriers:
- Fear and Avoidance: Fear is one of the biggest factors when it comes to hindering our ability to connect emotionally with others as well as developing greater emotional intelligence. We often fear losing control over our emotions at best and facing potential judgement at worst. This leads us to avoiding expressing ourselves or discussing difficult topics while also failing recognise our own underlying emotion. This can leave negative feelings unaddressed and prolong difficult conversations.
- Lack of Self Awareness & Empathy: The lack of self-awareness can lead a person feel disconnected from their own emotional states which can make it challenging to accurately detect the underlying emotions behind their behaviour and responses. This can lead you to become unable to correctly gauge how they're coming off to other people. Something especially important when engaging with others on sensitive matters like conflict resolution. This lack empathy towards oneself makes understanding another’s perspective even more difficult since it's hard convey compassion if not being mindful of ones own inner thoughts.
- Limited Understanding: A limited, oftentimes poor, understanding can hinder your capacity understand and recognise different types of emotions. If you can discover what underpins certain nuances of particular feelings (i.e why might you be provoked into hating certain things by social conditioning). Gaining more insights about your deeper rooted motivations and how they causes irrational decisions can be extremely beneficial.
- Stigma Around Mental Health: Due to historical stigmas surrounding mental health that still sometimes prevailing, you still hear old attitudes like, “you just need snap out of your bad mood”. Despite increasingly progressive push within societies growing acceptance of various mental health conditions, some people are still nervous about openly expressing their feelings, incase their vulnerability is punished.
These common barriers is possible but requires effort, and in many cases the support of a qualified expert.
How To Overcome Barriers To Emotional Awareness
Understanding our human nature and acknowledging our emotions can help us become more aware of how we respond to and interact with the world around us. But it’s not always easy, and many times, we are presented with barriers that prevent us from obtaining this understanding.
Fear, shame, denial, and trauma history can all play a role in preventing you from being truly emotionally aware.
To overcome these blocks it’s necessary to identify the blocks you may be facing in your attempt to become emotionally aware. Identifying triggers such as anxiety or depressive symptoms can help you gain better insight into why you feel a certain way, especially if you’re faced with conversations or relationships where emotional awareness could come in handy.
Utilising mental health resources such as therapy or mediation can provide accountability towards achieving greater emotional self-awareness which will be beneficial for finding constructive resolutions at work, or within your personal life, especially when dealing with difficult conversations.
Seek Support
Seeking external support, either professional or non-professional, is an important part of developing emotional awareness. Professional support might include therapy and counselling sessions with a mental health practitioner to help an individual gain insight into their emotions.
Non-professional sources such as friends, family members and even online communities can provide a source of comfort, understanding and validation which can be beneficial in helping to raise emotional awareness.
Benefits from seeking external support for improving your emotional intelligence can include;-
- greater confidence in managing challenging emotions,
- increased self-awareness about cognitive patterns that lead to certain behaviours,
- improved communication skills,
- enhanced empathy and compassion towards oneself and others,
- more effective problem solving strategies for navigating emotionally charged situations,
- the reduction of fear around emotions experienced by the individual (such as fear of criticism),
- more balanced relationships within interpersonal connections.
Apart from access barriers related to cost and availability, potential barriers to seeking support may come from within, due to feelings of shame or embarrassment when talking about personal experiences or opening up to another person.
It is often difficult for some individuals lacking in self worth who are reluctant to expose vulnerabilities in order receive help when needed. This may end up perpetuating a cycle preventing them from accessing needed resources.
Practice Self-Compassion
Self-compassion is an important part of emotional awareness. It involves recognising and labelling our own emotions and honouring that emotional experience with understanding, acceptance, and kindness.
Self-compassion has been strongly linked to better mental health outcomes in numerous studies. Practicing self-compassion can help you approach difficult experiences with relative emotional calm, balanced perspective, while you are better at releasing tension or stress.
In terms of overcoming barriers to emotional awareness such as denial or avoidance of unpleasant emotions, you need to be kinder towards yourself and understand your own needs rather than passing judgement on them negatively.
To practice self-compassion one can treat yourself kindly like you would a dear friend. Speaking words under your breath like “I am curious about this emotions” when feeling anxious are also helpful. Framing negative self talk into more positive framework eases discomfort associated with heightened emotions which helps you stay calm and develop greater resilience.
Mindful Breathing Exercises
Mindful breathing is a technique of focusing on your breath that is often used in meditation and other forms of mindfulness practice. By slowing down and paying attention to the breath, you are able to gain greater emotional awareness by focusing on the present moment, rather than worrying about future or imagined situations or ruminating over the past events.
To start practising mindful breathing, begin with simply sitting comfortably and focusing your attention fully on your inhales and exhales, without trying to change them in any way.
If starting out this exercise is difficult due to intrusive thoughts entering the mind, then try counting slowly from 1-10, before repeating the process slowly five times, or more if needed. This helps you find time away from distracting thought patterns.
Additionally practicing techniques such as alternate-nostril yoga breath-work has proven highly effective in calming down both body systems (sympathetic & parasympathetic nervous systems) while creating an inner atmosphere of balance during anxious moments or experiences.
Emotional Awareness Vs Emotional Intelligence
Comparing emotional awareness and emotional intelligence, both are important for self-regulation, empathy, and communication.
Differences And Similarities
Emotional awareness and emotional intelligence are two closely related concepts that can significantly impact an your mental well-being and interpersonal relationships. Here are some key differences and similarities between these two essential aspects of emotional health.
|
Emotional Awareness |
Emotional Intelligence |
|
Focuses on the ability to recognise and understand one's own emotions and feelings. |
Encompasses not only the recognition and understanding of one's own emotions, but also the ability to manage and express those emotions effectively. |
|
Associated with higher levels of joy and fulfilment. |
Associated with better social skills, relationship management, and overall success in various aspects of life. |
|
Relates to empathy, which allows you to differentiate between your own emotions and feelings. |
Includes empathy as a crucial component, but also covers other aspects of social awareness and interpersonal skills. |
|
Involves identifying and evaluating emotions in yourself. |
Focuses on controlling and expressing emotions, in addition to identifying and evaluating them. |
|
Can be improved through mindfulness practices, journaling, seeking feedback, identifying triggers and patterns, and practicing self-compassion. |
Can be improved through similar activities, but also through exercises that enhance interpersonal communication, relationship management, and problem-solving skills. |
While both emotional awareness and emotional intelligence share common elements, such as self-awareness and the ability to recognise and understand emotions, they differ in their scope and focus. Emotional intelligence encompasses a broader range of skills, including the ability to control and express emotions effectively, while emotional awareness is primarily concerned with the identification and understanding of your own emotions. Developing both emotional awareness and emotional intelligence is crucial for overall emotional well-being and fostering healthy relationships with others.
How They Complement Each Other
Emotional awareness and emotional intelligence both play important roles in allowing you to better manage your feelings and comprehend the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others.
Emotional awareness refers to your ability to understand your own emotions so that they can better recognise how those emotions affect you and the people around you.
On the other hand, emotional intelligence is your technical ability, or skill in understanding emotions and psychological states such as beliefs, desires, motivations, intentions etc., which then allows us to respond appropriately.
Emotional awareness focuses on being aware of your own feelings first, before trying to empathise with someone else's perspective, and ultimately leads towards developing emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence further builds upon these qualities by helping you apply that knowledge of recognising your emotions into becoming more emotionally mature, where you are able not only monitor your own feelings, but also be more attuned with other’s needs within relationships, both romantic ones as well as platonic ones. Emotional intelligence also helps you manage external stimuli like stressors better.
Emotional Awareness FAQs
1. What is emotional awareness?
Emotional awareness is the ability to recognise, understand and manage your emotions, as well as those of others. It requires you to be mindful and in tune with your thoughts, feelings and mental state in order to effectively communicate with those around them.
2. How can I improve my emotional intelligence?
The best way to boost your own emotional intelligence is through training and practice. You can also engage in activities such as mindfulness or journaling that allow you to better understand yourself and connect more deeply with your emotions. Talking openly about feelings can make it easier for others who are struggling with similar issues feel comfortable reaching out for help when they need it most.
3. What are the benefits of being emotionally aware?
Being emotionally aware enables you to lead a happier and healthier life by allowing youself to process what you're feeling instead of suppressing it, or continuously avoiding difficult situations & conversations. This will result in improved relationships both at home and work. You'll develop greater control over your reactions, and are more likely to make appropriate responses whenever possible rather than simply lashing out impulsively, during uncertain moments, or times stress and unhappiness.
4. Is there a difference between being emotionally aware and self-aware?
Although terms are often used interchangeably - there is a difference between emotion awareness and self-awareness. Emotional awareness focuses on recognising, identifying understanding, managing and responding to other people's emotions. Self-awareness entails knowledge these things in yourself (e.g. your personality, strengths, motives, intentions and thought processes).