What Is Self-Awareness? Understanding the First Dimension of EQ
Key Takeaways
- Self-awareness is the first dimension of emotional intelligence (EQ) and provides a foundation for developing other EQ skills.
- Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, and drives.
- In the workplace, self-awareness can improve decision-making, communication, relationships, and leadership.
- Low self-awareness can show up as emotional disconnect, hasty decision-making, or a lack of empathy for others.
- TTI’s EQ assessment measures five dimensions of emotional intelligence to help individuals better understand and develop their emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is a complex subject that takes time to understand fully. TTI’s EQ assessment breaks down EQ into five pillars. Let’s explore the first dimension in depth!
What Is EQ?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power of acumen of emotions to facilitate higher levels of collaboration and productivity.
What Are the 5 Dimensions of EQ?
The five dimensions of EQ are Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Social Awareness, Social Regulation, and Motivation. Every one of these factors is crucial for overall understanding, so let’s start at the beginning and take a look at self-awareness.
What Is Self-Awareness?
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, and drives.
There’s a reason why self-awareness is the first factor of EQ! It’s a foundational skill that the other factors build on; without it, it’s very difficult to understand and regulate one’s behavior.
People who have mastered EQ have the self-awareness to observe the linkage between their thoughts and their feelings. Thoughts, in the form of attitudes, beliefs, and expectations, create the context for the evaluation of our experience, and self-awareness lets us accurately acknowledge that context.
In other words, self-awareness helps you recognize what you are feeling, understand why you may be feeling it, and consider how those emotions can influence your behavior.
Why Is Self-Awareness Important in the Workplace?
Self-awareness is crucial for your understanding of yourself, but also for others’ understanding of you.
If you reveal poor self-awareness through an inaccurate assessment of your performance, skewing positive or negative, you will demonstrate a gap in your judgment. That can impact the decision-making of others around you. If your peers see you talking yourself up without the skills to support that self-hype, they might lose trust in your capabilities. Just as important, if you are unaware of your actual skill level and are constantly disparaging yourself, you’re going to become an easy target for those looking to take advantage.
Self-awareness lets you temper those impulses either way and exhibit a calm and collected presence in your workplace. Highly self-aware individuals are able to understand what they are feeling moment by moment, which makes it possible for them to be aware of how emotion is affecting them before they take action.
This awareness can be particularly valuable in situations that require communication, collaboration, leadership, or difficult decision-making. Recognizing your emotional response before acting gives you an opportunity to consider how your response may affect the people around you.
Our self-awareness can grow with our experiences, and grows relative to the intensity level of those experiences— negative experiences develop awareness more than positive experiences.
What Does Low Self-Awareness Look Like?
Low self-awareness is easy to spot in others, but can be difficult to understand yourself. If you’re unsure of your current self-awareness, you’re not alone; according to HBR, 95% of people think they are self-aware, but only 10 to 15% actually are.
Low self-awareness can look like:
1. A Disconnect With Emotions
Do you struggle with articulating your feelings? Do negative emotions like frustration or sadness seemingly affect you out of nowhere? If you aren’t paying attention to your internal emotional cues, you’re going to be constantly and unpleasantly surprised by how you come off to others and how you’re feeling, especially under pressure.
Recognizing emotional cues can help you identify patterns in your reactions. Over time, this awareness can make it easier to understand what situations trigger certain responses and how those responses influence your behavior.
2. Hasty Decision Making
If you’re out of touch with your emotions, you might feel compelled to respond quickly in all circumstances, without taking time to reflect adequately. Some situations do need a rapid response, but often, taking a moment to pause and fully consider the emotions involved in the situation and the effect your actions will have on others.
Self-awareness does not mean avoiding emotion when making decisions. Instead, it can help you recognize when emotions are influencing your judgment so you can make more intentional choices.
3. Lack of Empathy for Others
Forbes shared that 96% of employees believe showing empathy is an important way to advance employee retention, and employees are nearly unanimous in agreeing on the importance of empathy—yet 92% feel empathy remains undervalued.
Expanding your empathy will help you become a better leader and improve your understanding of others as well as your understanding of yourself.
How Can You Improve Self-Awareness?
Self-awareness is not a fixed trait. It can develop as you gain new experiences and become more intentional about recognizing your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
A few ways to build self-awareness include:
- Reflect on your emotional responses. Consider what you were feeling before, during, and after challenging situations.
- Look for patterns. Pay attention to situations that consistently influence your mood or behavior.
- Ask for feedback. Other people may notice behaviors or reactions that you do not recognize in yourself.
- Pause before responding. Taking a moment to identify your emotions can help you choose a more intentional response.
- Use an EQ assessment. A validated assessment can provide additional insight into your emotional intelligence and areas for development.
Understanding your current level of self-awareness is a useful starting point for developing the other dimensions of EQ, including self-regulation, social awareness, social regulation, and motivation.
What’s Your Next Step With EQ?
Understanding and implementing EQ can be complicated; the good news is that you’re already on the path to improving your self-awareness just by reading this article. If you want to increase your understanding of EQ, TTI can help!
Take an EQ assessment now! Contact us here!.