Copyright (c) 2009 Maurine Patten

Many of you are familiar with Emotional Intelligence. According to Daniel Goleman’s model, Self-Awareness is one of two domains in the area of Personal Competence. The second one is Self-Management which is not covered in this article.

You might think of Self-Awareness as setting the stage for your life. For that reason, it as an essential starting place from which you build the other important aspects of your life.

There are three areas in the Self-Awareness domain of Emotional Intelligence:

- Emotional Self-Awareness.

- Accurate Self-Assessment.

- Self-Confidence.

Emotional Self-Awareness is the ability to recognize your emotions and their effects. It has been said that there is no thinking without feeling and vice versa. Although we all have blind spots where we do not recognize our feelings, the more aware we are of what we are experiencing, the more learning is possible.

Emotions activate and chemically stimulate the brain. They are a critical source of information for learning and memory. Individuals who are high in emotional awareness:

- Know what they are feeling and why.

- Understand the connection between their feelings and what they think, say and do.

- Know how their feelings directly affect performance.

- Are aware of their values and goals.

Accurate Self-Assessment is the ability to know your inner resources, abilities and limits. We can have blind spots about our strengths and limitations, especially during times of stress when we tend to go on “automatic pilot.” Blind spots, among other things, can cause us to:

- Set unrealistic goals.

- Push others too hard.

- Need to seem perfect.

Individuals who are high in accurate self-assessment:

- Are aware of strengths and limitations.

- Learn more from experience.

- Are reflective and have a sense of humor.

- Are open to constructive feedback and self-development.

Self-Confidence is the ability to have a sense of your self-worth and accurately know your strengths. When self-confidence is appropriately high, you believe in what you can do with the skills you have. Anxiety levels tend to be low. Individuals who are self-confident:

- Welcome difficult assignments and challenges.

- Are self-assured.

- Can voice unpopular views.

- Are decisive and resilient.

Emotional intelligence is learned through experience, reflection and modeling over time. Time must be set aside with someone you trust and respect that will allow you to experiment with and practice new behaviors, thoughts and feelings to the point of mastery. The environment needs to be supportive, emotionally engaging and offer time for practice.

If you are interested in increasing your Self-Awareness, the following steps are necessary:

1. Believe self-improvement is important.

2. Know who you want to be.

3. Know your strengths and limitations as well as your values.

4. Seek out feedback – how you are perceived by others to determine the gap between who you want to be and who you are presently.

5. Work with a supportive, encouraging person you trust (a coach is ideal) who can guide and hold you accountable as you experiment with new thoughts, feelings and behavior in order to build on your strengths.

6. Practice these new behaviors over time until your ideal self is realized.

Increasing the three areas of Self-Awareness is worth the effort. It establishes the foundation upon which to build relationships and handle the challenges in your personal and professional life.

Maurine Patten, EdD. CMC – The Self-Confidence Sage has been empowering professionals to work collaboratively, increase motivation, and improve performance for the past 8 years using the latest research in neuroscience. Visit Maurine at: http://www.pattencoaching.com/services for details, client testimonials, and her free report “How to Be Resilient in Today’s World.” Mail to: mdpcoach@pattencoaching.com

Need help in this area? Today there is a growing body of science in the field of Emotional Intelligence (EI), indicating that proper understanding and use of emotions can help us be more effective workers and better communicators. CRM Learning’s video program, Emotional Intelligence, teaches that organizations that know this, and apply EI principles, come out ahead in employee morale, creativity, energy and productivity.

Organizations have been through a lot these past few years.  A certain amount of fatigue/disenchantment/frustration is normal. BUT, left unaddressed, these things can multiply and create a widespread epidemic of negativity.  The Negativity Self-Evaluation tool below can help assess where attitudes might be slipping towards the negative.  The debriefing information that follows provides steps for formulating an Attitude Adjustment Action Plan.

Negativity Self-Evaluation

Where do you rate on the negativity scale? Score yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 for each question, and try to be honest with your answers.

   1                     2                        3                           4                          5
Never             Seldom             Sometimes                 Often                    Always
                                                                                                                                                                                                   

1. Do you come into your workplace feeling enthusiastic and confident?                 _____
2. Do you focus on your goals even when you’re having a bad day?                        _____
3. Do you look for positive solutions when things don’t go your way at work?          _____
4. Do you set a good example for co-workers?                                                     _____
5. Do you communicate well with your colleagues?                                               _____
6. Do co-workers feel they can come to you for help?                                            _____
7. Are you satisfied with the quality of work you do?                                              _____
8. Do you find healthy ways to relieve stress?                                                       _____
9. Do you collaborate with others to meet the team’s and your goals?                     _____
10. Are you open to changes in your routine or environment?                                  _____
                                                                                                                Total  _____

Scoring
If your total is under 25, you are highly susceptible to negativity and may be affecting others with your attitude.  Continue to evaluate your performance on the job.  If you can’t break the pattern of negativity, ask for outside help from a supervisor, a friend or Human Resources.

If your total is between 25-35, you’re on the borderline; you can fall victim to negativity, particularly during stressful times.  When feeling pressured, give yourself a negativity “spot check”.  Ask yourself if your work is up to par, if you are snapping easily, or whether your co-workers are acting differently towards you.  These could all be signs that you need to take a deep breath and re-evaluate your attitude.

If your total is over 35, you probably don’t succumb to negativity often.  But, you may not be completely immune to it.  Think about how you interact with colleagues, especially when you’re stressed. People probably look to you as a model for positive behavior, so make sure stress doesn’t get the best of you.  And, if you see others inciting a climate of negativity, try to help the person(s) find a positive solution or encourage them to seek assistance.

Debrief – The Attitude Adjustment Plan
Here are several good steps to take whenever you feel yourself becoming negative. (If you’re a manager or co-worker who needs to point out negativity in another person, see the special Note at the bottom.)

Take responsibility for your attitude and acknowledge the difficulties your negativity is causing.
Without an honest acceptance of the responsibility for and impact of your attitude, there is no motivation to change.  

Practice “responding” rather than “reacting” to situations.
A reaction is often an instinctive, unproductive way of dealing with difficulties (negative people often “react” by blaming others for problems without seeing the part they’ve played in creating the problem).  On the other hand, a response requires thoughtful consideration of:
      - how can I take control of the situation vs. being a victim of the situation?
      - what productive strategies and actions can I take?

Attempt to identify underlying causes for the negative attitude.
Try to uncover some of the reasons behind what you’re feeling. Is there a higher amount of stress than usual in the workplace?  Are there unresolved issues with co-workers?  Have you been feeling undervalued or overworked? Could family problems, debt, or illness be a factor? 

Address the situations that cause stress.
Once you see what is causing the problem, try to find a workable solution and look for ways to prevent similar situations in the future. If need be, talk it over with another person.  It’s amazing how an outside perspective can shed light on things.  If there are conflicts you don’t feel comfortable handling on your own, ask a supervisor or HR person for assistance.

Note:  If you are in a position of pointing out another person’s attitude problem, make sure you do these things in addition to suggesting the actions listed above:
     - discuss the problem in private
     - begin by giving positive feedback
     - handle emotionally charged subjects with sensitivity
     - focus on performance, not personality

Based on material in the Leader’s Guide for The Attitude Virus: Curing Negativity in the Workplace.
© CRM Learning.

Need help in this area? Bad attitudes in the workplace can spread like a virus and infect everyone in the whole organization. With CRM’s The Attitude Virus program, help employees learn to spot unproductive attitudes in themselves and others, and counteract them with positive behavior.

1. When learning or memorizing anything, it helps to break the information down into small, basic units. Our short term memory retains a relatively small amount at a time, so a large amount of information or a lengthy list is best broken down. 

For instance, think about the way children learn the alphabet…the letters in the alphabet song are broken down into chunks of no more than one to four letters: (ab-cd) (ef-g) (hi-jk) (lmno-p) (qrs) (tuv) (w-x-y-z).

The same technique could be applied to something you want to memorize at work, such as the organization’s mission statement.

So, if this were your mission statement:
We are dedicated to providing insurance products that offer quality protection with value pricing. We wish to establish a successful partnership with clients, staff members, and insurance companies that respect the interests and goals of each party.

You may want to break it down into these small units:
• dedicated to providing insurance products
• offer quality protection with value pricing
• establish successful partnerships
• clients, staff members and insurance companies
• respect the interests and goals of each party

2. Create some kind of internal organization. It is much easier to remember something that is organized and has meaningful structure than something that is random or abstract. One way to organize is to look for a natural hierarchy in the material to be learned.  Another way to organize would be to make up a story or narrative chain to relate events to one another.

Sample:
If your license plate number is:  2DN1231
• You could assign the word “To” to the number 2
• You could see DN as an abbreviation of the name “Don” (especially if you have a friend or relative named Don)
• And, you could see “1231” as December 31st or New Year’s Eve.

Your narrative could then be:  I’ll Give a Ride To Don on New Year’s Eve

3. Find some kind of external organization. Some relationship must be found between the new information you are trying to retain and information which has already been learned so that one fits the others.

Example:
You are about to do a brief presentation that will encompass:
• An introduction
• A topic overview (e.g. “Lead Generation: Well Worth The Time It Takes ”)
• Three different topic points (for example):
   -  Generating Leads through Social Networking
   -  Generating Leads through Advertising
   -  Generating Leads through Cold Calling
• Closing statements

You could think of the different elements of your presentation as different locations within your house.
• the front door = your introduction or opening remarks
• the entry (from which point you can see a number of rooms) = your overview
• the living room (where crowds gather) = social networking
• the family room (where the TV is located) = advertising
• the office (where you often make business calls) = cold calling
• the back door = your closing statements

Recall is accomplished by visualizing the location and discovering the speech element associated with that location.      

Taken in part from the Leader’s Guide for the classic program “Memory” © 1980 CRM Learning, L.P.

Training Resource: Speaking Effectively… to 1 or 1000. Memory plays a big role when delivering a speech or presentation. This entertaining and effective program gives practical advice on how to deliver a compelling message to a group of any size.