Emotional Intelligence: A Self-Awareness Exercise

According to experts, one key to Emotional Intelligence is Self-Awareness.

If you wonder how good your self-awareness is, here's a quick exercise you can try:

1. Grab a pen or pencil
2. Grab a sheet of paper
3. Set a timer for 60 seconds
4. Are you ready?
5. Write down all the emotions that you've felt in the past 10 days.
6. DING! Pencil down...
7. Count how many words you wrote down.

I do this exercise with a lot of groups around the world and the results are quite consistent.

• 0-5 words = You might have some work to do in the area of self-awareness
• 6-10 words = Average. You're pretty self-aware.
• 11 or more = You're very self-aware. And probably female. No kidding, 80% of the time, in my high-tech environment, it's a woman that scores 11 or more.

The first time I did this exercise, I came up with four words - happy, happier, bored, excited.

Hopefully, you did better.

There are three reasons why you (and I) might score poorly.

1. The Spock Principle - You're a robot - an unfeeling shell of a human being. Let's pretend that's not it.
2. The Caveman Principle - You have emotions, but you don't have an emotional vocabulary with which to capture those emotions. You say happy instead of gleeful, delighted, jazzed, or jaunty.
   Like Eskimos have many words for snow, some people have 25 words for disappointed.
   Here's a list of a 130+ word emotional vocabulary. Now you don't have an excuse.
   
3. The Shark Principle - If a shark stops swimming, it dies. As a result, I suppose sharks don't spend a lot of time in reflection. The same is true for many people.
   I don't 'check-in' (I think that's the phrase emotionally intelligent people would use) with myself very often and ask, "What am I feeling?"
   I just keep moving...

Does it matter?

Well, it's hard to manage people or sell to people if you cannot identify the emotion they are experiencing.

Fortunately, in the the high-tech environment I work in, my customers and employees are as emotionally illiterate as I am (I'm joking!!).

Still, there have been a few times in my career where employees didn't bring their problems to me.
When I asked why, they responded, "You wouldn't understand. You never have problems."

Building that bridge of empathy is reason enough for me to continue working on this.

How about you?