Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to recognize and manage emotions that come from one’s own circumstances or that of others. It comprises three skills including awareness of our emotions, the capacity to connect emotions as well as relate them to responsibilities such as discernment, and solving problems. It also entails the capacity to manage one’s emotional expressions, which includes controlling one’s emerging emotions and understanding other people’s situations and helping them get over them by calming them down. It involves using emotional information to guide thinking and behavior. Performance is an aspect that heavily depends on emotional intelligence, be it in school or the workplace. Performance starts from emotional awareness of the self, which is the capacity to fathom one’s emotional interests and the impact on performance. One, therefore, knows what he/she feels as well as why such emotions emerge. In the process, people know how their emotions help or hurt their actions (Goleman 2017). Emotional self-awareness helps one have a sense of his/her strengths and limitations, and offers one element of clarity on the values as well as the purpose such that one makes better decisions.
Self-awareness of the emotions does not come from a simple scenario that ends instantly, rather, is a continuous process. The continual process offers one-moment by-moment opportunities to exercise self-awareness. Each moment offers an opportunity to be aware of the self or not. Enhancing one’s emotional self-awareness helps in achieving higher emotional intelligence because this will help in identifying emotions, being aware of them, and managing the emotions; this will eventually help in understanding the emotions of other people and what they experience and empathize with them (Goleman, 2017).
References
Goleman, D. (2017, March 12). Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence. Retrieved December 1, 2018, from https://www.change-management-coach.com/self-awareness.html