VAISHALI GILL
The first building block of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Self-awareness refers to our ability to understand our own emotions and how they affect us and others. It will be difficult to move on to other emotional competencies such as self-management, social awareness, or team leadership until we are aware of and understand our own emotions. Self-awareness involves being aware of different aspects of the self including traits, behaviours, and feelings. As you might imagine, there are many benefits to practicing self-awareness, it can make us more proactive, boost our acceptance, and encourage positive self-development. In others words it helps one to know what one is good at and choose a career they enjoy. Depending on others thoughts or beliefs in terms of what is good for us leads to personal and professional unhappiness. By knowing our strengths, weaknesses, likes and dislikes by ourselves - will help us know where we stand? Lack of self-awareness can lead to poor decisions, to an unrealistic notion of one’s competencies and to even career derailment. Types of Self-Awareness: Psychologists often break self-awareness down into two different types, either public or private. • Public Self-Awareness often emerges in situations when people are at the centre of attention, such as when giving a presentation or talking to a group of friends. • Private Self-Awareness happens when people become aware of some aspects of themselves, but only in a private way. Others are • Internal self-awareness which is about focusing on your inner values. • External self-awareness which deals with our feelings and behaviour with others. It’s the ability to look at others.