SELF-AWARENESS STRATEGIES

imply put, to be self-aware is to know yourself as you really are. Initially, self-awareness can come across as a somewhat ambiguous concept. There is no nish line where someone is going to slap a medal on you and deem you self-aware. In addition, awareness of yourself is not just knowing that you prefer oranges over apples or telling people that you are a morning person instead of a night owl. Its deeper than that. Getting to know yourself inside and out is a continuous journey of peeling back the layers of the onion and becoming more and more comfortable with what is in the middlethe true essence of you. Your hard-wired emotional reactions to anything come before you even have a chance to respond. Since it isnt possible to leave your emotions out of the equation, managing yourself and your relationships means you rst need to be

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aware of the full range of your feelings, both positive and negative. When you dont take time out to notice and understand your emotions, they have a strange way of resurfacing when you least expect or want them to. Its their way of trying to bring something important to your attention. They will persist, and the damage will mount, until you take notice. Facing the truth about who you are can at times be unsettling. Getting in touch with your emotions and tendencies takes honesty and courage. Be patient and give yourself credit for even the smallest bits of forward momentum. As you start noticing things about yourself that you werent previously aware of (things you arent always going to like), you are progressing. The remainder of this chapter introduces you to 15 original strategies, which were designed to help you maximize your awareness of yourself to create positive changes in your life. The strategies are straightforward and packed full of insights and examples that will help your self-awareness grow. 1S R 1L
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SELF-AWARENESS STRATEGIES
1. Quit Treating Your Feelings as Good or Bad 2. Observe the Ripple Effect from Your Emotions 3. Lean into Your Discomfort 4. Feel Your Emotions Physically 5. Know Who and What Pushes Your Buttons 6. Watch Yourself Like a Hawk . . . 7. Keep a Journal about Your Emotions 8. Dont Be Fooled by a Bad Mood 9. Dont Be Fooled by a Good Mood, Either 10. Stop and Ask Yourself Why You Do the Things You Do 11. Visit Your Values 12. Check Yourself 13. Spot Your Emotions in Books, Movies and Music 14. Seek Feedback 15. Get to Know Yourself under Stress
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Quit Treating Your Feelings as Good or Bad

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Its human nature to want to create two simple and easy piles of emotions: the good ones and the bad ones. For instance, most people would automatically classify guilt as bad. You dont want to feel ityou might even beat yourself up about itand you do whatever you can to get rid of it. Likewise, we tend to let good emotions like excitement run wild. We pump ourselves up and feed off the energy. The downfall of attaching such labels to your emotions is that judging your emotions keeps you from really understanding what it is that you are feeling. When you allow yourself to sit with an emotion and become fully aware of it, you can understand what is causing Suspending it. Suspending judgment of emotions judgment of allows them to run their course and emotions allows them to run their vanish. Passing judgment on whether course and you should or shouldnt be feeling vanish. what you are feeling just heaps more

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emotions on top of the pile and prevents the original feeling from running its course. So, the next time you feel an emotion begin to erupt, take notice of it immediately. Refrain from putting it into the good or bad pile and remind yourself that the feeling is there to help you understand something important.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is a new book with a single purposeincreasing your EQ. Inside youll find: 66 proven strategies that show exactly what you can do right now to increase your EQ. Access to the new, online edition of the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal test, which has the following enhancements:

A new feedback report that pinpoints the strategies that will increase your EQ the most. The ability to test yourself twice to measure the gains made in your EQ.

1S copy for just Click here to get yourR 1L the book $19.95 a month before
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