Self Awareness is having clear knowledge of your personality, drivers, thoughts, prejudices, strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, motivation, and even emotions. When you are truly self aware, you will find that you understand people better including how they ‘see’ you, how they perceive you, how you present yourself, your attitude and your responses to them in the moment that it matters
Self Awareness is a significant attribute of both Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence, two psychological theories that are helpful in understanding how we, and others, impact on the people around us. Being aware of the self will allow you to understand what may happen in relation to your thoughts and emotions about other people and events.
It is also important to understand that before you can become an effective mentor or communicator, it is essential that you understand yourself. The reason for this is threefold:
- We each come with the ‘baggage’ of values, morals, culture and social conditioning
- It is easy to react to others because of this ‘baggage’ if we don’t know what it is
- We can only appreciate what is truly impacting on the lives of others if we set our own prejudices aside
As a result it is only possible to work effectively if we know what outside influences are affecting us and what similar influences may affect the people we are working with. To have self awareness does not mean that we have no prejudices or baggage, simply that we know what it is so that we can identify it when it impacts on our relationships with others.
It can be helpful sometimes to note down somewhere what our own values are; what is morally acceptable or unacceptable to us; what life lessons we learnt from our parents, family and peers; and finally our own beliefs about the world around us and how it works.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence refers to an ability to recognise the meanings of the emotions we feel and their relationships to ourselves and others (triggers), and as a result of having this recognition, to the use reason and problem-solving to manage them. Emotional intelligence is involved in the capacity to perceive emotions, assimilate emotion-related feelings, understand the information of those emotions, and manage them.
Social Intelligence
To a degree, social intelligence is both contained by, and contains, emotional intelligence. The two are inextricably linked and it is almost impossible to be socially intelligent without being emotionally intelligent at the same time (and vice versa). Social intelligence though differs from emotional intelligence because it reflects more about how we interact with the world AND people around us, understanding the nuances of social communication, ie what it is appropriate to say or share in any given situation. Although the theory of social intelligence is applied to people, it can also be applied to businesses, as they too must have an understanding about the impact that they have on the social world around them.
Additional Mowgli Resources:
- Key resources for understanding Emotional Intelligence
- The Five Components of Emotional Intelligence and their role at work
- The Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire
- Tools for enhancing Self Awareness Description of and links to information on the Myers Briggs indicator assessments
- Have you got Social Intelligence?
- The power of social intelligence in a personal brand
- The role of self presentation in social intelligence
- What is synchrony?
- Apply social cognition to mentoring – cartoon
- Apply social cognition to business with habitat
- Exploring the role of empathy in mentoring
- Understanding the empathic civilisation
Additional External Resources:
- You can find lots of questionnaires to find out more about your personal strengths and emotions at Penn University’s Authentic Happiness website.
