Emotional Awareness

Posted by Stonewolf on 15.03.2025, 12:37 112 0

Emotional intelligence, at the very least, enables you to be aware of other people's emotions. This means you are able to correctly identify the range of emotions that they are feeling. This is what makes other people's emotions very tricky because we're not confronted or faced with black and white situations.

When you look at somebody, you can't just say that that person's angry. Usually, the person has a range of emotions. Maybe you're looking at somebody, and they're feeling apprehensive, a little fearful, and quite shocked. Other people would have a different mix of emotions.

People who have high emotional intelligence don't gloss over or dismiss these secondary or tertiary emotions. Correct emotional identification often boils down to getting a clear understanding of the mix of emotions somebody is feeling.

It's so much easier and simpler to just say that a person is shocked and call it a day. Unfortunately, you're not really fully understanding that person if you don't bother to look at other emotions that may be at play.

Another key component of emotional awareness is your own ability to be emotionally honest with yourself. In other words, you have to be able to read your own emotions, and this has to be a complete and honest objective assessment.

In other words, you can't just assume that since you're subjectively feeling a certain way, then that is the absolute truth. On a purely subjective basis, that is absolutely correct. After all, if you're feeling angry or upset, you have every right to feel that way. You obviously should know yourself enough to clearly label what you're feeling at any given time.

The problem here is, your emotions don't exist in a vacuum. Other people looking in from the outside must be able to clearly read you as well. There's a problem when there's a disconnect between the objective reading of your emotions and your own labeling of your emotions. It's not unusual for people to feel really angry, but other people would think that they're just disappointed, let down or inconvenienced. Eventually, this disconnect can actually cause serious problems.

Finally, increased emotional awareness leads to the ability to function without emotional denial. In other words, when you feel some strong emotion, you can easily own up to it. You're not making excuses for it, nor are you trying to pass it off as something else.

Emotional Understanding

In addition to understanding other people's emotions as well as your own emotions and clearly identifying them, emotional intelligence also involves deep emotional analysis.

When somebody feels emotionally upset, it is not just something that they feel at a given point in time and in a certain place. It has an impact. It can tie back to something that happened before, or it can cause consequences that will resonate in the future.

People with high EI understand this. This is why they are just as concerned about future impact and consequences as they are with root causes of why people feel the way they do. This analysis also applies to their own emotional states.