Happy Life Story
Happy Life Story
2. Why Self Awareness is Critical to your Happiness
Why Self Awareness is Critical to your Happiness
Today we are talking about Emotional Intelligence. A very big topic.
What is emotional intelligence? It is the ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control and use emotions to communicate with and to relate to others effectively and constructively.
But why are we talking about this?
There's 5 different components that make up the broader definition.
In this episode we will start with the first component: Self Awareness. What it is and why it is critical to your happiness.
Lani: Caregiving Philosophy
Melissa: Wandering Missy - Start Living the Life You Want. How to find Joy + Purpose in your Life.
Why Self Awareness is Critical to your Happiness
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
emotional intelligence, self awareness, emotions, thinker, thought, self regulation, talking, judge, aware, understand, quiz, feeling, unhappy, big picture overview, learned, never ending, interpret, constructively, change, other people's emotions
SPEAKERS
Melissa, Lani
Melissa 00:04
Welcome to Happy Life Story. I'm Melissa.
Lani 00:08
And I'm Lani. We're discussing how to create your better life story. So today we are talking about emotional intelligence. What does that mean to you?
Melissa 00:12
Oh, that's a big, big topic. That's a big, important topic.
Lani 00:31
I don't even know that most people have even heard of it.
Melissa 00:35
No. I've heard of it over maybe the past couple of years. I've heard the two words emotional intelligence thrown around. So obviously it's literal. It is the ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate control and use emotions to communicate with and to relate to others effectively and constructively. But why are we talking about this?
Lani 01:04
I think most people don't deal with people constructively nowadays.
Melissa 01:08
Exactly, that and I'll just bring up one more definition to kind of put it out there for those like myself that are newer to the the term emotional intelligence. There's five different components that kind of make up the broader definition. One is self awareness, recognize what you're feeling, and also understanding how your emotions and actions can affect others. Big topic, within the topic. Two, self regulation, three motivation, four empathy, and number five, social
skills.
Lani 01:50
Let's dig into it. My super big picture overview of emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and the ability to try to understand and manage those of others, other people's emotions.
Melissa 02:10
Great way of summarizing.
Lani 02:12
The good part is that emotional intelligence, unlike regular IQ, EQ can be learned and grow over time. You can keep getting more and more and more.
Melissa 02:47
Right. It's not like something you're born with and then that's it. It's not like there's a finite amount of it that you have. You can work on it.
Lani 02:55
Totally. I've been working on it for so long. And, I'm not even close to the end!
Melissa 03:04
When you really dive in, it's something that's obviously a never ending personal evolution because there's always something to be learned.
Lani 03:13
It's so fun too. Let's go on to the first one you were talking about, self awareness. Recognizing and understanding your own thoughts and emotions. That's a biggie.
Melissa 03:25
That is really a biggie. And, I think if you had to isolate and say one thing is more important than any of the others, if you don't start with self awareness, you're not going to get very far.
Lani 03:25
Right! I think that's the whole thing.
Melissa 03:47
If you can't interpret how you're speaking and interacting, and your thoughts and what you're putting out there, then that's definitely the starting point for you - becoming self aware.
Lani 03:59
Do you think you're more a thinker or a feeler? I think some people are more thinkers, in their minds, and some people are more feeling people.
Melissa 04:09
I think I'm more of a thinker, but then I can be so reactionary. Not to jump around on this, but I definitely plan on sharing a link to a quiz. You can start really diving into seeing whether you're a thinker. I think I'm a combination of both. It's like you said some people maybe just one or just the other, but when you read some of the questions you can kind of figure out where you are in the realm of emotional intelligence. I was kind of surprised where I was. I would react to some things versus think it through. So your question? I'm not sure, I might be a 50/50 mix.
Lani 04:48
Oh, that's interesting. I never thought about that. I always thought I was just a thinker,
definitely not a feeler, didn't care about emotions. Who cares about that? That's stupid. Now that I know emotions cause our actions, they're so, so, so important.
Melissa 05:18
My husband calls me Stoneheart. I tend to really not deal with emotions, I thought. But then when I thought about answering some of these questions on the quiz that I took, I could think back to examples like, criticism. If I do something, and somebody doesn't like the way that I did it, or I'm afraid of being maybe judged, then I'm like, ooh. So immediately I get, I don't even know the right adjective or feeling to use, but very reactionary. That's completely an emotion. And I'm not thinking that through clearly. Because if I was, I wouldn't have this big emotional reaction.
Lani 06:05
I think a lot of times those initial super big emotional reactions are just what's programmed into our mind from our past already. You can't help that.
Melissa 06:18
Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. I think of why I went to photo school. Why did I do that when I was living with a photographer that teaches photography? I could have learned from my husband, but I couldn't stand the idea of him telling me what do or to judge me or criticize me or whatever. So I went to school outside, back to college at 45, because I couldn't stand to be under a microscope. And that's when I realized the self awareness. I didn't even think about it before.
Lani 06:57
Now you realize it. So that's really what self awareness is. I think the feelings kind of come up. And then you look back at them and say, Why am I feeling that way? Or, what am I thinking?
Melissa 07:13
And then to your point, that comes from something like childhood or a teacher or a parent or somebody who probably reprimanded me in front of the class. Who knows, I don't have an example to think back to but I'm sure it stemmed from some somewhere.
Lani 07:30
I know, let's blame our parents! No, just kidding.
Melissa 07:43
Self awareness, I think, is number one for a reason.
Lani 07:47
Yes, it's important to know your own strengths and weaknesses by looking at yourself. I think a lot of people don't want to actually be self aware, because they judge themselves so much. And they judge themselves so harshly. They actually don't want to be aware. They want to ignore everything.
Melissa 08:08
If we all could work on one thing it's self awareness. Because when you think of anything from how to become happier to helping women take that chance and to understand your strengths or try to understand why you're not taking chances or why you don't want to really make change or why you keep going through the treadmill of rinse and repeat the same life over and over that you're unhappy with it really comes down to being self aware. If you don't want to take a look at everything, then clearly nothing will ever change.
Lani 08:49
Right. You have to take a look at what's bad to figure out what's wrong. That's what people don't want to look at. They think I'm going to ignore the bad stuff that I did. But that makes you repeat it because you're not looking at what you can change
Melissa 09:08
Exactly. And it's just a repetitive cycle. And you wonder why nothing gets better and nothing changes or you're still unhappy or whatever. Pretty much if you don't want to take a hard look at yourself, then you're not going to change anything.
Lani 09:27
Isn't that the truth? Well, I guess we'll talk about self regulation next time.
Melissa 09:35
Excellent.
