SELF AWARENESS
Self - Awareness is at the core of Emotional Intelligence (EQ). The first step in developing your EQ starts with increasing your self awareness and insight. You can increase your Emotional Intelligence simply by increasing your self - awareness. If you are not aware of something about yourself that is counterproductive you cannot change it. If you are not aware of something about yourself that is productive, you cannot harness it.
Remember the Johari Window? Do you agree with this statement?
Anything that is in your unaware area controls you.
The principle of awareness was powerfully illustrated through a study done by psychologists of overweight people. They divided them into two groups. The first group was put on a diet worked out by a dietician. The second group were told that they could eat whatever they liked, as long as they recorded everything they ate and posted it on their fridge door. Amazingly the second group lost even more weight than the group that was on a controlled diet. Simply becoming more aware of their eating behavior (e.g. realising that they were eating 10 sandwiches and drinking 20 spoons of sugar a dayenabled them to take control of their behavior. While their eating habits were outside of their awareness, they were controlled by them. When they became aware of their eating habits, they were empowered to take charge and control them.
Activity 3
Click on the link below, read the article and then answer the questions that follow:
Activity 4
Self Awareness and Learning
In the introduction we briefly discussed the four stages of learning:
Unconscious Incompetence
As an unconscious incompetent, you do not know what you do not know. In other words you are not aware that you are incompetent in a particular area. It is out of your awareness and in your unaware area. In this state you are not as competent as you think you are or could be with something and probably less competent than other more competent people in this particular area.
How does this apply to EQ? Nadine's profile may show that she is highly confident. If she is in a state unconscious incompetence she may only be aware of the positive aspects of her self - confidence, but blissfully unaware that she may also be over - confident and lack vigilance. As a leader she may assume that her team is capable of certain things because of her over - confidence, when in fact they may need her coaching and guidance to enable them to do what she needs from them. Or she may commit the business to a particular project, unaware of the threats and challenges it poses. With unconscious incompetence in an EQ context, the things we don't know we don't know about ourselves will be our masters - we cannot change what we don't know we need to change and this unawareness has the potential to derail us.
Conscious Incompetence
As a conscious incompetent, you realize that you are not as effective as perhaps you thought you were or thought you could be. The shift to this state from being unconsciously incompetent can be emotionally destabilizing and upset our inner equilibrium for example when the over - confident leader discovers that her team is failing or that the project she committed to is more than her team is able to cope with.
Within an EQ context, we often employ defence mechanisms like denial, excuses or projecting blame onto others to restore our emotional equilibrium. This only results in a perpetuation of our old behavior. In MY EQ strong emphasis is placed on increasing self awareness so as to bring what we don't know we don't know about ourselves into awareness. This can potentially be a challenging time in your development which takes you well out of your comfort zone. However, it is ultimately empowering as someone like Nadine will avoid the pain of failure resulting from her over - confidence as she becomes more aware of it and learns strategies to offset this tendency.
Conscious Competence
Becoming consciously competent often takes time, as one steadily learns more about yourself and how your personality works both for and against you. This process is also likely to go in fits and starts as one learns, forgets, plateaus and starts anew.
A lot of care has been taken in ensuring that MY EQ provides you with tools and processes that will enable you to learn new behaviors. These tools and processes are discussed in detail in Modules 2 and 3. When you are in the conscious competency stage of developing your EQ you should accept the fact that the new behaviors you are learning will require conscious effort and will not feel natural. Persistence and implementation of our development recommendation will however help you to get to the next stage.
In Nadine's case she will need to learn more of what Edward De Bono calls Black Hat thinking. Black Hat thinking involves critically evaluating something, playing devil's advocate and understanding why it won't work. Initially she will have to consciously work hard it because the natural pull of her personality (we like to call it gravitational pull of self) is towards optimism and thinking why things will work.
Unconscious Competence
Over time and with repeated practice, the behaviors that you are consciously developing in the previous stage become internalized and automated. When you reach this stage you no longer have to think about utilizing new behaviors.
In Nadine's case, consciously practicing Black Hat thinking over time will result in this become an internalized behavior and when dealing with situations she will be able to naturally engage in this type of thinking.
Personal Mastery
If Nadine views her personal development as a lifelong task and repeats the processes provided by MY EQ then she creates the potential to achieve personal mastery, where she takes her ability to both understand why things can and can't work to increasingly higher levels.
Personal Leadership Brand
In the introduction we briefly touched on personal leadership brand. This is an important concept for you as a leader to understand.
Norm Smallwood states:
A leadership brand conveys your identity and distinctiveness as a leader.
You have a leadership brand whether you are aware of it or not. A significant part of your leadership brand is created by how you behave as a leader. It is one thing to have a statement about what your leadership brand is, but ultimately your leadership brand will be defined by your actions.
Part of Nadine's stated personal leadership brand may be that she always delivers to customers on - time. However, the gravitational pull of self - her over - confidence - can quite easily sabotage her stated leadership brand as she struggles to deliver to customers because she under - estimates tasks due to her over - confidence. Her actual leadership brand - how other's perceive her - may in fact therefore be that Nadine over - promises but under - delivers.
MY EQ, by taking you on the journey of really getting to know yourself and by providing you with tools to increase your emotionally intelligent behaviors and over - time achieving personal mastery, therefore creates the opportunity for you to consciously improve and develop an authentic personal leadership brand, where your actions match up with your words.
Activity 5
Activity 6
Ken is the Logistics Manager for a large hospital. He achieved an extremely high score on the “Dominance” scale. Some of the counter-productive behaviours associated with this trait are a tendency to walk over people, want things done your way, think you are always right, and to be a poor listener. Alan’s subordinates feel demotivated because he does not take their views into account. Alan is also part of the hospital’s Senior Management team. The HR Manager has confidentially been informed by two key members of Senior Management that they are considering resigning because of Alan’s tendency to walk over everyone and dominate discussions in the Management team.
Next Page 
Brain Plasticity