Emotional Self Awareness, Show notes, episode 3

Today’s episode was the third broadcast in our fifteen part series on emotional intelligence. We’re reviewing all fifteen dimension of the EQ-i 2.0 model of EI by MHS. Emotional Self-Awareness is the third and final competency in the Self-Perception subscale.

Here are some notes and links from today’s show. Please join us in two weeks, on Friday August 28th at 9:30AM Pacific, for our next broadcast on Emotional Expression, as we kick off the next scale of Self-Expression. Need a reminder? You can subscribe to our EQ and You reminders.

Review the model of all 15 EI competencies.

“Five Big Discoveries About Personal Effectiveness,” David Rock, Psychology Today

Understanding the threat response, subconscious drivers of behaviour and executive functioning: SCARF (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) model, by David Rock.

Smart Tribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together, Christine Comaford, 2013

“SCARF® in 2012: updating the social neuroscience of collaborating with others” (PDF), Dr. David Rock and Christine Cox, Ph.D

List of feeling words (PDF), by the Center for Nonviolent Communication.

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Partial show notes

0:00 Introduction by David Cory, and a reminder to send in your stories and insights.
1:00 Kim: Let’s acknowledge the cultural context we’re talking about. I’m an older guy in Canada and we generally have not done well in terms of being aware of our emotions… I was raised in a shut-down and repress your emotions kind of culture, and theres a carry over…
3:00 Kim: This approach has health implications, but also it’s an empowerment issue, because it’s a culture that says simply that emotions are something that are happening to you and you have a very small number of ways to respond to that …
5:00 David: This relates to situational awareness of your emotional self-awareness, like for example, you wanted to speak up at a meeting about something someone said, and you regret it later because it was a critical team opportunity… we’re also taking about the connection between the head and the heart and a more generalized phenomenon that happens when people disconnect from their interests and then discover they’re doing something unfulfilling…
7:00 Kim: We’re talking about physiological responses with many gradations…
9:00 David: Yes, there’s an evolutionary reason for our emotions and other physiological responses, and we need to pay attention to them. David Rock has some interesting things to say about the neurological basis of emotion. At the most basic level, we’re talking about our facility about how we read our environment. We perceive the world around us through our physiological and biological body…
10:10 Kim: Yeah, we experience the external environment so we tune into our internal environment…
11:30 David: This raises the opportunity for learning, and for change …
12:20 David: We all have emotional baggage and we either lug it around or we process it. Processing requires awareness as a first step…
13:00 Kim: Yes, the first step to expression and the first step to getting your Emotional Operating System, is emotional self-awareness…
16:00 Kim: My emotional operating system is changing and so the more we can let go of the idea that we’re a finished product the better. We’re a work in progress…
16:30 David: It’s helpful to develop a vocabulary for the varieties of emotions. Let’s drop the “good and bad” …
19:00 Kim: I’m going to throw in a little humour here…
23:00 Kim: I have an openness and curiosity about myself…
24:45 David: Yes, and being emotionally unaware, or cut off, is a relationship killer. It can choke the lifeblood out of a relationship…we need to get comfortable with discomfort… Let’s get in tune with what annoys us, what pleases us… disfunction comes from being out of touch with our emotional landscape…
27:00 Kim: If we constrict, instead of being open, and if we aren’t curious about ourselves, then we sort of do a Bill Murray Groundhog Day. We’ll see the same situations arising in our lives. I like to have Bill Murray’s face in front of mind… being open and curious about my emotional landscape is vulnerable but it’s freeing…
28:00 David: How do we stay in tune and in touch?
28:40 Kim: One idea is to reflect back on moments in your day, and over time, try to make these reflections more nuanced…
29:45 David: Yeah, and if you haven’t seen one, find a list of emotions online, print out a list of emotions, and review them and check in with them. You can also try journalling…
30:30 David and Kim: Thanks everyone, take care, and get in touch …

Send your stories for Episode 4, Emotional Expression, or Episode 5, Assertiveness, to:

• david [at] eitrainingcompany [dot] com, or
• kim [at] eitrainingcompany [dot] com

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