“There is only one corner of the universe that you can be certain of improving: and that is your own self.” ~ Aldous Huxley

When we think about self-awareness, what are the things you need to be aware of to become more ‘self-aware’?

Be aware of the following things and the ways in which they impact on what you do and contribute to your map of the world:

• Goals, immediate and long-term
• Beliefs, about ourselves and others
• Values, those things you hold dear
• Drivers that effect how you work
• Rules, that you live by, the shoulds, musts and oughts
• Self-talk, the inner voice that tells us we can or cannot do something

Internal Dimensions.  
Humans are very complex and there are so many things going on on the inside at the same time.  You will find that one thing is linked to another. Here are a few examples of the things going on the inside: 
• Self-talk – Things that you say to yourself for example…I’m not good at handling conflict
• Beliefs – what do you belief about yourself and others. This may not be at the conscious level and unless you dig a little deeper it may not be obvious.
• Emotions – are you aware of your own emotions and are you in control or are they controlling you? Are you aware of your own and others
• Hot buttons – are there things that trigger behaviour, emotions, are you predictable?
• Fears and anxieties – What is your greatest fear? Does it make you anxious?
• Judgments – do you have preconceived ideas about people and situations?
• Self-confidence - 
• Driver behaviour – what makes you do what you do?
• Rules – As a … I must … I should … I ought …

External Dimensions
• Personal style – this is how you do things in your own unique way that people know and notice
• Skills – externally what are you known for 
• Physical presence – what impact do you have when you enter a room?
• Impact on others – what do other people feel after spending time with you?
• Energy levels – are you full of enthusiasm or not and how does this affect those you interact with… 
• Non-verbal behaviour, statitics show that 70% of communication is non-verbal which goes to show the importance of emotional intelligence.
Ask yourself – what your body language or actions telling the person you are dealing with

How can you begin to identify the filters (hot buttons) that trigger your emotions and use this information positively to change events and achieve a more positive outcome?

There are 3 ways in which you can identify your emotional responses:
• 1. Tuning into your senses
• 2. Getting in touch with your feelings
• 3. Knowing your goal

The Map

The Map Is Not The Territory (Alfred Korzybski, Science & Sanity, 1933)
You must realise that people act from their map as opposed to reality.  
Different maps of the same reality are of equal value, depending on context.  
Whilst you may not be able to open someone else’s map, once you recognise your map, you open up infinite possibilities of seeing the world in new ways.

Gauging The Mood By Hearing
There is a big difference between listening and hearing!  It is possible to find yourself in conversation with someone and then you realise you don’t know what they just said even though you’ve been listening. 

Gauging the mood - Seeing
This is very practical and you can try when you are next in a meeting to assess the mood of the group by simply relying on sensory information – what you see and hear.

What does 'tuning into your senses' mean?  It means paying attention to what you see and hear and not what you think you see and hear.  This means you have to be attentive even in places you visit a lot of times.  

Your beliefs, values, drivers and rules act as filters, distorting and deleting what otherwise might be important information.  
Would you believe that you ‘see what we want to see and discard the rest’?
We tend to zone out things we see and hear everyday and assume they are exactly the same way they’ve always been.  What am saying here is you have to consciously look at things as though it’s the first time you are seeing them and listen in to the sounds around you.

Although our feelings are internal, they are often accompanied by outward (often physical) manifestations.  By paying attention to theses external signals, you can begin to understand what these feelings mean for you, moment by moment.
Emotions
Within psychology there has been a great deal of debate about the exact nature of an emotion.  For our purposes, an emotion can be seen to consist of four elements:
1. What we think - our interpretation of events that produces a particular emotional response or thought?
2. What we feel - a label that we use to describe a particular state
3. How our bodies react – e.g. racing heartbeat, feeling tense
4. How we behave - e.g. running away, hitting out or hugging someone

It is generally accepted that an emotion is not simply an automatic physical response to a situation, but our interpretation of bodily changes and information available to us.
Certain feelings drive particular behaviours
Certain feelings drive particular behaviours.  By retracing the link between a physical response, your interpretation and the feeling, you can begin to identify your emotional responses in any given situation.  One way in which you can develop the capability is to record changes in your emotional state by keeping a feeling diary.

Keep a feeling diary
Keeping a feeling diary helps you identify your emotional responses.  When you notice your mood change, ask yourself: What is going through my mind right now? And, as soon as possible, write down your mental image or thought in the Automatic thought(s) column.

Date/Time
Automatic thought(s). What did you think?  Actual event, stream of thoughts
Emotion(s). How did you feel?  Thoughts that preceded the emotions
Response. What did you do? Specify emotion
Outcome(s).  What were consequences? Detail what happened

You can create a table like this one below; top heading and example one

Date/time          |     Thoughts         |         Emotions             |     Response                            |       Outcome

22/01                       I don't care                angry                         No one cares about me              Disinterested in life

Why is important to have have goals and know what they are?
Our goals are what spur us into action.  These might be short-term (what we want to accomplish right now/next month) or longer-term (for example, what we would like to have done with our lives).
As with our feelings, our desires or intentions are not always obvious to us.  

The value of becoming aware of your goals is that you can use this information to help you develop the strategies necessary to get what you really, really want.  It is not enough to write goals down, you have to be committed to them and be conscious of that they are all times as you will need to align your decisions with them otherwise you create a subconscious conflict.  This is not always easy to identify and could create the habit of self sabotage as you can never go against yourself

Believe your behaviour

• Trust your feelings
• Be honest with yourself
• Exceptional heart based goals

Set up exceptional goals
Steps to setting exceptional goals and finding your path with a heart:
1) State your goal in the positive (what you want rather than don’t want)
2) Own it
3) Make it sensory specific (What will it feel like when you have achieved your goal?  What will it sound like? What will it look like?)
4) Check the ecology (is it something you really, really want? What or who else might be affected when you have achieved your goal?)
5) Identify the resources you need and go for it

Recap on Section 2.

The reality of life is that it happens everyday!

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. (William Shakespeare, Hamlet)

Managing our emotions effectively involves controlling those unproductive behaviours that really don’t get us anywhere.  Winning a shouting match may feel great at the time but this is a short-term gain and transitory.  You may end up losing a potential major client and this kind of behaviour does not support building effective relationships.  In addition, raising your adrenalin levels will do nothing for your longer-term health!

Emotion Management is a Key Emotional Intelligence Capability
By understanding the link between your interpretation of an event and your responses to it, you can choose an alternative way to feel. This is a key emotional intelligence capability.  Using a tool like the feeling diary will help you to identify the interaction between your thoughts, feelings and actions.

Let me give you a simple formula that will help you determine the outcome of every event: 
Event + Emotion (variable) = Outcome
You will notice that the only variable in equation in your power is the EMOTION.  You have the power how to choose how to feel about any situation.
(E2 = Outcome

The Dynamics of Emotion
Look at the activating event and ask yourself, is it
- Real or
- Imagined
What is your belief and interpretation and is your response;
- Rational response or
- Irrational response
What are the consequences and or reaction, do they;
- Evokes feelings or 
- Leads to a behaviour

Always, remember you have the power to choose how you see a situation no matter how challenging that event is.
As the Greek philosopher Epicletus said, “People are disturbed not only by things, but by the views they take of them.”  

Remember this, 'your beliefs, values, drivers and the rules you live by create your map of reality'. 

If you can begin to recognise the way in which you delete, distort and discount important information, and make decisions on the basis of little real evidence (simply our own perceptions) you can begin to see how much of your emotional life is influenced by your map of the world.  

Change the map and you change how you see, hear, feel and behave in the world.

You can change your interpretation of what you see and you can change your responses to it.  
No one can make you feel anything.  It is outside of ‘their’ control

The following techniques explained in detail in the video are great to apply if you find yourself worrying.

1. Worry Buster Technique

2. One-day-at-a-time Technique

3. The 6 second Rule

4. 5-Step Freeze-Frame Technique

Recap on Section 3.

In order to achieve high levels of motivation, overcome setbacks and perform at our best, we need to be able to manage our own internal states, harness our emotions and channel them in a direction that enables us to achieve our objectives.

In my opinion, self motivation is one of those elusive things that is not constant and therefore requires that we be conscious of ourselves to keep it that the desired level.
These are the essential elements of self motivation that we will cover in detail;
• positive Self-talk, 
• Visualisation 
• Creating an EI environment

Self – Talk
Adopt positive self talk!  The little know fact about self-talk is this - the most powerful conversation you will ever have is the one you have with yourself.  
For this astonishing reason, developing an excellent inner-voice also known as positive self-talk is absolutely important.
We get so hurt by what other people say about us however, in most cases it’s because they are telling us what we are already telling ourself and we don’t like it.Let’s see how you can develop positive self talk.

Use affirmations

Write out each affirmation three times, in the first, second and third persons and repeat it to yourself as many times as possible.  
This is because our current views of ourselves are usually formed by a mixture of what we tell ourselves, what others tell us and what others say about us.  Make sure your affirmations are always written in the positive sense, so there are no negatives in them.

Achieving State of flow
Let's look how others use 'state of flow'.  Sports psychologist help successful athletes to use visualisation to enable them to create the right internal mental state in which to engage in their sport.  Whether this is an image of winning a gold medal or breaking a personal best the aim is to achieve a state of flow.  
This is an internal state that energises and aligns emotions with the task in hand.

Two decades of research by the US based psychologist Czikszentmihalyi show that activities that both challenge and permit us to draw on existing knowledge are most likely to send us into a state of flow.  
Daniel Goleman describes flow as the harnessing of our emotions to achieve superior performance and learning

Visualisation
Visualisation is know by different words and I may need to come back to it on another course. Why you may wonder. Visualisatiion is the creating through your mind and whether you know it or don't, believe it or not you are constantly creating all the time.

For this course, let's look at visualising an inspirational mentor following 4 steps which are discussed in the video.
This is a process that you can repeat this over and over on different things until it becomes your second nature.

There is a great awareness today of the different functions of the left brain (logic, reason, maths, reading, language and analysis) and the right brain (recognition, rhythm, visual imagery, creativity, synthesis, dreams, symbols and emotions).  Taking advantage of this knowledge, you can develop your emotional intelligence by accessing all of the psychic resources you have available within you.  No one is only either Right Brain or Left Brain though one function maybe be dominant.
Creative visualisation

Creative visualisation, using imagination, is a normal feature of the nervous system, which has largely been ignored for being labelled unscientific.
A central idea is that the brain when it creates an image (whether real or imaginary) gives rise to emotional states that will evoke behaviour.  Changing the way you think will change the way you feel and, therefore, change the way you behave

Creating an EI environment
This might sound a little odd but our environment does not make us however, it has a huge impact on us.  It is therefore important where you have the power to create an environment that is conducive to what you would like to achieve.
Here's how to create an emotional intelligence environment.  
Think of a place where you were happiest.  What did you see and hear? Was there plenty of light? Inspirational images?
Identify what you need to have around you to make you feel motivated.

These are guidelines to create an environment that is conducive to developing high EI; make sure your environment meets the following criteria:
1. It is healthy and helpful:
• Check if the air clean?
• What can you hear, are they helpful sounds?
2. Is there adequate lighting for what you are hoping to achieve?
• Does it a motivate you?
3. Here are some motivators that you can surround yourself with, such as:
• Pictures of your choice
• People
• Phrases
4. Is the environment organised?
• Clear your desk, clear your min

The Power of Well-chosen Music

Music is a very broad term and the preference of music is very personal.  There is more to music than words and research shows that music enhances performance.  
Dr Georgi Lazanov notes that a well-executed concert can do about 60% of the presenting work in about 5% of the time.What 
The benefits of well-chosen music can lead to:
• Lower levels of stress
• Improvements in long-term memory and retention
• Higher levels of creativity
• Enhanced learnin

Recap on Section 4

Congratulations - you have come a long way to this almost end point! and going back to where we started, 

Let's recap on the course - it covers the 5 Principles to Emotional Intelligence and it's delivered in 2 modules.

The 5 Principles to emotional intelligence are divided into two categories which are Intrapersonal and Interpersonal
In this module we looked at Intrapersonal category - this is the inner intelligence we use to know, understand and motivate ourselves.  It means you are look inside before looking out. 

We have covered the first 3 principles that is;
1.Self-awareness
2.Emotional management
3.Self-motivation

In the next module (Module 2) we will be looking at Interpersonal category, the outer-intelligence we use to read, sense, understand and manage our relationships with other people. In simple terms this intelligence focuses on things outside of ourselves.
The two principles are:
4.Relationship management
5.Emotion coaching

Register for Module 2 now and be sure to download your resources.
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