Career Issues: Emotional Intelligence and Self-Awareness

 

‘Can you describe your strengths and weaknesses?’ This question, frequently asked at interviews, is not surprisingly one that interviewees are often least prepared to answer. While few have difficulty rhyming off strengths, describing one’s weaknesses, or one’s vulnerabilities is another matter. Doing so requires a level of disclosure that few of us are willing to make not only to others but even to ourselves. As Abraham Maslow (1962) says, ‘We tend to be afraid of any knowledge that would cause us…to make us feel inferior, weak…We protect ourselves and our ideal image of ourselves by repression and similar defences’. However, research shows that vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. We connect to others through vulnerabilities. They are key to our self-awareness and to managing ourselves socially.

This article is designed to equip you with some means to identify and explore those vulnerabilities and thus to improve your self-awareness.

Focusing on the here and now

Begin with noticing and self-reflecting. When interacting with others, slow yourself down and take notice of your emotions, thoughts and behaviours as situations unfold. Concentrate on what is happening to you in the moment. Studies show that normal human bandwidth allows us to concentrate on up to four voices at one time. One of those voices should be our own internal voice.

The ability to focus on the present can and should be practiced regularly by using mindfulness exercises. Mindfulness simply means a non-judgemental concentration on the present, and is practiced by focusing on one thing, e.g. our breathing. Through mindfulness practice, we learn not to engage with passing thoughts but rather to observe them and thus to notice recurring negative thoughts that may be affecting us. By practicing mindfulness privately, we develop skills that we can call on to ground ourselves when we feel stressed or unfocused. These skills help us to avoid being distracted by anticipatory thoughts and imaginings and to stay focussed when circumstances demand.

Numerous phone apps are available to help develop or improve our concentration skills. Headspace is one such option.

Noticing thinking errors

How do we identify emotional or cognitive barriers to self-awareness? Be on the lookout for ‘thinking errors’ in your internal dialogues. These are harmful thinking patterns that may habitually hold us hostage so that we behave at the will of others or as victims of circumstance. Some examples of these include:

  • Awfulization: maximizing one’s part in a situation, e.g. ‘That was the worst interview ever, I was awful.’;
  • Blame throwing: e.g. ‘It’s all his fault, he should have highlighted the difference.’;
  • Demands: using ‘should’, ‘must’, and ‘has-to’ in dialogues, e.g. ‘He has to listen to me because this report is late’, ‘She should have pointed that out, she knew it was important.’;
  • Extreme thinking: e.g. ‘she never listens’, ‘he’s always late’;
  • Globalizing: applying global ratings based on exception cases, e.g. ‘I failed my exam. That proves I’m a failure.’;
  • Personalization: jumping to self-damning conclusions without relevant information, e.g. ‘if I ask my manager for support, he’ll think I’m incompetent’.

Such thinking errors or beliefs should be intercepted and challenged by considering their usefulness and by applying a reality check. Are these beliefs helpful? Are they true? Is there evidence to support them, or to suggest otherwise?

Group dynamics, PFAT scanning and feedback

While mindful meditation and self-reflection are useful tools for improving self-awareness, our reflection in other people is more informative. When working in a team, it is important to stay aware of how others react to our behaviours. Noticing such reactions provides us with valuable (silent) feedback. Active listening and observation can help us to recognize and thus adjust any negative behaviours of our own. This is particularly useful when working in stressful environments so to avoid confrontation. A simple tool called the ‘PFAT’ scan can help here. Using the PFAT scan, we pay attention to the following:

  • Any Physical Body symptoms in other members of the group, e.g. blushing, sweating, fidgeting, nervous tics, clenched teeth or clenched fists?
  • Any indications of others’ Feelings by their mannerisms or behaviours, e.g. defensiveness, anxiety, worry, boredom, tenseness, challenged, angry?
  • What body language does the person Appear to have? Are they retreating or lunging forward? Are they stammering, whispering or yelling?
  • What does the other person’s Thinking focus on? Are they speaking on task or are they defending their position, discrediting others, redeeming themselves?

To gain greater insight into our relational habits, we should pay attention to group dynamics, focusing not only on how we think and what we observe but also on how we feel during teamwork or group work.  Certain situations or people may trigger negative reactions within us. We may discover that what we are experiencing is the mirroring of past behavioural patterns that we shared with parents or siblings.

We should also seek feedback from trusted others, including our seniors and peers. Receiving such feedback openly and sharing our vulnerabilities can prove edifying. By accepting our vulnerabilities with reasonable self-compassion, we can start to accommodate them and to build on our strengths.

March EI Exercise

Practice mindfulness and the reflective exercises described in this article. Next, we will consider self-regulation and useful strategies for managing our emotions.

Article by: Paul Price; first published in Accountancy Ireland Extra, March 2017