SKILL 3
Emotional Self-Awareness
Understanding what you’re feeling and why you are feeling that way is perhaps one of the most critical components of emotionally effective living. It is intimately associated with how well we use our empathy by understanding what other people are feeling and why they feel the way they do. Together these two skills of emotional awareness and empthy are what enable us to motivate and influence the thoughts and actions of ourselves and others—in short, the skills most necessary to succeed in life.
Consider for a moment the fact that emotions are deeply connected with sensation; in fact, our emotional life begins when we explore our physical world as newborns and infants. Until we are strong enough to at least turn over in bed, we are pretty much subject to the conditions in our environment. If something is poking or constraining us, we can’t really locate it and change it. Nonetheless, our bodies reflexively express aversion by contracting their muscles—initially at the point of discomfort, then throughout the limb or trunk, and eventually throughout the whole body if the discomfort is great enough. If all this still provides no relief and we are uncomfortable enough, we cry for help!
If, on the other hand, something pleases us, like a warm bottle or someone rocking us in his or her arms, our muscles tend to generally relax so we can enjoy the experience. Obviously, feeding involves some muscular engagement (also largely reflexive), but more interesting perhaps is the fact that enjoyment itself actually requires a kind of “effort” called awareness. Consciously noticing the sensations we are feeling is rather like pushing the “record” button on our life recorders and making the memories of that sensory experience conscious. In contrast, the sensations of feeding may be recorded unconsciously because of their reflexive nature or consciously if the baby is alert and attending to the sensory experience.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS?
Here’s the point. Emotions begin as the values we learn to place on our sensory experience, our likes and our dislikes. The conditions surrounding our pleasant and unpleasant sensations give rise to our ability to recognize and express our emotional preferences. All of our sensory life is recorded in us (perhaps even as us if Candace Pert (2000) is correct in the thesis of her work The Body Is Your Subconscious Mind) and the way in which we recall those emotions—either more consciously and intentionally or more unconsciously and reactively—has everything to do with the level of our emotional self-awareness.
The next stage of development after sensory awareness and emotional awareness is symbolic awareness—we begin to translate our experience into the words and ideas of our native language. This is a hugely rewarding and exciting time in our lives! By now we are also developing the muscular strength and coordination that free us to explore our world (more or less) at the whim of our own interest . . . and we can tell people what we want and need much more specifically.
Unfortunately, the ability to objectify our world through language and operate on it as “other than ourselves” is often overly emphasized and reinforced as we start thinking ahead about our children’s future in terms of the goals they will need to accomplish to be successful in our technologically driven postmodern society. As parents, we are busy, our own attention is split in a dozen directions, we are trying to achieve our own measures of success, we are tired. If we do not know how to take the time to consciously model how the emotional world integrates with the symbolic world, our children may end up reacting out of their conditioned emotional preferences rather than responding with emotional intentionality, that is, emotional intelligence.
HOW CAN WE BUILD EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS?
To develop the ability to consciously express emotional self-awareness in our children and in ourselves, we need to connect to parts of our experience—what we’re feeling and why we are feeling that way. In a very simple language pattern that Robert Carkhuff introduced in his human relations training in the 1970s, we can discover and share our internal experience by filling in the blanks to: “I feel _____________, because _____________.” “I feel worried because I can’t reach my daughter.” “I feel mad because you misled me.” “I feel really excited because I’ve never seen a roller coaster that big before.” We have to regularly check in and take our own emotional pulse and then, when appropriate, we may want or need to share what we have discovered with the other people around us.
Without emotional self-awareness, we will live a life of reaction rather than initiation. It will seem to us as if we are at the effect of life rather than able to influence it effectively on our own behalf and on behalf of those we care for. Reconnecting with our sensory and emotional awareness and using that awareness consciously not only helps us achieve what we want in life, but also enables us to enjoy it much more fully when we do.
STAR PERFORMERWith pride in sharing our humanity with her, we nominate Maya Angelou as the star performer for emotional self-awareness. She’s an American author and poet who was active in the Civil Rights movement and supported the work of Martin Luther King. She read one of her powerful poems at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton. Ms. Angelou is well known for her series of autobiographical volumes that focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly recognized is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her 1971 volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie. We quote one powerful stanza from her poem “Still I Rise” from her volume of poetry And Still I Rise (1978):
“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
President Barack Obama presented Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
REEL PERFORMERFor this example, we select Michael Sheen playing David Frost in the movie Frost/Nixon. This is the story of an amazing game of wits in which the historical stakes are as high as they have ever been. David Frost must get keenly in touch and stay in touch with his emotional self-awareness or be publicly manipulated and stonewalled by former President Richard Nixon; this manipulation would allow Nixon to rewrite history and rehabilitate his reputation while effectively destroying that of the former talk show host.
While his research team is working diligently and trying to school him on the facts, Frost is often preoccupied, traveling to try to raise the $600,000 he needs to pay Nixon. The first three interviews do not go well. Nixon is able to parry the planned questions and successfully indulges in long self-justifying monologues. Four days before the last interview, in a weird twist of fate, a drunken Nixon calls Frost at his hotel and points out that it will be matter of winner take all. This conversation galvanizes Frost’s awareness of what he needs to do. He sends one of his researchers to follow up a lead he had previously discounted, and his colleague comes back with gold. Rejuvenated by this positive turn of events, Frost works tirelessly for the next three days and meets Nixon with a new confidence and determination. He can no longer be misled and distracted, but the former president is still a wily adversary until confronted by new evidence from a recording of the conversation with Chuck Colson. Frost is now the master, here pushing hard, then backing up quickly and letting Nixon implicate himself with his self-serving explanations. Without his skillful use of emotional self-awareness, the truth behind the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s involvement in it might have remained mired forever in denial and dispute. It was David Frost’s ability to adjust to the moment-by-moment shifts in emotional nuance that enabled him to outmaneuver Nixon, who was relying instead on a powerful, presidential rehearsal of the past as he perceived it.