Building emotional self-awareness increases your ability to motivate, influence, and get results from others.

If you listen into C-Suite executives nearly everywhere, you will hear them discussing how this group or that person will feel about a decision. Often, there are long conversations analyzing how to take everyone’s feelings into account before deciding on the right course of action. They are practicing emotional self-awareness, the ability to tune into how they and others feel about something. They know that the more they understand about how people will respond to decisions or changes, the more likely they are to achieve their goals.

Why does this work? Because how your employees feel when they are at work will determine the quality of their work. That’s why high emotional self-awareness is the strongest predictor of overall success.

sidebar: How your employees feel when they are at work will determine the quality of their work.

Most people are not motivated for very long by rational arguments, charts, or data. Being bossed around actually decreases motivation instead of increasing it. Even money doesn’t go very far to motivate people. If they don’t feel like doing their job, arguments, authority, and a paycheck can get them to do only the minimum.

When people want to do their job, they will do it with gusto–and you’ll get better results. If you want to improve performance, you need to figure out what your employees need to feel good about their work. When you help them feel good about doing a great job, they are more likely to try harder.

People Are Motivated by How They Feel

Take the directive to wear a mask during the pandemic as an example of how feelings are more powerful than rational arguments as a motivator. There was no question about the science of the effectiveness of masks. When many leaders relied on the science as their best argument, they didn’t take into consideration how people feel about masks–the discomfort, the distrust of people who don’t show their face. Ultimately, that sense of mistrust (along with a general mistrust in government) became associated with wearing masks, and large portions of the population rebelled against mask mandates and use.

In New York City, however, where the pandemic hit hard before science caught up with how the virus spread, city leaders overcame these objections by building trust and showing empathy. They held nightly press conferences to communicate the necessity of wearing masks and isolating. They recognized the hardship, expressed how they were overcoming their own discomfort, and asked for people’s trust and help. As a result, high levels of compliance with mask wearing helped the city reduce the impact of the virus quickly and the medical system was able to rise to the challenge without being overwhelmed.

In that case, leaders used what effective leaders know: building trust, demonstrating empathy for the sacrifices asked, being transparent about what we know and what we don’t, asking people to help and giving specific guidance about actions that contribute to safety. In other words, they used emotional self-awareness to tune into how people felt and got the results they wanted.

What is Emotional Self-Awareness?

Emotional self-awareness is the ability to know what you are feeling and why. Emotions operate largely in the sub-conscious realm. Having emotional self-awareness is a conscious decision to pay attention to your feelings. When you are aware of how you are feeling and the cause of that feeling, you can decide whether the emotion is helping or hurting what you are trying to do.

Self-awareness means raising emotional information into consciousness where you can use the information to make a strategic choice about what you want to do. Once you understand your own emotions, you can use that same skill to understand others and give them what they need to be motivated and engaged.

Research from every corner continues to pinpoint emotional self-awareness and emotional intelligence as the essential quality for effectiveness and success.

How Emotions Work

Our emotions are a highly evolved system for assessing our environment for threats and responding to them. This is an evolutionary advantage that helped our forebearers survive under harsh conditions, where being able to sense a threat and respond quickly often meant the difference between life and death.

Although usually the threats we face now are not usually life-threatening, our emotional system still goes into overdrive when we sense that something’s not right. Our emotional system picks up on tiny details that we don’t cognitively process, the tightness of someone’s jaw, shoulder or fist muscles, fleeting facial expressions, modulations of voice that convey rich information about what someone else is feeling. If we let that sense operate under the radar of conscious thought, we can be surprised in ways that are unpleasant, or feel overwhelmed by stress that we can’t identify. As a leader, not being able to understand how your team feels is a disadvantage that no amount of authority will make up for.

The First Rule of Emotional Intelligence

The first rule of emotional intelligence is: mange your own emotions first.

It’s just like on a plane: if the oxygen masks come down, put your own mask on first before you help others. You won’t be helping anyone if you pass out. It’s the same with emotions. If you let your frustration, annoyance, or rage get the better of you, you can’t help others feel safe and get down to work.

You can begin building this fundamental emotional intelligence and leadership skill just by noticing how you are feeling and connecting your emotions to events throughout the day. It’s normal for emotions to be in constant flux throughout the day. Our emotions are constantly being affected by everything around us: the traffic, the weather, food, co-workers, people on the street, and everything else.

If you are disappointed, is it because your coffee is cold or is there another disappointment that you are feeling underneath that? 

If you are optimistic, is it because the traffic is unusually clear today or is there something else that you are hopeful for?

Emotions group together with other similar emotions, so look for more than one reason why you might be feeling something and try to identify the most important reason, the one that really matters. Then you can ask: is this feeling helping me achieve my goal or is it hurting my chances? When you ask that, you are building emotional intelligence.

Three Tips for Building Emotional Self-Awareness

Build this fundamental skill with the following three tips:

  1. Pause when you feel a Wait-What Moment. We all know the feeling of wait, what? That moment when you realize something is going on that you missed. This a red flag from your emotional system saying, something is happening that you should pay attention to. Try to figure out what set off that red flag. It is often something subtle. If you learn to recognize the subtle clues, you will learn to identify when you need to be on high alert earlier and find yourself less surprised by others and more strategic about how you approach delicate situations.
  2. Keep a journal to note shifts in your mood. Start thinking about what it takes to change your mood. What makes you feel bad? What makes you feel better? Start to identify your triggers and notice how sensitively your mood sensors are calibrated. Often, it takes only the slightest off-hand remark by someone you trust or admire to send you into a day or half-day of feeling bad. Learn how to handle this situation by analyzing why they feel the need to make a negative remark and what made them feel threated, either by you or by someone else. You’ll know that you have begun to build self-awareness when someone can make a negative remark and you ask yourself: I wonder what’s wrong with them?
  3. Start to notice how your comments or responses affect others. Our emotional systems are always on—at the office, at home, on our way from here to there. Start to watch how other people respond to you. Is that how you want them feel? Is that feeling likely to help them do what you hope they will do, or did it get in the way of them doing what you hope they will do? Start thinking about how to respond to people in ways that increase the likelihood that they will do what you want them to do. Hint: When in doubt, start with empathy. If you were them, what would motivate you?

The good news is that we all have the capacity to increase our emotional self-awareness and our emotional intelligence. It’s a constant choice to be aware of how we’re feeling and why, but the results are well worth the effort.