Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to notice, name and understand your own emotions as they happen. In The 10P Emotional Literacy System it is the first quadrant and belongs to the literacy half — reading. Its question is simple: "What am I feeling?"

Three channels

Emotions show up in three places, and self-aware people learn to read all three:

The body — heat in the face, a tight chest, a heavy stomach, restless legs. The body usually knows first. See Body scan.
Thoughts — "This isn't fair." "They're laughing at me." "I can't do this." Thoughts are the story the feeling tells.
Urges — to hit, run, hide, buy, drink, scroll, text. Urges are the feeling asking for action.

Naming it precisely

Self-awareness grows with vocabulary. "Bad" is not useful information; embarrassed, disappointed, jealous and dreading each point toward a different need and a different response. Research shows that people with more precise emotion words regulate emotion more effectively.¹ Build yours in Emotions A–Z and in Emotional vocabulary.

Tracing it

The final self-awareness skill is understanding why. What happened just before? What does this remind me of? What need or value is being threatened? Often a strong reaction to a small event points to an older, unprocessed experience — the territory of Trauma and emotional literacy.

Practice

Name it to tame it — label the feeling in a sentence.
Feelings journal — five minutes a day, three questions.
The Feelings Check-In — from "fine" to the precise word in 60 seconds.

Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16. doi:10.1177/0963721414550708 ↑