4 Habits to Level Up Your Self-Awareness

For years we’ve strived to increase our IQ so as to earn more money. Turns out that those with high EQ earn 70% more than those who have a high IQ.

Here are the 4 areas of Emotional Intelligence that you can work on to increase your earning potential.

There are 4 areas of EQ and in this article, we’ll unpack the habits of the first area.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize & understand your emotions in real-time. We all have pre-set rules for how we’ll respond per experience.

A person with high self-awareness still feels the emotion. They just recognize it for what it is and carefully process it before responding.

A person with low self-awareness on the other hand has a habit of overreacting and then blaming their reaction on others.

The First Habit of self-awareness is to notice your feelings

By noticing your feelings you can then begin to seek understanding for why you have them and if there is a repeating pattern.

Are these feelings really from you or from outside influences telling you that this show you should feel?

Then realize however you react will have an impact on others.

A sure-fire indicator that you should not react is when say, “I have to say…”

No, you didn’t.

You chose to.

Once you understand this, you’ve taken ownership of your feelings and now have the power to control them.

The second habit of self-awareness is understanding how your buttons get pushed.

Think back and recall the times when you got upset.

What happened?

What is something somebody said or did?

Now look back further to a time before when you got upset.

Do you see a pattern?

Were you insulted, ignored, interrupted, mocked?

Once you discover your buttons, begging to explore them to understand why you choose to get upset.

Nobody made you mad.

The truth is, you chose to be upset because of a preset rule that you have for yourself.

Once you own this, you then have the power to control and then change it.

The third habit of self-awareness is journaling

Journaling is the highest form of thinking. It is where the rubber meats the road.

It’s where what we think and what we truly understand collide.

It’s also a powerful tool for self-awareness saving you hundreds of dollars in therapy.

Journaling will help you to see patterns in your thoughts, behaviors, responses, and actions.

As you recognize them, you then have the power to change them.

The fourth habit of self-awareness is to not be fooled by your moods.

Some mornings you’ll wake up feeling uninspired or discouraged and it may just be that you didn’t get a good night’s rest.

On the flip side, you may have just crushed a new goal and you feel great.

Enjoy your win, but realize that it’s temporary and we need to get right back to work.

In conclusion, to be self-aware make sure you implement the habits of noticing your feelings as they happen in real-time without reacting.

Understand how your buttons are pushed and then discover why. Keep a journal to further develop a deeper understanding of yourself, and lastly, don’t be fooled by your moods.

Following these disciplines will help you to level up your self-awareness making you a stronger leader and you’ll likely make more money as a result.