When’s the last time you practiced emotional awareness? If it has been a while, take a moment, sit down, relax, and ask yourself, “what emotions am I feeling right now?”, “what emotions have I been feeling a lot in the past couple of days?”.
Emotional awareness is the first component of understanding why we are feeling the emotions that we are. Awareness allows us to shed a light on the emotion itself and allows us to ask ourselves, “what could be causing me to feel this way?”
Emotional intelligence then allows us to find a way to make ourselves feel BETTER by identifying STRATEGIES that will lead us to more productive, supportive thought patterns.
A lot of what we’re seeing right now is a default negative thought pattern…THAT PEOPLE DON’T EVEN KNOW EXISTS IN THEIR OWN BRAIN! And a lot of the time, this self-sabotaging, negative thought pattern is caused by what we are CHOOSING to focus on.
If we choose to focus on things that we can’t control, we end up in an unresourceful, negative state where emotions like frustration, anger, sadness, confusion, and worry are everywhere. But if we can shift our focus to things we can control and impact the resourceful conversation in our head will produce emotions like happiness, creativity, joy, and ease.
