Emotional Awareness is the ability to recognise our emotions.

This is the foundational skill of emotional intelligence. The ability to discern, label and name our emotions in real-time gives us the intelligence - the data - we need to work with our emotions.

This article walks through the ‘What’, the ‘Why’, and the ‘How’ of emotional awareness. For those of you tight on time, here are the spark notes of the article:

What? Emotional awareness is the ability to recognise and understand one's own emotions, encompassing the capacity to identify, label, and comprehend the various feelings we experience.
Why? Awareness forms the cornerstone of emotional intelligence - it gives us the information we need to work effectively with our emotions.
How? Build your Emotional Literacy | Real-Time Emotion Check-Ins | Pattern Identification | Awareness Exercises

Emotion Check-in

Let’s start with a little exercise.

What are you feeling right now?

Perhaps curious. Thoughtful. Enthused. Maybe irritated. Alone. Discouraged. Hmmmm, you could be expectant. Stressed. Thankful?

Take a wee moment to pause, use the feeling wheel, and examine your emotions - what are you feeling right now?

Credit: Abby Vanmuijen

What is Emotional Awareness?

Emotional Awareness is the ability to recognise our emotions. It means we are able to break down the cacophony of feelings within us.

Awareness is the skill of looking inside ourselves and identifying the incredible range of emotions we have experienced in the past, and are experiencing right now, in the present. It is our capacity for introspection; understanding what triggers our emotions, what their functions are, how different feelings play out in our body and minds, as well as discerning the patterns of how our emotions interlink with each other.

Take a look at this comparison to explore the difference between an emotionally unaware and aware person.

Why is Emotional Awareness important?

Let me start with an analogy.

Imagine you're on the sports field, playing your favourite game, or you are at the gym, when suddenly you are injured - maybe it's your knee, wrist, or shoulder.

You head straight to the doctor, seeking help for your injury. As you explain, "I'm injured, please help," the doctor begins their history taking and assessment. They ask questions to understand the nature of your injury: Where does it hurt? Is it a sharp or dull pain? How did it happen? What movements exacerbate the pain? So on and so forth.

With each question, the doctor is building their awareness of your injury. They gather information to accurately diagnose the injury and develop a treatment plan tailored to your specific needs. Whether it's recommending rest, physical therapy, or surgery, their goal is to help you best work with the injury and regain strength as effectively as possible.

Just as the doctor's understanding of the injury enables them to prescribe the right treatment, our understanding of our emotions empowers us to work with them more effectively. When we take the time to understand our emotions - where they stem from, how they manifest, and how they affect us - we're building awareness. This awareness allows us to navigate our emotional landscape to the best of our ability.

Emotional awareness is the linchpin of Emotional Intelligence. It helps us recognise when we are stressed, upset, depressed or exhausted so that we can implement relevant strategies. It helps us identify the build up to our emotions so that we can transform the triggers and adjust our environment to better suit our needs. It helps us savour the present instead of getting wrapped up in the emotions of tomorrow.

Emotional Awareness gives us the information we need to purposeful work with our emotions.

Tools - How to improve our Emotional Awareness

Here are a handful of videos to help you start building your emotional awareness. They include exercises on emotional literacy, which is our ability to name our emotions, as well as real-time emotion check-ins (as we did at the top of this article), pattern identification, and emotion awareness tools (Emotion Journal).