SELF-AWARENESS–The awareness of our own reactions to other people and situations.

EMOTIONAL MANAGEMENT–The ability to predict and manage our moods and impulses.

SOCIAL SKILLS–The ability to identify and react appropriately to the emotions of other people.

EMPATHY–The ability to  tune into and understand what other people are feeling.

MOTIVATION–The ambition to be effective

Self-awareness and emotional management allow us to manage ourselves effectively and to interact optimally with others. In our professional lives, they allow us to make decisions that optimize our performance and our career satisfaction.

Empathy and social skills help us to make choices about relationships, both personal and professional. They help us to interact effectively with those around us, enhancing both our own goal achievement and our value to others.

Motivation allows us to run further, faster. The combination of increased self-awareness, emotional management, empathy and social skills enhances our personal confidence, which in turn, fuels motivation.

• Practice tuning into the way you are feeling. If you are happy, what are the contributing factors? If you are upset, when did you start feeling that way and why? People assume they know why they feel their emotions, but a closer look reveals more complexity than anticipated. Being aware of what is most likely to make us happy, angry, hurt, impatient, relaxed, or content is the first step in managing negative emotions and creating positive emotions.
• Ask people you trust for feedback about what they see in you. Disseminate the suggested survey from The 80/20 Principle  (author: Richard Koch) to 10–15 people and then look for themes in the answers. The observations of people we trust can help us be aware of blind spots in our own perceptions and can also increase our awareness of the way others see us.

• Experiment with strategies to help you maintain emotional equilibrium, especially when you are sad or angry. Try distraction, talking with friends, breathing or relaxation exercises, and gratitude lists. See what seems to work the most effectively and the most consistently.
• Practice reframing situations from another perspective. Is there something you can learn from the situation?
• Above all, practice allowing the emotions to move through you. Try not to push them aside. Experiment with sitting and feeling sad (not fun, I know) instead of immediately pushing aside the feeling and focusing on the next task. Being disappointed, hurt and sad are not weaknesses. The faster you are able to accept them as human and allow them to move through you, the easier it will be to move on to a more positive perspective and refocus on the task at hand.

• Watch and listen. Watch the interactions of other people. If a person is not well-liked, what are they doing that tends to distance or annoy others? How do the well-liked people act? What do they do or say to make other people feel comfortable? When do people lose attention? What is the conversational exchange ratio (i.e., how long each person speaks)?
• Observe others’ reactions to you without personalizing their responses. Watch people’s body language when they are interacting with you. Are they leaning in? Or are they angled away? Are they gradually moving backward? If it seems that you were connecting with them, and suddenly, they become more distant, at what point did that happen? What are you doing or saying when people respond exceptionally well to you? If the conversational topic is not resonating with them, can you shift the topic to something else?

• Obtain more information on others’ backgrounds to understand their point of view. It can be difficult to understand the emotions and behavior of others, especially when their reactions are different from our own. It is helpful to gather information that might help you see and feel things from their perspective. Would you be so quick to judge your colleague’s meltdown if you knew that he had just received a health diagnosis? Often, we don’t have the inside information, but it helps to imagine the various possibilities that may account for others’ emotions. We are not making assumptions–just trying to open up our minds to factors that we may not be able to see.
• Watch for micro-expressions. To accurately tune into what another person is feeling, it is helpful to watch their face. First, your attention to their face helps your brain engage your mirror neurons. Mirror neurons help us feel what other people are feeling. Secondly, tiny movements, such as an eyebrow twitches or a shifted eye glance, can give you information about how they are processing a conversation.

•  Apply the Premack Principle Do the things you don’t like doing first. Follow them with either fun rewards or tasks that you enjoy doing. Using this principle helps us to be productive throughout the day and reduces the time spent in the emotional dread of whatever we don’t want to do. Pay attention to how long the disliked task takes so that you can use it for positive future reference. If it takes only 30 minutes, remind yourself of that the next time. If it takes a long time, focus on how you will feel when it’s accomplished AND see if there is a way to avoid it being as painful in the future.
• Talk yourself through it. You don’t need to feel like doing something to accomplish it. Most people focus on the emotional aspect of motivation. If you know that the task is linked to your values or your long-term goals, talk yourself through it. “I know you don’t want to do this, Jim. I know it is tedious and annoying. But you know it’s important, and you can do it.”