Leaders with an accurate self-awareness are able to know at any time, which emotions they are feeling and why they are feeling them, without judgment. An emotional intelligent leader with a high score in accurate self-awareness can easily recognize how their emotions and feelings are affecting their performance and the team work or the environment. They are able to connect the dots and build the links between their feelings and what they think, do and say. On the other hand, leaders who lack emotional self-awareness, often feel stressed and overwhelmed, because they don't know how to establish priorities--health, family, and a balanced work life. They easily get irritated, frustrated or angry and even treat others in an abrasive manner. They are a toxic people and they contaminate others with their toxicity. To build or enhance your accurate self-awareness skills, consistently, practice the following recommendations:

• Use a self-awareness journal: Schedule time to practice checking in your emotions regularly, in order to get in the habit of flexing your identifying muscles. Bedtime would be a good time to start. Sit quietly, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Ask yourself the following set of questions answer them honestly. There is no right or wrong answer. Just listen to your responses. Self-reflection is a typical activity of leaders with high emotional intelligence. Write your answers in a self-awareness journal. Use a paper one, not a digital journal.
  • How am I feeling now?
  • What am I feeling?
  • Where in my body is the feeling manifesting itself?
  • How long have I been feeling this way?
• Mindfulness: Be mindful of the feelings in your body. Be consciously present when your feelings like waves hit the shore. Sense them without judgment. Don't get stuck in an antagonistic relationship with your emotions, thinking of them as bad and something that we should suppress. They only take from 6 to 19 seconds to go away. However, they left you a message, they left you data. They exist to help us. Overcoming this mindset that there are good and bad emotions is one of the hardest parts of practicing emotional intelligence, but it's also extremely liberating. Once you truly make emotions your ally, you are empowered to take control of your life. The first step is acknowledging that emotions are providing you with valuable information.
• Name your emotion - Naming is taming. When you feel yourself reacting to a situation, take time to yourself, do some deep breathing to calm down, and name your emotion. Research has proven that naming emotions is an incredibly effective method for reducing the intensity of an emotion. Naming emotions to yourself helps, and naming them out loud helps even more. By bridging the gap between thoughts and feelings, naming emotions helps provide distance between the default, "I am anxious..." to a much less overwhelming "I am feeling anxious". Try to verbalize the emotion - "I am feeling really anxious right now. I can feel it in my stomach and my back. What is the anxiety trying to tell me?". Acknowledging your emotions as they occur gives you more opportunities to learn about yourself by connecting emotions to their causes. The next set of questions will help you to identify your triggers:
  • When did this feeling first start?
  • What was happening when the feeling started?
  • Has its strength changed?
  • How has the strength changed?
• Explore what the emotion is telling you: First you identified your emotion with a label, now you are exploring what the emotion is telling you. Make sure that you are dealing with the full emotional story. In a calm state of mind and in a peaceful environment dive deep into your emotions and feelings. Often we feel an emotion that is only the tip of everything that we are feeling. Use the following set of questions to guide you throughout this dive:
  • What's underneath my anxiety?
  • Am I anxious because I feel vulnerable or out of control?
  • Am I anxious because someone has made me look bad and I think others will laugh at me?
  • Am I anxious because I accepted that work assignment even though I really didn't want to?

All of these roots of your anxiety are different, but the resulting emotion is the same. So you need to be willing to look beyond the initial emotion and explore what else you might be feeling, so you can learn how to manage your emotions. Otherwise, you are just addressing a symptom, not the root cause.