What Your Emotions Are Telling You About Your Leadership

Understanding the full scope of Self-Awareness includes recognising and understanding one's own emotions. This includes the ability to differentiate between subtleties in one's own emotions while understanding the cause of these emotions and the impact they have on one's own thoughts and actions and those of others (MHS, EQ-i 2.0).

It is certainly considerably more comprehensive than its name suggests. Moving through actually realising you are feeling something (we are never not feeling an emotion), to labelling it, to understanding how it is impacting on your behaviour, and then managing your emotional state if required! Understanding how you ‘show up’ to others is so important, as well as understanding how your emotional state may be impacting on you over time. We all run patterns – some not as helpful as others.

The Power of Understanding Your Triggers

As we have all experienced, we’re feeling vaguely excited or somewhat down but cannot pinpoint an exact cause. Perhaps slightly anxious without a tangible reason. If you can understand what causes your emotions, you have the opportunity to change your reactions to events.

Imagine you notice yourself feeling irritable and tense every time a particular client sends you a meeting request late on Friday afternoons.

Without emotional self-awareness: You simply feel annoyed, respond curtly to the client, and carry that tension into your weekend. The pattern continues, affecting the working relationship.

With emotional self-awareness: You pause to examine the feeling. You recognise the irritability and trace it back to its cause - Friday afternoon requests trigger anxiety because they disrupt your boundary between work and personal time, reminding you of a previous role where weekend work was expected.

By understanding the cause of your emotion (boundary concerns from past experience) rather than just experiencing the emotion itself (irritability), you gain the power to choose a different reaction—one that preserves the client relationship and your own wellbeing.

 

The Four Components of Emotional Self-Awareness

Emotional self-awareness is made up of four experiences which can be described as follows. It involves:

1. Understanding what emotion you are experiencing,
2. Being aware of your emotion in the moment (not minutes or hours later as you reflect on what happened in ‘that’ meeting)
3. Knowing what triggers different emotions in you
4. And finally, understanding the impact of your emotions on yourself and others

Potentially, you could be good at one of those components and not skilled in the others.

Emotional Self-Awareness provides one of the basic building blocks of emotional intelligence. For example, imagine a person who is not assertive. To overcome the challenge of speaking up, they first need to understand what causes the challenge.

But can you have too much emotional self-awareness?

Well-developed self-awareness is exceptionally beneficial. However, if it is not balanced with other components of emotional intelligence such as impulse control or reality testing, some people may experience intense reactions to circumstances that others would respond to more mildly. Having said that, if we lack emotional self-awareness, we are captive to our emotions and the behaviours they produce without clear knowledge of the cause or the intensity.

I believe it is critical for leaders to pay attention to their emotional state and how it is demonstrated through their behaviours both verbally and non-verbally. Recognition is the first step - we then need to do something about it if our emotional state isn't the most resourceful it can be!

 

Inside the EQ-i

What are the relationships between Emotional Self-Awareness and other subscales within the EQ-i 2.0?

Emotional Self-Awareness and Emotional Expression

Emotional Self-Awareness obviously impacts the perceptions that others have of someone and their leadership style. When we see both Emotional Self-Awareness and Emotional Expression being low, this certainly exacerbates the situation. The patterns of behaviour that can be present, are someone who may not take the time to explain the motivations behind their decisions and is more likely to be directive in their communication. They are also unlikely to be aware of how their body language is showing their real feelings about a situation or conversation.

When Emotional Self-Awareness is low and Emotional Expression is high we venture into the territory of "too much information" as the individual talks things through to make sense of them. We need to be mindful that our direct reports don’t need to be on the roller coaster with us as we sort through our approach.

Emotional Self-Awareness and Reality Testing

Another interesting combination is Emotional Self-Awareness and Reality Testing. They often can be linked. I have found that if someone is not really paying attention to their emotional state, then they are often not paying attention to investigating their own biases or when they may need to be more objective. This can be someone who is heavily focussed on the task at hand and getting things done - with a lesser focus on "how" it is done.

When Emotional Self-Awareness is low and Reality Testing is high, we see someone who is potentially a little disconnected and evaluates the world in absolutes. They can tend to black and white thinking and focus on evidence and data for decision making. At times they miss the emotional tone of situations and depending on their Assertiveness and Impulse Control can come across as emotionally dissociated impacting on their ability to engage others.

 

Developing Emotional Self-Awareness

Knowing that we are all flawed individuals, I am sure we cannot sustain the energy required to remain self-aware in every moment, but being mindful of our reactions and behaviours more often than not is certainly a worthy goal.

There Is Nowhere to Look Except Your Mirror

Self-awareness is often spoken about as if it is a destination — something you have or don’t have. In reality, it is a practice. One that requires courage, humility and a willingness to be uncomfortable. And I always feel it is a demonstration of my level of curiosity. That is, can I be curious about myself, the motivations behind my behaviour, and how I am perceived by others?

"Every moment is an opportunity to be self-aware or not." – Daniel Goleman

The following practices are not about becoming a “better person”. They are about becoming a more effective leader by understanding how you actually show up as compared to how you intend to lead.

1. Building Self-Awareness Through Reflection (Journalling Without Navel-Gazing)

Journalling is not about recording events. It is about examining your internal response to events.

Most leaders can recount what happened in a meeting. Far fewer can articulate:

• What they felt
• What they assumed
• What they reacted to
• What they avoided

Self-awareness lives in these gaps.

A useful discipline is short, frequent reflection, rather than long, infrequent introspection.

At the end of the day — or after a significant interaction — write brief responses to:

• What irritated me today?
• What surprised me?
• When did I feel most certain I was right?
• When did I feel defensive?
• What did I not say that I thought?

Patterns will emerge far more quickly than insights from memory alone. Over time, you begin to see your own defaults: where you push, where you withdraw, where you dismiss, where you over-explain.

This is not self-criticism or personal judgement but rather about collecting data on your lived experience as a leader that you can use to continue to finesse and grow.

2. Creating Feedback Loops (And Not Shooting the Messenger)

Feedback is one of the most powerful — and most avoided — sources of self-awareness. Not because it isn’t valuable, but because it threatens the identity, we hold of ourselves.

Most leaders say they want feedback. Fewer actually receive it well.

If you want honest feedback:

• Ask for it when things are calm, not when you are already under pressure
• Be specific: “What do I do that makes your job harder?” is more useful than “Any feedback?”
• Ask people who don’t work well with you, not just those who do

The real work, however, begins after the feedback is given.

Common ego responses include:

• Explaining your intent
• Minimising the impact
• Arguing with the data
• Discounting the source
• Laughing it off

Each of these shuts the door on further honesty.

A more useful response is simply:

• “Thank you. I need to think about that.”
• “That’s uncomfortable to hear, and I appreciate your honesty.”
• “I can see how that would land that way.”

You do not need to agree with all feedback for it to be useful. You do need to take responsibility for how you are experienced.

Every interaction today is an opportunity to practice emotional self-awareness. Every moment of irritation, certainty, or defensiveness is data. The leaders who succeed aren't those without emotional reactions—they're the ones who understand their reactions and choose their responses.

The real question is: are you willing to look honestly at what you find?