How to achieve Happiness through Emotional Intelligence? To avoid burnout and improve productivity, mindful planning, correct decision-making, and reaction to events are needed to enjoy work with a purpose!

Using emotional intelligence, we can measure stress and burnout by measuring such traits as stress tolerance, self-actualization, happiness, and optimism.

- Brent Darnell

Emotional Self-Awareness:

The ability to recognize and understand one’s feelings and emotions, differentiate between them, and know what caused them and why.

Emotional self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence and is critical to career success, health, learning, relationship satisfaction and individual performance. These emotional self-awareness exercises will improve your skill in understanding and working with emotions and facilitate your effectiveness at work and in your personal life. Emotional self-awareness you will improve your ability to:

Identify the emotional and intellectual factors that contribute to your decisions
Label your feelings
Discriminate the intensity and range of feelings you experience
Recognize the existence of multiple feelings in a given situation
Identify what triggers feelings
Appreciate the “contagious” nature of feelings
Recognize that emotions can change over time
Shift your emotional energy

Emotional Self-awareness is the first step to Happiness

Developing emotional self-awareness is a life-long process. Some people develop it naturally as they mature. But you have the opportunity to develop it on purpose!

Is it really possible to develop emotional self-awareness and improve emotional intelligence?

Yes, the good news is that emotional intelligence can be learned. Your emotional skills develop through experience over your entire lifetime. While this self-study will give you tools to increase your emotional intelligence, the real classroom is your everyday life!
Emotional learning is quite different than cognitive (intellectual) learning. It takes place in a different part of your brain. Cognitive learning primarily accesses the memory centers while emotional learning is literally hard-wired into your nervous system. Developing new emotional skills actually retrains your neural pathways (the system in your body and brain which carries messages around). The more you practice your new emotional self-awareness skills, the stronger those emotional habits become. An old emotional habit (e.g. holding a grudge) atrophies from lack of use when replaced by another emotional habit (e.g. forgiveness). Emotional learning is more like learning to play a musical instrument or learning a language. It takes more time, repetition, application, reflection, follow-up, and coaching.

Like many people, you probably make decisions without giving a great deal of conscious thought to many of them. For example, did you reflect on your rationale for purchasing your last car? You probably spent time evaluating cost, mileage, comfort, financing, color, and other factors. But, did you actually spend time analyzing why those factors were important? Was it that blue reminded you of your favorite bicycle? Or, that you chose the same car company as your parents? So much feeling goes into every decision you make – and most of the time you aren’t even aware of it. Those feelings provide critical information. That information helps you make decisions. So, by getting better at using emotional information along with other rationale, you will be able to make better choices in your life. People who have developed their emotional self-awareness are more likely to:

make career and job choices, which match their talents and give them satisfaction
create and sustain healthy relationships
be highly regarded as team players
exhibit formal and informal leadership qualities
take appropriate risks and understand the consequences of their actions
maintain their composure and demonstrate resilience
elicit trust from others
enjoy a general sense of well-being
identify their level of stress tolerance and manage their lives to avoid debilitating stress
accurately assess their strengths and weaknesses and know what they need to develop
trust their intuition and use it to be creative
make thoughtful choices and take responsibility for their actions
know their values and live in alignment with them
recognize and respect differences in others
manage their time and resources consistent with their priorities
demonstrate integrity
balance their work and home lives
maintain flexibility in the face of challenges and change

There are several skills involved in being emotionally aware, such as recognizing and identifying feelings, understanding the reasons underlying your emotions, and understanding how emotions can be influenced. These skills allow you to be more in tune with your emotional life and use the skills to be effective in every aspect of your daily life. But, how you use these skills is, to a certain extent, a reflection of your beliefs about the value of emotion.

So what does emotional self-awareness look like anyway?

Recognizing feelings
Identifying and labeling feelings
Identifying the intensity and range of feelings
Recognizing that you can hold multiple feelings at the same time
Identifying what triggers feelings
Appreciating that emotions are contagious
Recognizing that emotions can change over time
Demonstrating how to shift emotions

Read more by purchasing Brent Darnell's book on People-Profit

Happiness in the workplace starts with Emotional Intelligence!

Yes, healing from burnout is a process that takes time, effort, and support. The process of healing from burnout can involve several steps, including:

Recognizing and acknowledging burnout: The first step in healing from burnout is recognizing that it exists and acknowledging that you are experiencing it.
Reducing stressors: It is important to identify the sources of stress and take steps to reduce them. This can involve setting boundaries, delegating tasks, or prioritizing self-care.
Seeking support: It can be helpful to seek support from friends, family members, or a mental health professional. This can provide a safe space to discuss your feelings and develop coping strategies.
Practicing self-care: Self-care is an important part of healing from burnout. This can involve activities such as exercise, mindfulness, or engaging in hobbies.
Reevaluating priorities: Healing from burnout can involve reassessing priorities and making changes to ensure that they align with your values and goals.

It is important to remember that healing from burnout is not a linear process and can involve setbacks. However, with the right support and self-care strategies, it is possible to recover and prevent burnout in the future.