What is Emotional Awareness?
The ability to understand and recognize one’s own emotions and the emotions of others. It is important because it cultivates better communication, navigating social situations, and improves the quality of relationships.
-Better Communication: helps people notice how others are feeling and how that influences their communication.
-Improved decision making: Make better decisions over their lives
-Social Skills: Navigate social situations and enjoy relationships
-Better interpersonal Relationships: improves the effectiveness of interactions with others
-Improved Mental and Physical Health
What is Emotional intelligence?
The ability to manage both your own emotions and understand the emotions of people around you.
The 4 Pilers of Emotional Intelligence
1.) Self-Awareness: Recognize your own emotions and understand how they influence your actions
2.) Self-Regulation: Manage emotions in a healthy way, adapt to changing circumstances
3.) Empathy: Understanding other people’s emotions offers comfort and support
4.) Social Skills: Build and maintain relationships and effective communication skills
Separation of Energy Meditation:
https://youtu.be/5T0VFyF-KA4?si=YjzH82zEAF9kRusG
Important messages from Atlas of the Heart By Brene Brown
Page 172
A couple of serious watch-puts when it comes to disconnection. The first comes from the researcher Trisha Raque-Bogdan. She writes, “To avoid the pain and vulnerability that may result when their efforts to achieve connection are unsuccessful, individuals may enact their own disconnection strategies, such as hiding parts of themselves or discounting their need for others. They may learn that it is safer to keep their feelings and thoughts to themselves, rather than sharing them in their relationships.”
This means that rather than making a bid for connection and having the bid ignored or rejected, we hide out or pretend we don’t need anyone. I think most of us have done this- I know I have. And it’s a recipe for loneliness and, for me, blame. I can withhold a bid for connection, and then blame someone for not responding. It’s a lot of scrambling to avoid hurt. And it doesn’t even work.
The second watch-out is about perfectionism. There’s actually a “perfectionism social; disconnection model,” and this research shows that people who are high on the perfectionistic traits scale behave in ways that cause perceived and actual exclusion/rejection by others. In other words, my perfectionism drives me to show up in ways that lead people to push me away. This doesn’t surprise me, but it’s still painful to think about, because ultimately our perfectionism is about trying to avoid being excluded or rejected.
Even though I’ve studied some of these topics for years, the process of writing this book led me to make connections and see relationships that have escaped me, such as the symmetry of these findings:
Authenticity is a requirement for belonging, and fitting in is a threat.
Authenticity is a requirement for connection, and perfectionism (a type of fitting in) is a threat.
Happiness Page 207: We need happy moments in our lives; however, I’m growing more convinced that the pursuit of happiness may get in the way of deeper, more meaningful experiences like joy and gratitude. I know, from the research and my experiences, that when it comes to parenting, what makes children happy in the moment is not always what leads them to develop deeper, joy, grounded confidence, and meaningful connection.
Forboding Joy Page 215: When I give talks, people always seem surprised by the finding that joy is the most vulnerable human emotion. given that I study fear and shame, people are hesitant to believe that something as positive as joy can make us squirm. then I share what is almost certainly the most surprising finding for most people: If you’re afraid to lean into good news, wonderful moments, and joy-if you friend yourself waiting for the other show to drop-you are not alone. It’s called “foreboding joy,” and most of us experience it.
This is when things get quiet.
Forboding joy is one of those practically universal experiences that everyone thinks of as something only they do. A few people don’t experience it, but most do. And when it comes to parents… 95 percent of the parents we interviewed experience foreboding joy with their children.
When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding. No emotion is more frightening than joy, because we believe if we allow ourselves to feel joy, we are inviting disaster. We start dress-rehearsing tragedy in the best moments of our lives in order to stop vulnerability from beating us to the punch. We are terrified of being blindsided by pain, so we practice tragedy and trauma. But there’s a huge cost.
See Brene Brown Atlas of the Heart for Full reading
