The pursuit of knowing myself

I found this post on the Harvard Business Review to be helpful in a very pragmatic sense, as well as confirming the importance for me of intentionally working to improve my EQ, and the role this plays in leadership. The idea of "knowing your triggers" is one that I have been working on this fall, as part of my attempt to drive up my EQ - it's another way of saying "recognize your patterns", one of the two dimensions that is important within the pursuit of knowing yourself.

Why is it that certain people seem to simply "push our buttons"? I don't know, but I do now know that I can rewire that button, and even disconnect it. By keeping a reflection journal this fall, I've been able to identify various individuals within the school to whom I have strong emotional reactions that sabotage my ability to work with those people. For example, I have worked hard this fall to respond to a faculty member with patience and trust, instead of annoyance and contempt. I was never proud of having those feelings toward this person -- well, in point of fact I also didn't really understand I was having them until I developed my emotional literacy (another critical aspect of the pursuit of knowing yourself), but I knew that our interactions always left me feeling tense and exhausted. By increasing my ability to name the emotions I was experiencing, and then tracking them closely throughout my day, I came to understand that I was constantly responding to this person with these emotions. And, since that was not how I wanted to respond, I began being aware of whenever I was beginning to have those feelings during conversations. When this occurred, I asked myself why or what about the conversation was leading to those, and then addressed that issue -- which may have been an assumption I had, or perceived the other person to have, or something else -- either out loud, with that person, or in silently in my own head. By going to the source of those proto-emotions, I was able to catch them before they undermined me.

I'm definitely at various stages of this work in regards to different people. Just this week I was able to identify that I am responding to, and approaching, one member of the faculty from a position of fear. While I have had plenty of successful and positive interactions with this person, I am now ready to begin work on noticing and putting aside my fear during our interactions, rather than allowing it to drive my words and actions - especially since, when it does, I don't perform well!