What is Emotional Awareness?
Updated: Apr 5
Emotional Awareness is about being more aware of emotions you have, not being more emotional. It's noticing which emotions you have, paying attention to the emotional and physiological feelings that come with them, and learning to halt negative emotions, turning them into more positive emotions.
It's easy to identify feeling happy, sad or angry, however depression seems a little harder for many people to acknowledge, often avoiding getting help, or working through their problems.
Emotional awareness helps you learn about the purpose of each emotional state and the nuances that come with them. It helps you learn what can trigger these states, or create the states you desire, such as happiness or motivation. It helps you see patterns in how you respond and react to triggers, and how you interact with other people.
So why is it important to learn about emotional awareness?
Imaging this... You can go for weeks without food, days without water and minutes without air, but you can barely go seconds without an emotion. Many people will argue this and say they rarely have emotions but that's because they are not aware of them. I guarantee they do have emotions but they've learned to overlook or bury them, even avoid them. These are often people who will argue (says it all) that depression doesn't exist and it's all a state of mind.
How can Emotional Awareness help me?
Becoming aware of your emotions helps you to recognise when changes are affecting you, and how to cope with change using more resilience and forethought. By learning for yourself, it also empowers you to support others more easily when they are feeling emotional, overwhelmed, angry, stressed or anxious, because you can see things from their point of view more easily. Imaging teaching someone to drive if you haven't learned yourself. It's the same with emotions. By learning more, you can pass on your wisdom's to your family, friends and colleagues but start with you first.
Are there any downsides to learning Emotional Awareness?
Not in the literally sense of making life worse. There will be times when your personal growth may result in people moving out of your life, but they were probably holding you back, or not ready for their own personal growth yet. This should not be seen as a negative, but as progress for yourself - where toxic and negative people make way for more positive and supportive people in your life. This can be a tough one to swallow at times, but in hind sight you realise it was for the right reasons.
How do I learn Emotional Awareness?
There is no fixed method such as exams or certificates as this really is about you, and your personal growth. There are a number of people around the world that teach it under different hats for different reasons such as leadership skills, spiritual awakening, and more. As you and everyone else on this planet is individual, so will your emotional cycle, your personality and your values be unique and you should find a way that suite you.
Kay Reeve - author if this blog post, has however created a way to teach emotional awareness through mentoring online. Kay uses a visual diagram of the emotional cycle, to bring about an awareness of emotions in a logical and structured manner that makes learning appropriate for all ages and lifestyles.
How can I learn Emotional Awareness from Kay Reeve?
You can also check out more about Kay's work on her YouTube Channel, starting with her introductory video.
If you would like to learn Emotional Awareness with with Kay Reeve via zoom mentoring sessions, use the contact page to connect.