From the course: Developing Your Emotional Intelligence

Developing social awareness

From the course: Developing Your Emotional Intelligence

Developing social awareness

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- Developing your self-awareness is essential if you want to enhance your emotional intelligence. Equally critical is building your social awareness, as this is where you focus on taking what you've learnt about how you process informations and you apply that to create collaborative and rewarding relationships. There are simple techniques that you can adopt and skills you can practice that will help you to develop your social awareness. The first place to start is with your senses, and in particular, using your senses to learn more about the world and people around you. What do you see, hear, feel? This probably sounds a bit too obvious but you'd be surprised at how little notice we pay to our senses. They tell us about social situations, particularly in pressurized situations or if we're busy or stressed. You can challenge yourself to take part in a sensory audit whereby you take a walk either in the workplace setting or even outside. For 20 minutes, really focus on what you can see, hear, and feel, and even smell. If you find your mind wandering, gently bring your thoughts back to your senses. You're gathering information, learning to pay attention to the details of your surroundings, which can help you with social awareness. You can use your senses to process information about others. When you're next interacting with another person, consider what their facial expressions and body language is telling you and listen for the tone people are using when they talk. Once you become proficient at this, you can start to piece that information together to get an idea of what people are thinking and the dynamics between people. A lot of this technique is about taking notice. Quite often, the information is there in front of us, but we're juggling so many demands, priorities, emotions, thoughts, feelings, that it can take a bit of practice to step outside of ourselves and our thoughts and immerse ourselves in our surroundings. Start with using your senses to gather information and then use that data to inform your judgment about the best way to interact with others. Join me in the next video to find out how to take your social awareness one step further to build strong relationships.

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