Today was an interesting day. A day of learning. For me personally, a day for self awareness. We had a training session at work about emotional intelligence with author of the book ‘Born to Create’ Anne Jacoby. Emotional Intelligence has become a corner stone of a lot of things w have been working now. And this session could not have been at a better time.

I am not that good at rating myself on the EI scale or any scale for that matter, though people have told that I do possess an ‘ok’ empathy, whatever that means. But I doubt if it reflects every time in my behavior. I also don’t know if it is an acquired skill or natural.

Emotional Intelligence is all about understanding emotions. Our understanding of both our and other’s emotions. This needs us to be self aware and be empathetic. As I completed the 5 hour session today with many others in the company, I was able to recognize 8 traits of mine that I need to be aware of myself and work on.

Did I know about these behaviors before, Yes I did but I had not felt a sense of urgency to act on them. Again sense of urgency will not last for long and so my action item from the session, is to write about each one of them in coming days.

I want to delve deeper into each one of them and see how it impacts me personally, as well as people I live and work with and how addressing these can improve other aspects of my life.