Self-awareness
Noticing what you feel, naming it in specific words, and tracing where it came from, while it is still happening.
The skill, taken apart
Self-awareness in the emotional sense is three habits stacked. Noticing: registering that your state has changed at all, which sounds trivial and is not, because most moods are discovered late. Naming: putting a specific word on it, since "stressed" is a bucket and "resentful about being interrupted" is information. Tracing: connecting the feeling to what set it off, which is the part that makes the other two useful.
Naming precision is where the leverage is. A specific label does work a vague one cannot, pointing backward at the trigger and forward at a response, and studies tend to find people differ widely, and fairly stably, in how finely they can do it. The word you choose changes what you do next: a bucket word suggests nothing, a precise one usually suggests the cause.
What self-awareness is not
It is not thinking about yourself a lot, which can run entirely on buckets, and it is not the same as being right: self-report measures record how you see yourself, and how you see yourself is one of two traditions, not the whole truth. The people around you hold the other half of the picture.
Where this is scored
On this site the scored version of this territory is the Self-Insight facet: 8 items, a margin printed on the figure, and the honest caveat at each end of the scale.
The rest of this family
Each page here covers one part of the territory: the map starts at what emotional intelligence is.
Find out how you read a room, and how you handle one.
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