Today’s Road Map Strategies to Improve your Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence Planning your response for when you encounter emotional situations How your EAP can help

1. Self-Awareness:
Tools for managing emotional
situations

2. Today’s Road Map
• Strategies to Improve your Self-Awareness
and Emotional Intelligence
•Planning your response for when you
encounter emotional situations
• How your EAP can help
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3. Emotions inspire our actions
That’s why they’re called E-motions!
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4. Understanding the impact of exposure
to emotional situations
• First – it is perfectly understandable that
regular exposure to a wide variety of human
emotions will eventually have an impact
• Coping with these emotions requires
preparation and planning in advance
• A great starting point is to understand the
basics of Emotional Intelligence
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5. Two Key Areas of Emotional Intelligence
1. Self-Awareness
2. Self-Management

6. Self-Awareness
• Self-Awareness is the ability to accurately sense and identify personal
feelings, along with the ability to understand and evaluate them. To be fully
aware of your feelings you must first identify them, and then you must
acknowledge and accept them.
• Self-awareness is concerned with knowing about your own internal states,
preferences, resources, and perceptions.
• As you become more self-aware, you become better able to be in touch with
your own feelings.
• Self-awareness is very important to maintaining composure in an emotional
situation. Not being in touch with your own feelings in sufficient degree can
handicap your overall effectiveness and coping ability.
• Individuals who have high self-awareness are able to conduct accurate self-
appraisals, are self-confident, are authentic, welcome feedback, and tend to
perceive situations accurately.

7. Developing Self-Awareness
Overall Self-Awareness is comprised of
three major areas:
• Emotional self-awareness
• Accurate self-assessment
• Self-confidence

8. Emotional Self-Awareness
• Emotional self-awareness is the ability to recognize your own emotions
and their effects, to identify how you react to cues in the environment,
and to understand how your emotions affect your overall emotional
wellness.
• Individuals in which this competency is highly developed:
– Are aware of their feelings
– Understand the connection between their own feelings and what they think, do, and
say
– Know why certain feelings occur in themselves
– Recognize how their feelings affect their performance
– Understand the implications of their actions
– Are aware of how they are guided by their values and goals

9. Accurate Self-Assessment
• Accurate self-assessment is the process of identifying your inner
resources, abilities, strengths, and acknowledging and accepting your
limits. It is a key factor in ones ability to self-regulate and accept
feedback and support from others when dealing with emotional
situations
• Individuals in which this area is highly developed:
– Have a sense of humor about themselves
– Are knowledgeable of their own strengths and weaknesses
– Have the ability to be reflective and to learn from experience
– Are receptive to candid feedback, new perspectives, continuous learning,
and self-development

10. Self-Confidence
• Self-confidence is your own belief in your capability to accomplish a
task. Self-confidence includes acknowledging and affirming that you are
the best person for the job that you are doing. It is also about conveying
your ideas and opinions in a confident manner and having a positive
impact on others.
• Individuals in which this area is highly developed:
– The belief that they are the most capable person for the job
– The ability to present themselves in an assured, unhesitating manner
– The courage to voice views that may be unpopular and to go out on a limb
when following their convictions
– The ability to be decisive and to make sound decisions despite uncertainties
and pressures

11. How to Improve and Develop Self-Awareness
• Increasing your self-awareness will require serious
thought and effort.
• You will have to be objective about yourself and your
own perceptions as you examine your inner feelings and
explore your reactions to the people and events in your
work life.
• Specifically, you need to objectively examine the ways
that you make appraisals, understand which situations
are likely to impact you, and be confident in your
requests for help or support
• You should reflect on how to identify those situations that
are impacting you and understand why.

12. Tips for Developing Self-Awareness
Emotional Self-Awareness
– Pay attention to the physical reactions aroused in your body during stressful
situations.
– Keep a journal where you write down your behaviors and inner feelings
when faced with stressful situations on a daily basis.
Accurate Self-Assessment
– When interacting with people with whom you feel comfortable, ask for their
constructive feedback about your actions /reactions and behaviors.
– Make a list of what you believe to be your strengths as well as any areas
where development is needed, and then compare your own list and a similar
list prepared by someone else.
Self-Confidence
– Adjust your thinking and behaviors so that they closely match those of
someone whose models that trait of self-confidence—with that model in
mind, act decisively during emotional situations.
– Find someone you trust – a “Buddy” who would be willing to help you to
decompress after a stressful situation.

13. Self-Management
• Self-Management is the ability to
understand your emotions and then use
that understanding to cope and recover
after stressful situations
• Self-management is also the ability to use
your feelings to reason well and act
intentionally.

14. Why is Self-Management Important?
• Self-management is important because when people are able to
better manage their emotions, they perform better under stress, and
can recover faster after stressful situations
• The more people allow emotions to control and direct their behavior,
the harder it is for them to regularly deal with emotional situations.
• People who are good managers of their emotions are open to
change, effective in mood management, and consistent in stress
management. They are intentional, productive, and behave in a
reasonable and rational way.

15. Tips for Improving Self-Management
Emotional Self-Control
– Make a list of all the things that can cause you to react in an emotional
situation. Create a strategy to prevent these triggers from causing you
to lose your composure and your self-control - -ie. deep breathing, take
a walk, talk to your buddy
– Reduce your stress though physical activity, or other types of relaxation.
– Spend some time exploring the values and principals that you feel most
strongly about and write down the important ones. Next to each one
examine which situations you encounter that may trigger an emotional
reaction from you. Be aware of these situations as they arise going
forward

16. Tips for Improving Self-Management
Conscientiousness
– Be aware that external factors causing you stress can limit your
ability to manage stress brought on by emotional situations at work.
Are your external pressures building up? How can you address
those beforehand?
– Build routine checks into your calendar to ensure devotion to
deadlines, policies, and standards. In the event that you find
something that does not reach the desired standard or that will take
much longer than the time frame given, work though your plan to
give the task at hand more time and effort. Take charge of the
stressors you can control to improve your resiliency to those things
that you can’t – like the emotional impact of stress in others

17. Tips for Improving Self-Management
Most Importantly – Cultivate Optimism!!
– For two or three days, make a list of any difficulty you encountered, and
write down the consequences next to each one. Look for a way to view
the situation with a positive outlook
– Smile. Consciously make every effort to encourage positivity in others.
– Focus on shifting your mindset from negative to positive in as many
areas as you can, so that your resiliency to those situations that are
overwhelmingly negative or stressful is much higher

18. www.mybalanceworks.com
1-800-EAP-CALL or 1-800-327-2255
24 hours a day, 7 days a week

19. BalanceWorks is an enhanced Employee
Assistance Program available to employees
and family members
• Provides 24/7 confidential, short-term counseling
services
• Provides resources for achieving work/life balance
• It is included at no additional cost to the employee
What is BalanceWorks?
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20. ls BalanceWorks Confidential?
Confidentiality is a key principle of BalanceWorks
• No information is released without the
employee’s written permission, except as
required by law
• Legally required exceptions include:
• Threats or harm to oneself
• Threat to harm others
• When the safety of a child is in question
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21. Who is Eligible For BalanceWorks?
Eligible employees and eligible family members can
participate in BalanceWorks. Eligible family
members include:
 Employee’s spouse or domestic partner
 Employee’s dependent children up to age 26
 Employee’s unmarried children, regardless of age,
residing with the employee who are mentally or
physically incapable of earning their own living
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22. Personal Assistant Service
 Personal Assistants are work/life experts who can provide
information on a wide range of topics
 PAs will help address day-to-day responsibilities or major
life events including:
 PAs can be contacted as often as needed by phone, by
accessing the mybalanceworks.com web site, or by the
mobile app, BalanceGo.
• Vacation Planning
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 30 minute no cost phone consult per
separate issue per year with a financial
professional
 Get advice and resources on any financial
matter, including budgeting, bankruptcy,
estate planning, and credit report issues
 Telephonic appointments made at
member’s convenience
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per issue per year with a licensed attorney
 Get legal advice and resources regarding legal
matters including wills, custody matters,
purchasing a home, small claims, etc.
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business days
 If the individual chooses to hire an attorney after
the initial consultation, there will be a 25%
discount on additional services
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25. Counseling Services
 eni offers professional short term counseling for a variety of
concerns, including but not limited to:
 Marital/Relationship problems
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 Stress
 Fear
 Eligible members receive up to 6 sessions with a counselor
for each separate issue that arises during a calendar year
 A national network of over 40,000+ counseling providers
 If needed, eni will assist employees in finding long term
counseling that is covered by the employee’s health
insurance or by providing information on community based
services
 Anxiety
 Grief/Bereavement
 Alcohol or substance abuse
 Denial
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26. Contact us at:
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visit us online at:
www.mybalanceworks.com
Download the app:
BalanceGo
For additional information
Consult your Benefit Specialists
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27. Thank You!