The connection between personal responsibility and emotional intelligence to build self awareness and leadership skills.  I illustrate a whole-person approach for being able to progress toward one’s unique goals.

 

For some reason, the term “responsibility” has been misrepresented and misunderstood as a burden, or a component of adulthood that is to be dreaded in a sense. I offer an alternative perspective that will show you why responsibility is a gift and how you can use this gift. Let’s begin by breaking the word responsibility into two sections so it’s easy to see.  Response-ability, i.e. the ability to respond.  Can we agree that an ability can be considered a skill?  Can we agree that skills can be learned? Let’s entertain this interpretation of response-ability to uncover the benefits of improving this skill. 

 

We begin with a basic lesson in leadership and healthy communication. 

 

Reaction vs. response.  

If we allow our emotions to control us in a situation, we have a tendency to react instead of respond.  A reaction can be considered a response that isn’t thought through consciously. It’s probably easy to think of a time when you allowed your emotions to overtake your logic. This is a practice and it’s imperative to keep this one in our spiritual tool-kit as we embark outside our comfort zone.  

 

Comfort zone 

 

What is personal responsibility?

  • The ability to respond
  • Staying present in your experiences
  • Not expecting others to solve your problems for you
  • Embracing challenges
  • An approach that helps to have healthy relationships with self and others
  • Must abandon victim mentality 
  • Living in a way of assuming accountability and being willing to volunteer it if necessary 
  • Developing and deepening personal relationship with intuition, something unique to each one of us. 
  • Committing to a growth mindset
  • Need to feel connected to a purpose in order to find motivation for this route

 

Much of the motivation to embark on this journey, which requires facing our demons and evaluating our short comings along with forgiving and accepting ourselves completely.  This is not an easy practice and if we aren’t connected to our mission or purpose in life, it’s hard to find a reason to do this work.  

 

What kind of reasoning exists to embrace challenges instead of circumventing, dreading or avoiding them? Another mindset shift here: Becoming self-aware to a degree where you have an adequate level of consciousness regarding what is important to you at a deep level. Imagine that we all have a unique purpose on this planet and in order to identify what this is we must remember who we are and what is important to us. 

 

Much of the motivation to embark on this journey, which requires facing our demons and evaluating our short comings along with forgiving and accepting ourselves completely.  This is not an easy practice and if we aren’t connected to our mission or purpose in life, it’s hard to find a reason to do this work.  

 

 

 

Purpose

  • Fulfillment
  • Purpose drives motivation
  • Spiritual being having a human experience 
  • Meditation practice
  • A desire to leave a legacy
  • Make a valuable contribution to the world

 

Emotional intelligence 

-   View emotions as experiences

  • Allowing oneself to experience emotions
  • Observing internal responses to situations, recognizing these feelings that result
  • Viewing emotions as something we are experiencing, not who we are (separating identity from emotion)
  • Trusting ourselves to not get lost in the emotion and remembering it is temporary 
  • Emotions are tools to use for navigating our course through life
  • Addressing codependent fear of not wanting to hurt other people’s feelings by expressing our own.
  • Not take things personally. 
  • Change perspective to embracing emotions as a tool for growth and be willing to let ourselves experience them.  
  • E = energy: E-motion: Energy in motion
  • Self-acceptance 

 

 

We must trust ourselves to allow an emotional process to move through us. To help us allow this we can remember that emotions are temporary.  Watch most children for an example- they can be hysterical and crying and then 30 minutes later they are happy and laughing again.  We run into problems when we resist allowing feelings to enter and move through us! Emotions are tools to help us navigate this world and by adopting a practice to identify our own feelings we can make decisions toward fulfilling our unique purpose. There’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to this as we each have a different design and what’s right for some isn’t right for all. That’s why we are given these tools and we need to learn how to use them! If we allow ourselves to surrender to the experience so that it affects us, we create the right circumstances to grow and learn from situations.  When we are numb to our emotions, we have a tendency to repeat the same mistakes over and over again because we are not conscious of how our choices make us feel.  Make no mistake however, just because we have become numb to our feelings on the surface doesn’t mean these repeated lessons aren’t affecting us.  By cutting off the cycle with an unwillingness to be open to an honest consequence of a decision, we are allowing our mind to navigate our path instead of our heart and body.  In order to journey towards wholeness, we need to improve our practices of considering our mind, body and soul in all of our decisions and carrying the concept with us mindfully. This is a challenging practice because the mind can be very attached to its thoughts and when the body contradicts the mind, it causes us to reevaluate and sometimes forcing us to adjust our beliefs.  

shift from COGNITIVE awareness (in your head) to CONSCIOUS awareness (in your heart). 

 

Belief system: 

Just this practice in itself of adjusting our belief system is a basic skill which is an absolute requirement. It’s not possible to do this work without this skill. 

 

 

Self-awareness 

  • Who am I?
  • Intuition
  • Strengths and weaknesses
  • Being yourself
  • Unique in many ways
  • Acceptance

 

Know thyself- what is there to know?

  • likes/dislikes
  • Feelings/ emotions/ energy in motion
  • What makes me feel “good”/ What makes me feel “bad”
  • What’s important to me?
  • What are my goals and motivations
  • What brings me joy?
  • What are my fears?
  • What are my values?

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. 

 

 

 

 

Self awareness + Self acceptance = Power and confidence 


Self-acceptance: Stop judging ourselves so harshly and taking things personally.  While getting to know ourselves we learn the we didn’t consciously choose everything about ourselves.  We must become observers in order to be able to learn who we are.  It’s about loving ourselves for who we are. And we must also ask these questions to discover these things,  Some things we don’t like about ourselves we have the power to change and some things we can’t.  Whether we do or we don’t, we must make the reoccurring decision to love ourselves in this moment right now just as we are.  

 

The relationship between Self awareness + Self acceptance

 

 

Self-awareness requires emotional competence

Emotional competence/ emotional intelligence is being able to identify and differentiate emotions.  For example: happy, sad, angry, frustrated, excited, scared, etc.