© Steve Whiteford 2021 Learning Emotional Self-Awareness and being mindful of feelings and thoughts can present a “chicken or the egg” dilemma. Which will be my first cure. the thought or the feeling? There may be some very precise neuroscience I’ve not read, but from personal experience, I’m moved to say it really doesn’t matter….
© Steve Whiteford 2021 Oddly, self-awareness is a quality some people actively resist. It requires the courage to be introspective, to truly consider the meaning of your way of being and its effectiveness. It often comes to us through feedback or criticism from others, but to accept that, you need to trust the person’s perceptions…
© Steve Whiteford 2021 Becoming a creative professional in the arts is often prefaced with many warnings about the tough road ahead. My own decision to be an actor at eight years old was immediately scoffed at and discouraged by my parents. Little did they know that my attraction to the art was based in…
© Steve Whiteford 2021 If you are a ghost-er, therefore a ghost – unlike a Halloween ghost you’re probably not frightening at all. Like most ghosts people report having experienced, you’re just an annoying practitioner of “now you see me, now you don’t.” Ghosting is akin to Gaslighting because it’s a denial, a charade. And…
© Steve Whiteford 2021 Identity and ego are good things. They are how we uniquely define ourselves and how we relate to the world. In best-case, we use them to accurately enact our values and allow us to function effectively in the world. But it’s a problem when we are strongly committed to an inflexible…
© Steve Whiteford 2021 Consider Scrooge. We all have an internal Scrooge. Some aspect of our values, beliefs, or behavior that is driven by a lack of self-awareness, possibly repressed responses to unresolved events in our lives. Working with emotional intelligence requires an openness to incremental self-awareness. To acknowledge the visitations of feeling throughout the…
Listening to Daniel Pink’s The Power of Regret, I was happy to be reminded of Fundamental Attribution Error in his discussion of Foundational Regret.
Between Daniel Pink and Daniel Kahneman I’ve had Cognitive Bias on my mind. When you really explore it, I think you’ll find Cognitive Bias begins with and is very difficult to separate from feeling. For instance, when we make a Fundamental Attribution Error, our emotions want to reject responsibility, or when we fault someone else’s…
Dealing with disagreement feels like conflict – having an opposing position, experiencing discomfort, and a desire to be right or win. The intensity of disagreements can vary greatly based on the stakes. Sometimes disagreements are just differences of preferences or result from unexamined interactions and habitual moods. From “I don’t like the way you did…
The pursuit of Emotional Intelligence is not for the faint of heart. The foundational skill for its pursuit is self-awareness. Like peeling an onion, it’s apt to result in tears and involves shucking many layers. I remember several years ago when a friend was redesigning my web, I stopped by to see how it was…