Self-regulation and emotional-intelligence work hand-in-hand to help bring a person’s awareness of their inner self to surface. These two psychological characteristics do so by giving a person the opportunity to distinguish judgments from feelings and rational thinking from emotional feelings. Furthermore, self-regulation and emotional-intelligence do the same in reverse, by assisting us in aligning our judgments to our feelings, and our rational thinking with our emotional feeling, both in which complement the other and offer an individual a higher level of self-awareness and understanding. Together, self-awareness and self-regulation help us respond to life’s occurrences more critically, with more understanding, and with more rationale.

Emotional intelligence, to me, is having an intimate relationship and understanding of how we feel about, process, and react to the diverse situations life throws our way. I believe emotional intelligence is a reflection of a person’s inner awareness and reveals their personal characteristics, especially in moments of high stress and uncertainty. Also, I believe emotional-awareness is something we all have a tendency of underappreciating. So often, we seem to react with a ‘knee-jerk’ and do not take the time to develop useful and meaningful thoughts that lead to positive reactions.

An example I like to use for how I display emotional-awareness is when my children have mini meltdowns. Often my five-year-old and four-year-old twins have a hard time processing their emotions and can be a lot to handle all at once. In these situations, I like to take a short but needed moment to process the situation and give as much patience as possible. I come from a family with a history of high-stress anxiety so I am always on alert and try to stay aware of my stress levels. I always take my time through talking with my girls collectively and individually, followed by taking time to reflect on each situation to have a better understanding of how to make the next one a little easier for everyone.

I chose this screenshot of a post I added to Instagram a short while ago as it is a fine representation of what I wrote of above. The verbiage tells the story and I find it perfect for the assignment. Also, I love the humor aspect of it!