To improve our self-awareness and self-management, it is crucial to be fully aware of our feelings. Unfortunately, our childhood upbringing often teaches us to bury our feelings. “Big boys don’t cry,” is a message most boys hear often. Some girls hear it too, “Big girls don’t cry.” In response they learn to bury their sad feelings. Often girls hear, “Nice girls don’t say that.” They learn to bury their angry feelings.

Likewise, in a myriad of ways, many other feelings get squashed by our parents and others. We learn to keep them down, out of sight. In some situations of life, this strategy may pay off. You don’t want to bark at your boss immediately when you get angry at him/her. In my Module on Assertiveness in my Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop, Leadership Communication™, we often discuss when to express our feelings and when to avoid expression.

However, you have to be aware of your feelings before you have any conscious choice. The problem is that we have often learned so well to bury our feelings as children that we don’t even feel them now. They stay hidden from us too. For example, we may feel angry but not notice it. Then someone else says, “You look angry.” We are surprised, but instantly we recognize that they are right, we do feel angry. With their help, the feeling popped out. Or, it was already out, and then it popped into our awareness.

What if you could recognize feelings sooner? Then you could consciously choose what to do about them. Unfortunately, often we are acting on the basis of feelings that we are not aware of. To improve our self-management, we must increase the occasions when we are able to consciously choose what to do versus just acting out our feelings.

Becoming more aware of feelings is a learning process most of us need to work on. The process is analogous to learning how to play a musical instrument. You have to learn the scales and practice them a lot. If you tried to jump to a melodic tune right away, you usually failed. First you had to learn the scales and become aware of each move on the instrument to make each note.

In the world of emotions, we need to “learn the scales” too by growing our vocabulary for feelings. Some people only use a few words to describe their feelings: glad sad, mad, afraid, etc. In the Appendix of my Participant Workbook for my Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop, Leadership Communication™, I list dozens of feelings. You can get this list from my Self-Study version too.

I suggest you hold this or another thorough list of feelings in front of you and practice naming feelings in different situations. Learn the nuances of different names of feelings. Are you mad? Then decide how much. If only a little, choose a word on the low end of the scale such as “miffed” or if a lot, on the high end, such as “furious.” Start using more refined, subtle words for feelings rather than just settling for words like mad. Become versatile and flexible in your vocabulary. Of course, we also need many other ways to grow our self-awareness.

You can read about or listen to recordings of more ways to increase your self-awareness in my Self-Study Program. And you can actually practice these ways in my Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop,Leadership Communication™, which has a whole Module on Self-Management. For more information, please call me, Bill Murray, at 919-419-9460 or contact me from my web site link, “Contact Us,” or read on our web site’s home page.