Emotional Intelligence Self-Awareness Exercise

Purpose

Self-awareness is one of the important competencies within emotional intelligence. Self-awareness is about understanding your strengths, limitations, attitudes, values and motivations. In this exercise, delegates have an opportunity to reflect on their values and see exactly what matters to them the most. Self-awareness helps people understand what they believe now and how this might have changed from the past. Hence, this exercise can be conducted periodically, such as once a year, and you can expect to get different results each time. Comparison of these results on their own can be quite educational and further help to increase self-awareness.

Objective

Go through the values provided and select the best ones based on the instructions provided.

What You Need

• A copy of the “Value List” provided below.

Setup

• Explain to delegates that in this exercise they will be examining themselves in respect to a range of values. By understanding the values, they will boost their self-awareness.
• Provide a copy of the “Value List” to each delegate.
• Ask delegates to identify ten values that they strongly believe in or that are important to them. The list is provided as a reference only. They can add any other value they feel strongly about to the list and select it as part of their most important ten values. Ask them to write these values on a separate piece of paper. For best results, they should be as honest as they can. They should not pick values to show off, for being politically correct or popular fashion. They should choose only based on what’s important to them.
• Allocate about 5 minutes for this part.
• Now in the next step, ask the delegates to select only five values from the ten they have selected. This is now much harder, but the selection process will force them to see what they truly value the most.
• Allocate 2 minutes for this part.
• Allocate a few more minutes for reflection so delegates can think about what their choices really mean to them.
• Bring back everyone together and ask them to share their values and observations one by one. If the delegates know each other or are part of a team, sharing important values can be quite educational as people can see what’s most important to other team members.
• Follow with a discussion.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 2 minutes

Activity: 5 min selecting ten values + 2 min selecting five values + 3 min reflection = 10 minutes

Group Feedback: 10 minutes

Discussion

What did you learn about yourself in this exercise? Was it difficult to select the ten values? How about narrowing it down to five values? Did you add any new values to the list? What did you think of other delegates’ values? If you know the other delegates, did their choices match your expectations? If you have gone through this exercise in the past, were your values any different? What does this suggest?

Value List