Growing your social awareness is the third step in growing your emotional intelligence. There are three key parts to growing your social awareness. First, there is growing empathy, then organizational awareness, and finally taking on a service orientation.

In growing self-management I mentioned using a personality tool to discover your communications style and better understand some of the challenges you will need to overcome to strengthen communications. You’ll have a communications style you may assume fits everyone but doesn’t, and even may cause tension in your interactions with others. Applying that technique to others so you better understand how they like to communicate is a great first step. Then, you can adjust your communications style to better match theirs – not communicate like them, rather follow guidance for speaking to that personality type to have more effective communications, or at least to “get” their reaction to what you say and how you say it.

As you grow your social awareness muscle you use the same technique you use to better understand yourself, but you use it to better understand others. The picture below shows the four major personality groupings and how each sees themselves and how others may see them. It also provides some guidance for interacting with others. As you grow social awareness, you balance your need to be yourself with the need to interact with others and meet in the middle. Once you start seeing others, you can start to imagine how you would feel and react if you were them.