Emotional awareness

Emotional awareness has been described as knowing, very specifically, how we feel. It means being able to label our feelings with specific words. At its highest level, it could be perceived as being able to predict our feelings. The Ladies of the Lamp are 100 percent compliant with describing and labeling feelings with specific words. Our postings, both in the learning team folder and in the main classroom, are fraught with descriptions and labels of our feelings, thoughts and opinions. The area where we could turn the team into a truly innovative model would be the prediction of our feelings. In order to predict the future, it is sometimes useful to look at the past. During our doctoral residency, we all expressed an affinity for the writings of Abraham Maslow, much to the chagrin of our philosophy instructor.

Abraham H. Maslow in the new edition his book Eupsychian Management, re-titled Maslow on Management states “The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important” (1998, p.

English: Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs Itali...

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9). This quote definitely describes the Ladies of the Lamp. We all are working toward the common goal of the Doctor of Education degree in educational leadership. We demonstrate the importance of this goal by putting our time, money and effort toward the goal. We are working well, evidenced by the good grade we received on the first learning team assignment and the good natured humor which circulates throughout our postings.

“There must be an ability to identify with a fairly wide circle of human beings, ideally with the whole human species” (p.21) said Maslow (1998) and this is an appropriate description of the Ladies of the Lamp. First, we are members of a learning team encompassing a wide circle of women from different socioeconomic levels,