One of the main ingredients of happiness is self-awareness, the ability to recognize/identity one's emotions and the impact they have on you. If we are not able to identify our emotions, how can we know if we are happy? This section will cover the RULER program and introduce three different strategies for improving emotional awareness.

R.U.L.E.R is a program designed by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to help individuals build and develop their emotional intelligence.

R.U.L.E.R stands for:

Recognizing emotions in self and others

Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions

Labelling emotions accurately

Expressing emotions appropriately

Regulating emotions effectively

The possession of these five skills results in a high level of emotional intelligence. The Yale Center as well as other groups have developed different tools to grow these 5 points.

Most people lack the vocabulary to identify, label, and describe their emotions. Emotions are often labelled using only 3 words: bad, good, and fine, which doesn't help the individual or those around them to understand their feelings and what can be done to help. You have surely found yourself describing your emotions with these 3 words as well. In order to solve this issue an extensive list of emotional vocabulary has been compiled to help you label your feelings.

The previously discussed tools are mostly centered on the individual but more social tools are also available. Moodscope is a great emotional intelligence training tool that involves both social interaction and individual work. Moodscope helps you understand the causes of your emotions through a graph composed from daily emotion tracking. You can head to this link, https://www.moodscope.com/, watch the great introductory video, create an account, and begin your first session. In each session there are cards that have the numbers 0-3, 0 being not at all and 3 being extremely, and an emotion in the middle. All you have to do is flip the card until the description of your emotion is at the top and click on it. Your data will be tracked on a graph that you can check anytime of the day, and on each point you can also add a description as to what you think the cause of the day's rating is. Feel free to also add buddies that can help you understand trends and can keep you accountable. Overall this tool might work for you or maybe you prefer one of the previous methods, but as long as you are training your emotional intelligence you are on your way to being a more self-aware person. After using Moodscope for around two weeks I personally think that it is a great tool to help develop emotional intelligence. I was able to get a great understanding of what caused certain emotions inside of me and how to label them. I also found that it gave me a desire to improve my level of happiness and overall well being.