“Emotional self-awareness is the ability to recognize your feelings, differentiate between them, know why you are feeling these feelings, and recognize the impact your feelings have on others around you.”
The most important thing what comes first is: emotional self-awareness – that you explore and understand yourself. Only then you are able to change.
Because if you don’t recognize what you are doing, why you are doing it and the way it effects others, you cannot change. You think of yourself: “nothing is wrong with me” – so therefore you don’t see the need to change.
If we are not conscious of what we are feeling we won’t be successful in:
– building key relationships
– noticing when we are feeling stressed
– our capacity for empathy
– offering sensitively verbal communication to others
This ability of emotional self-awareness will “empower you to work toward improvement in all of emotional intelligence’s other areas. Without it, though you might sincerely try to address problems one by one, you’d end up going round in circles. You’d get no feedback; you’d be unable to monitor your progress (…).”
People who have a lot of self-awareness see, when they are “out of sorts, irritable, sad, or seductive, and perceive how these feelings alter their behavior in a way that may alienate others. Usually, they can also figure out what incident precipitated their feelings. The capacity to know what they are feeling and how they are behaving allows them a degree of control over their potentially alienating behavior.”
(quotes and content from: E-Book: The IQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and your success; 3rd Edition, Steven J. Stein, Ph.D., Howard E.Book, M.D.
life coaching colouryourdream 
This is so true.