Beyond Emotional Intelligence E-Book

S. Michele Nevarez

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 454

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Discover the hidden inner workings of your mind so you can break unhelpful habits and set yourself on the path to achieving your full potential. Beyond Emotional Intelligence reveals how our ingrained mental tendencies can either help or hinder us, depending on how conscious we are of their influence over our lives. Whether we seek to set and achieve our desired outcomes, improve our relationships, or live in alignment with what we value most, we need emotional intelligence (EI) to identify and overcome the mental patterns that may be keeping us stuck. In this book, you'll embark on 12 Self-Discoveries that will help you get to know yourself, so you can stop getting in your own way. You'll learn how, with practice, you can retrain your mind to develop new thought patterns that will serve you better as you work toward your life's aspirations. Each of the 12 Self-Discoveries offers unique clues and insights into who we are and why we do what we do. They function as an internal barometer for our triggers, emotional patterns, and mental habits. Ultimately, they provide a clear path to uncover and work with our habits of mind and patterns of action and reaction, giving us the possibility to exercise our own agency at key moments in our lives. Beyond Emotional Intelligence presents the 12 Self-Discoveries framework which provides you with a solid foundation from which you can begin to grow. * Discover how your hidden thought patterns are influencing your life and your relationships with others * Build Emotional Intelligence as you learn to recognize your reactions, perceptions, and value systems * Use the highly regarded 12 Self-Discoveries model to identify your mental roadblocks and remove them with new habits of mind * Learn proven methods for influencing your outcomes, de-cluttering your mind, and shift your own awareness This book will be your guide as you embark on a rigorous process of self-discovery as you learn to embrace your inner wisdom and take control of your results.

Leseprobe

Praise for Beyond Emotional Intelligence

“Michele Nevarez has done it! Her years of study and personal experience have come together in a beautiful way to deliver Beyond Emotional Intelligence. This is a book that melds intellect with humanity and provides a framework for truly understanding mind-based habits facilitating an existence with life's most valuable riches.”

—Kim AdesPresident and Founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and The Journal That Talks Back

“Finally, a book that focuses on developing the inner landscape and habits that have profound impact on the quality of our life experience. Brilliant, insightful and actionable practices to take living to the next level through leveraging the power of your mind and the abilities you hold within to shape your everyday experience.”

—Carla ReevesMindset Coach and Host of the podcast, Differently

“Beyond Emotional Intelligence takes the imperative yet intellectual subject of emotional intelligence and makes it as accessible as having a conversation about your most favorite ideas. This book creates a pathway for a generation of thinkers, doers and dreamers from all walks of life to understand themselves and those around them better. To me, it is a must-read.”

—Deepak RamolaFounder and Artistic Director of Project FUEL

BEYOND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

A GUIDE TO ACCESSING YOUR FULL POTENTIAL

S. MICHELE NEVAREZ

Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone] or fax [phone].

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic formats. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nevarez, S. Michele, author. Title: Beyond Emotional Intelligence : a guide to accessing your full potential / S. Michele Nevarez. Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2022] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021036639 (print) | LCCN 2021036640 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119800200 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119800224 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119800217 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Emotional intelligence. Classification: LCC BF637.S4 N466 2022 (print) | LCC BF637.S4 (ebook) | DDC 158.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036639LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036640

Cover Image: Barn Swallow: © Andrew Howe/Getty Images Picture Frame: © amtitus/Getty Images

Cover Design: Wiley

To my father, Robert Carrizales: may the profound sense of love, gratitude, and loss I feel from our paths having but narrowly crossed—you departing as I was arriving—dissolve within the Dharmakaya level of aware emptiness. Let us meet where there is no coming and going or meeting and parting. Let us all meet in the open field of our own awareness.

Preface

We all have habits, but we often don't take much, if any, time to consider the many kinds of habits we have, the purpose they each serve, or their impact on our lives and the lives of those around us. Take my grandma Harriett, for example, whose mental habits had steep consequences yet ultimately served as coping mechanisms as she attempted to organize her environment to deal with the unwieldy responsibilities placed upon her. She was born a twin in the 1920s, weighing in at three pounds. Not expected to live, the nurse attending her and her twin brother's birth took them both home, where she fed them goat's milk and kept them snuggled in cotton next to one another inside a cigar box, which she kept warm inside a propped-open oven—a story that no doubt bears the marks of a proper fairy tale. Over the course of her life, Harriett suffered from a series of “mental breakdowns”—a word that when uttered was always in hushed tones or guarded whispers. One of these said mental fallings out occurred following the birth of her fifth child—my mom. Each time Harriett suffered what was deemed a mental collapse, she was sent away to Warm Springs, which only later did I come to learn wasn't a resort where guests went to enjoy the salubrious effects of soaking in natural hot springs but was in fact the Wyoming state mental institution, where guests received generously dosed cocktails of medicine before, during, and after shock treatment. For all we know, Harriett was just experiencing postpartum depression each time she had a child or was having a difficult time coping as she attempted to raise her five children in a four-room shack without running water. Sadly, we'll never really know which came first, her “mental illness” or the “remedies” she received to treat it.

While we each have a unique constellation of circumstances and contexts in which we find ourselves, we must each ultimately make our way in this world. Our visible habits are born from the sum total of our life circumstances and experiences. But it is from our invisible habits of mind, our perceptions and how we make sense of them, that we set everything into motion. Though our brain mostly curates our experiences for us, it's up to each of us to figure out what we have at our own disposal to intervene. Not unlike attempting to juggle a set of Cutco knives, we often find ourselves facing a juxtaposition of unexpected and ever-evolving circumstances as we grapple with the intricacies of our own lives and those of the people around us. Yet we don't receive any formal training to navigate life's mysterious bits, which nonetheless represent the vast majority of what we wake up to and have to face each day. Instead, we don habits like armor as we go through life, making the best of it, crossing our fingers, hoping today isn't the day we'll come apart at the seams. Each habit we have serves one if not many purposes, one of which is as a coping mechanism we unconsciously craft and come to rely upon, often well past its expiration date. We continue to pull from the bank of experiences we've had up to this point as we attempt to make sense of and adapt to our surroundings. We are each the beneficiaries of the belief structures, the artifacts of meaning, passed down to us through the respective contexts influencing us since birth—our shared and unique lineages of sense-making.

As is the case with most of us at various points in our lives, Harriett's life circumstances exceeded her ability to cope with life's devastatingly precise blows. Harriett wound up getting married right out of high school and was immediately catapulted into a life of abject poverty, hard work, and the stress of dealing with situations she'd not encountered up to that point. As the story goes, she and her twin had supposedly been coddled as they were growing up, no doubt in response to the thread upon which they precariously glided into this life and upon which they remained delicately balanced thereafter. Harriett had many children in close succession following her husband's—my grandfather's—return from World War II during a time he was meant to have attended Dartmouth College, just as his own father had. Instead, he found himself responsible for the care of a growing family and a wife struggling to keep all of the remnants of their lives stitched together. Directly upon his return from the war, he was put in charge of the daily operations of the family farm. It was a situation in which no one was set up for success, yet everyone had to carry on the best they could anyway—no doubt a familiar refrain that plays at times softly and at other times more loudly against the backdrop of everyone's lives. Each suffers the collateral damage life doles out. Like spoonsful of ipecac, we swallow what is placed at our lips with the faith that it will help more than it harms, knowing full well that there will be consequences.

For Harriett, these life challenges yielded erratic and unstable states of mind, not to mention an array of notably unconventional habits. While surely not an intentional strategy, her unusual habits served the function of getting her through life's extraordinary circumstances. They also happen to be what we fondly remember her by now. If her novel and unexpected combination of words didn't have the effect of keeping you teetering on the edge of your seat, then her quirky collection of habits certainly would. Upon entering her house, guests might be greeted by a rotting chicken carcass sitting atop the washing machine in the mudroom, where the anticipation of what lay in store would dissuade them from taking off their shoes. Harriett would stow away freshly baked chocolate cake in the filing cabinet, possibly with the logic no one would find it in there, although everyone eventually did. She cultivated a spectacular garden of colorful molds and crystals she kept inside the refrigerator—juxtaposed with the food that would be served each day. Growing up, my mom had to fish her clothes out of the deep freezer where Harriet conveniently placed any freshly washed laundry in twisted heaps parked next to packages of frozen meat wrapped in butcher paper. Each morning my mom would have to excavate, thaw, dry, and iron the frozen clothing if there were to be any hope of reanimating and donning pieces of her wardrobe again. Imagine what those kinds of experiences prepares a human for.

Harriett also had a number of pithy sayings we now lovingly refer to as Harriettisms. After the untimely death of my cousin, my grandma Harriett offered up the following words of wisdom when the discussion among family turned to the topic of the upcoming birth of my daughter Sonya: “You only have so much potential, and that's it.” She then made a clicking noise with her tongue against the roof of her palette as if she were suddenly atop a horse signaling it to giddy up and move on out before throwing her head back in unbridled laughter. While everyone else exchanged nervous and furtive glances around the table, someone thankfully broke the uneasy silence with a suggestion that we have the choice combination of words embroidered on a baby blanket. It was a toss-up between that and another of Harriett's favorite sayings, “You don't have the sense God gave a soda cracker!”—a phrase, if you were the recipient of, you could be sure wasn't a compliment.

As is the case with many people we interact with in our lives, dialogue with Harriett was more like a one-way conversation, from her to you, interspersed with rhetorical questions she mostly didn't want you to answer, although nodding was tolerated. She would often go on and on telling stories about the Emblem Bench. As a child I thought she was referring to some kind of home base, a place where people go to rest and take refuge from being chased as they do in the game of tag, which in this case ironically it kind of was. The Emblem Bench was how she referred to the small farming community in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming—population 23—where she and her family lived on the Edwards family ranch. Other times, she would become engrossed in telling stories about Werbelows, a reference many mistook for mythical creatures or a species of marmots when, in fact, she was referring to the neighbors whose surname was Werbelow. Yet despite all Harriett came up against over the course of her life, she managed to keep emerging and prevailing. She outlived my grandfather by a decade and passed away at the age of 88 on Thanksgiving Day.

Like Harriett, we are all dealt a seemingly random and at times brutal hand from a deck that seems hopelessly stacked against us. While we do our best to keep everything straight, we often find ourselves dropping what we can no longer hold or adding to an ever-evolving inventory of mismatched sets and runs as we attempt to discern which cards to retain, discard, or simply play. Similarly, it's up to each of us to figure out which aspects of ourselves and our largely unexplored habits of mind will go unchecked as they predispose and set into motion our actions that define our outcomes—stark reminders of the choices we've made in an ongoing tally of our wins and losses.

We each have habits; although yours are likely different than Harriett's, they also serve some purpose in your life. Whether they bear the mark of tediousness and routine or take the form of stories and beliefs intended to help us cope, we each have them in spades. We come to rely upon a repertoire of habits—an entourage at the beck and call of our mind. Yet among the variety of purposes our habits serve, the one our brain and body is by design the most preoccupied with is the conservation and efficient use of our body's resources. As our brain perpetually predicts and anticipates what's coming next, it adjusts the balance in our allostatic reserve. Anything it perceives will require a greater metabolic lift, such as applying conscious thought or attention, carries a heftier price tag. Habits partially solve for that by bypassing the need or permission for our conscious involvement.

Typically, we think of habits relative to our daily living patterns, like whether we managed to make it to the gym at least once before our membership expired, or whether we binge-watched yet another British detective series while polishing off our last bottle of wine and peanut M&M's. Others of us might have the aspiration to dial back how many hits of caffeine we imbibe every hour on the hour, or the number of times we consult our pocket oracles—otherwise known as our social media apps—to satisfy our uncontrollable urge to see who liked, loved, or ignored our last post. Who among us isn't waiting on the edge of our seats to check out this week's latest amateur TikTok videos, or to put to bed once and for all the question keeping millions of us up at night and dutifully checking our LinkedIn feeds each day to discover what in fact makes a good leader? A topic that has certainly kept us rolling in a seemingly endless mashup of articles and books on the matter.

Similarly, much of merit has already been written on habit change, mainly from the perspective of tactics and strategies we can take incrementally to shift our rather predictable responses to our outer context and environment. Yet, it is the internal landscape of our own minds that offers the richest set of clues about the constellation of mental habits giving rise to our outer or visible habits. What this book attempts to unravel is how our habits of perception and interpretation shape and inform how we make sense of what we perceive, and, in turn, how we act on them. As the reader, you will learn how what you think, say, and do is largely a habitual expression of how the brain is designed to make sense of each of these dynamic components relative to its own experience; how your habits of mind are the default, the source of how you habitually experience yourself, others, and the world around you. You'll learn to relate to your own awareness and its various qualities as the primary vehicle you have to shift your vantage point in the present moment and your perspective and interpretation of what follows. By developing your own capacity for conscious awareness, you begin to see yourself as an agent capable of discerning when your mental habits governing your interpretative narratives may be getting in the way. You'll learn where in the soup of perception you can have greater conscious involvement and say in what we otherwise experience as a seamless unconscious process. When we learn how to relate to our own cognitive and sensory processes with greater mental acuity, a.k.a. conscious awareness, we welcome the possibility for greater parity between our desired actions and outcomes and the ones we're setting ourselves up to get. At a minimum, we can act with a more informed knowledge of what we do and do not have the capacity to influence within ourselves, and how we can act with greater clarity of being, if not unencumbered then at least less encumbered by our interpretative overlay. Not once and for all, of course, but in each new moment our perceptions call upon us to do so.

You'll be introduced to a number of frameworks and methods throughout the book, each meant to provide you with practical strategies to remind you what you have influence over within yourself and how best to access it in the present moment. Both the MindBody Map and the 12 Self-Discoveries are designed to help you surface and work with the mental models informing the interpretative overlays you use to make sense of your perceptions, and, in turn, the influences that give rise to your self-identity and your social identity, the source and expression of how you move through the world and are in relationship with yourself and others. You'll explore how each of these components of who you are feeds your overall sense of purpose, agency, and wellbeing—a blueprint of what you rely upon to make sense of your experience. As you learn to practice new ways of minding1 and paying attention, you'll gain perspective and insight into how you are the common denominator, the creator of your own experience. You'll learn how enacting various aspects of your own awareness better positions you to evaluate whether the mental models you regularly employ to organize and make sense of your life are reflective of what you want to prioritize and elevate—and if they aren't, how you can start accessing your own awareness to shift your perspective and develop new ways of parsing the meaning you choose to make.

Upon embarking on this inner journey, you'll have a much better sense of whether the mental constructs you employ again and again are yielding the ideal outcomes and relationships you want to have, and how you can become more cognizant of and intentional about how you habitually make sense of life. In the same way you can be strategic about creating the external conditions to be conducive to the behaviors and habits you want to reinforce and promote in yourself, so too will you learn how to do this on an internal basis. By becoming familiar with and learning to notice the qualities and expressions of your own awareness, you'll increase what you're capable of influencing by virtue of your own agency of mind, the primary gateway to accessing your full potential. In short, we will investigate how the meaning we habitually attribute to our perceptions sets us on a trajectory that takes on a momentum and life of its own—for better or worse—and where you have the opportunity to intervene on your own behalf.

Despite our best-laid intentions, the frequency with which we often succumb to indifference or quickly lose interest in anything requiring ongoing effort requires we have enough interest to reinvigorate our aims once we've noticed they've petered out. This dynamic we face within ourselves is not dissimilar to the low-stakes attitude pervasively taken towards the global climate crisis or the various socioeconomic and political divides that run deep in almost every community across the globe. Maybe this is because we don't fully grasp the import our habits have on the individual and collective quality of our lives on this planet, or because the consequences of our habits aren't within close enough reach for our brain, whose primary job it is to assess and prioritize our body's most immediate needs, to have a natural inclination to do so. In other words, we don't immediately spot the causal relationships between perception and interpretation and the outcomes we are repeatedly getting on an individual and societal level. It is owing to a similar disconnect that our divisive and uncharitable narratives about ourselves and each other go unchecked and are at the root of a much deeper and more profound rift we perpetuate not only with other people but with ourselves.

If what I'm writing about has any hope of reaching the level of benefit and positive effect it has the potential to have, then it must also have the capacity to serve as a starting point for us each to unpack, reframe, and rewrite the mental models responsible for the inner state of affairs giving rise to the outer state of affairs. Although I have no background—literally none—in the arena of politics or social justice, the mechanisms for addressing the societal and collective narratives at the heart of any societal divide are not different than what is needed to address the personal narratives and habits of mind that hold us back as individuals in our own lives. After all, it is the stories we tell ourselves and the sense we habitually make of our perceptions that are at the heart of what gives rise to the patterns and themes that keep us complicit and comfortably opaque. Our mental models carry with them the seeds that separate and divide us from ourselves and each other. What plays out at a societal level is basically the same impasse happening inside each one of us on a much broader scope and scale. Anything we do to arrange the outer conditions with the intent to reform, such as much-needed policy and structural changes, will continue to be met with obstacles and resistance unless and until we attempt to dismantle the confusion at the level of individual perception. It's a “both and” value proposition—it's not one or the other. Both have to happen in tandem.

Given the incredibly complex and nuanced nature of perception both from a physiological and psychological perspective, I've taken the liberty of putting together a working model that attempts to capture the perceptual process along with its outcomes. I refer to this as the value stream map of perception (VSM). In case you are wondering what a value stream map is, it's a methodology derived from the discipline of Lean process management and is meant to visually map a process from beginning to end. It is a clever mechanism that allows us to see the big picture and pertinent details in a single visual snapshot. It's an ingenious way to conceptualize and study the elements of any given process and to be able to visualize the otherwise invisible relationship between each step, obstacles to flow, efficiencies to be gained, redundancies, and opportunities for optimization. It enables us to conceptualize what has been right before us all along but has been both too close and too distant for us to see and aptly relate to. By depicting what is otherwise inaccessible to us, we can start to see patterns, themes, and nuances—pointing us toward the inner workings and potential of any given system. With perception and our habits of mind at the center of our inquiry, we can start to uncover where we may consistently be getting hung up or derailed and, in turn, where we have direct and indirect influence on the process.

What could be more important than our ability to influence our own outcomes? I can't think of anything more relevant or important than exercising whatever measure of influence we have over what we think, say, or do in response to our perceptions. Can you? In this book, I introduce you to the mechanisms underlying your patterns of perception and how you habitually make sense of what you perceive. By becoming both an observer and witness to what is operative underneath the results you're consistently getting in your life and in your relationships, you'll practice paying attention to the meaning you attribute to your own experiences. In so doing, you'll learn where the potential exists to influence your own behaviors and habits that might otherwise remain unconsciously ingrained, including those aspects of perception that are preconscious. As you're able to spot and exercise what you have influence over relative to your own experience, you'll be in a better position to act in accordance with what matters to you most. Assuming having influence and efficacy in your own life are important to you, you're in luck because that's exactly what this book will give you—practices that allow you to regain the stronghold of your own mind.

With those objectives in mind, you'll have a chance to investigate where your interpretative overlay may be more of a stumbling block than it is helpful. You'll see where you have the wherewithal to act upon each inflection point, those discrete moments of possibility between what your brain curates for you by way of your perceptions and what you, in turn, make of each of its clues. We have the choice of whether to continue reenacting habitual ways of navigating the vicissitudes of life or to take a step in the direction of what may serve us and those around us better. With each step, the invitation will be to sharpen your own powers of observation, to unearth and piece together your habits of mind, and to engage the introspective and observational capacities of your own awareness. Through rigorous self-discovery, you'll practice employing the internal wisdom you have at your own disposal while exposing the deleterious effects of how you habitually make sense of your experience and learning to cultivate more conducive ones. As you gain insight into how to uncover and work with unhelpful mental patterns, you'll experiment with new ways of producing better responses and outcomes, ones that bring more benefit than they do harm and help more than they hinder.

Note

1

. Minding refers to how we perceive and pay attention, using our mind’s own awareness and powers of observation.

Introduction: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

In the same way scientists discovered an entire ecosystem of microorganisms living within a single drop of water, we can each discover the universe of possibilities percolating within us, a dynamic display just ready to express itself in any number of ways and combinations. As Leonard Mlodinow writes in his book Elastic, the magnificence of the human brain lies in its ability for “bottom-up” or elastic thinking (Mlodinow, 2018). This is the kind of novel and creative thought process that has at its beck and call a seemingly infinite number of possible connections it can draw from, resulting in unique ideas and unexpected creations. The brain's capacity for free and nonlinear association is still more of a mystery than not and hasn't yet been successfully replicated outside of the stomping grounds of the human skull. In the same way the brain's capacity for elastic thinking has given rise to humanity's greatest inventions, our brain has the unique and unparalleled capacity to simulate its own reality, casting predictions that piece together the fundamental ingredients of perception itself. While we each have the experience of leading our lives out in the world, in fact we live our entire lives from the cockpit of our own minds.

Despite the fact that it seems we're strictly responding to stimuli on a reactive basis, contrary to how we experience our own perceptions and emotions, the brain is thought to proactively simulate its own version of reality. According to the latest neuroscience research, the brain draws on its prior experiences to predict what will happen next, anticipating how we will need to respond. Our brain makes real-time adjustments to its estimations to account for its own prediction errors and metabolic requirements by factoring in input from our senses as well as our interoceptive sensations. Words and concepts are the brain's currency for making sense of its own perceptions relative to what it anticipates will happen next and how we will need to respond in a context-appropriate manner. Lisa Feldman Barrett has written extensively about the brain's functioning relative to each of these topics in her book How Emotions Are Made (Barrett, 2017). It's a book I highly recommend to those interested in delving into the latest research on the neuroscience of emotion. In the following chapters, we explore the practical implications of what all of this may mean, and how this relatively new way of understanding perception and emotion as constructed experiences invites us to rethink and reenvision what it means to be emotionally intelligent. As we navigate the territory of our own mind, we will surface what's at stake and where we have wherewithal and agency within the context of perception itself.

Beyond Emotional Intelligence approaches the topic of habit change from an intrinsic perspective, introducing you to cognitive and contemplative practices for identifying and working with your own habits of mind. This is a fancy way of saying you'll learn how to use thought to change thought and awareness to change everything, starting with your perspective. The focus of this book is to help readers connect with what they have available within themselves as their primary means—qualities they don't have to go somewhere else to find, starting with their own awareness and capacity to perceive. By developing your inner coach, the source of wisdom from within, you access the aspect of your own mind that is inexhaustible and always present for you to connect with. Only through awareness do we have the possibility for our actions to be consciously derived and our intentions purposefully acted upon. Our ability to shift our perspective and relate to our circumstances in the moment is dependent on our capacity to activate the rudder of our own minds.

Without a doubt, emotional intelligence and the broader mindfulness movement have done much to bring the value of self-awareness and contemplative practice into the mainstream, while demonstrating the generative effects of empathy and compassion. However, I believe we've only touched the surface of what we each have available to us to access the inherent qualities of our own awareness. There is far more to explore by way of the mind's expression of awareness and how we can familiarize ourselves with something that is always with us but we are rarely cognizant of. With this goal in mind, you'll be introduced to the Awareness Matrix, a framework that gives you a bird's-eye view of what you do and do not have the capacity to be consciously aware of relative to your MindBody functions—at least from a scientific point of view. You'll learn how self-awareness is simply one stance, one way of being aware among many invaluable ways in which we are already aware and can become even more so. The intrinsic qualities of our own minds are present whether our attention or awareness of them is or not. This is the jumping-off point for this book.

We will orient ourselves to the topic of habit change from a very personal and practical vantage point. The book addresses the importance of cultivating and training our attention to notice its own habitual patterns and to optimize and select for choices that contemplate and account for the interplay between our inner and outer habits and the conditions that give rise to them. You'll be asked to look at specific themes and clues within your own repertoire of mental habits, noticing how you consistently make sense of your own experience and the actions you take in response. Typically, we perceive disturbances to our peace of mind and sense of wellbeing occurring as a result of external events or circumstances. Even though we may perceive our emotions to be discrete, universal responses triggered in response to stimuli, we will learn from recent findings in neuroscience that this is only how things appear—likely owing to what we've been taught up to this point about what gives rise to our emotions and how we behave in response. It is more accurate to say that our brain proactively curates our perceptions and our emotions for us. However, becoming consciously aware of how we interpret and act on them relative to what our brain has predicted is where we have a say in the matter.

Irrespective of whether we perceive ourselves or our emotions as being triggered, or whether we operate on a more precise understanding of how we come to feel the way we do, we are each at the mercy of our brain's ongoing display and constantly evolving simulation of reality. When the salience or valence of our interoceptive sensations rise to a level at which we become cognizant of them, and our brain decides that they are important enough to assign them meaning, the output is our affect, which may or may not materialize into an instance of emotion we are consciously aware of. Despite what it may seem, we aren't at the whim of outside circumstances nearly as much as we are at the mercy of our own perception of these circumstances. As we'll learn more about relative to one of the 12 Self-Discoveries in particular, we are, in a very real sense, the common denominator of our own experience. Ultimately, we are the beneficiaries of what we think and how we feel, as are those whose lives we directly or inadvertently impact by how we make sense of and respond to what we think and how we feel. Therefore, it's up to us to find practical ways to work with our own perception of reality along with the mental models that shape and inform how we make sense of our experience.

La Chispa: The Spark to Our Affect

Throughout this book, you'll be invited to identify and reflect upon your own mental models and belief structures that influence how your brain subconsciously anticipates what you perceive as well as how you then make sense of its perceptions. What you then do with that information on a conscious basis makes all the difference. We'll use the MindBody Map and the 12 Self-Discoveries to unearth and discover the mental models we habitually use to create meaning. You'll be invited to notice what motivates and drives you, not only physiologically but psychologically. I refer to this pull or valence that magically draws us toward what holds salience and interest for us as “la chispa,” which is Spanish for spark or flame. La chispa speaks not only to what we need to function optimally at a physical level, but to what we need to thrive psychologically. In my own experience and in coaching people over the years, I've observed that we never have just one why. We're more complex than that. We tend to have many whys that evolve and morph over time and vary depending on which area of our lives we are focused on. In fact, our whys emerge relative to the context in which we find ourselves and as a result of what we expect and hope to have happen. But unless we do intentional work to uncover what's at stake for us in each of the key areas of our lives, we remain mostly unconscious of the role la chispa and our mental models play in the process. La chispa continues crackling and smoldering within us even when we ignore its presence; its flames rise up with a force we can no longer ignore in response to the messages our bodies are constantly sending us. La chispa does the picking for us as we move through our lives. So, until we make a point of uncovering its path and inner workings, it remains alive within us without us necessarily being aware of its influence.

La chispa gives us accessible language, a metaphor, to reference what we'd otherwise refer to in scientific terms as our affect and on a psychological level our motivators and drivers. Affect is thought to be a by-product or consequence of our interoceptive sensations. It is our experience of feeling, a precursor to an instance of emotion as well as the source of valence, either drawing us toward what we like and are attracted to or repelling us away from whatever we dislike and subsequently reject. Our affect acts as a kind of homeostatic oracle, taking a first pass at registering our interoceptive sensations and plotting what and how we feel somewhere along the spectrum of pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant, which our brain then acts upon. While not all affect registers at a level at which we are consciously aware of its presence, it guides our brain in its primary job of managing our “body budget,” a term Lisa Feldman Barrett uses in her work to describe the brain's primary job of regulating the body's metabolic resources, or source of energy—what I refer to in my work as our MindBody Map, or physiological and psychological wellbeing.

Affect and Ego: A Tale of Two Good Buddies

What neuroscience has not yet connected the dots on in this equation, as far as I have been able to discern, is the role of affect's sidekick “ego,” defined in this context as our pervasive and enduring sense of self, the psychological lynchpin of our fundamental drive for self-preservation and search for meaning. We each move through the world with a primal and mostly unconscious reliance upon our sense of self as the “owner” of this body and mind. It is thanks at least in part to the continual manifestation of affect that we have the impression of being a self in a body in which we have the capacity to feel and to make conscious and volitional choices. Moreover, it is owing to our capacity to be aware that our experience manifests and registers to begin with. Irrespective of whether our awareness is inseparable from consciousness, the capacity and continuity of which may persist or cease the moment our lease on this body is up, or whether consciousness is independent of or dependent on our physical form, we each have the undeniable experience of being aware and existing as a self in a body. I've not met a person yet who doesn't have the distinct impression they exist. From this perception of agency comes our instinct to find personal purpose and meaning, offering a psychological rationale and counterpart to our physical existence while at the same time playing the role of an inbuilt cheerleader, an ebullient advocate who knows just when to break out the pompoms and Let's Go Bananas routine when the wattage of our chispa for life wanes. Whether a construct or not, our sense of self is a pervasive feature of our experience. While we may very well have ego to thank for the ongoing sequel of embodied existence, experientially it seems to serve the purpose of being the functional “owner” of this body in which our capacity for awareness has made all perception possible. Part and parcel of our physicality is a psychological imperative, albeit both temporary. Meanwhile, our affect and awareness serve as both the map and navigation system. We'll look at what recent neuroscience research does and does not have to say about each in the chapters that follow.

For the purposes of this book, we'll mostly approach things from the level of what is practical, acknowledging that how things appear may not be as they actually are. The fact we have the perception we exist as a self, moving through the world in a body we call our own, is what we have to work with. It would be silly to ignore it. Instead, we need to embrace it, learning to work with our habits of mind and internal navigation system in which our affect surfaces emotion while our awareness becomes a natural first choice for navigating its own perceptions. By investigating what moves you—the psychological momentum behind all that you do—you'll begin to discern how you're habitually organizing and prioritizing what you pay attention to and act upon. With each self-discovery comes a clue, an additional piece to the complex puzzle of how your brain ascribes meaning to what it perceives. In turn, you'll learn to spot and work with the mental models and interpretations that may or may not be conducive to your overall aims, and when they aren't, what you can do about it.

Creating Optimal Internal Conditions

You'll have an opportunity to experiment with what it looks and feels like to create the necessary conditions within yourself to be able to exercise awareness. It turns out there is great opportunity to dial in our understanding of the mind's role as well as that of perception itself in the formation and evolution of our mental habits and the vital role each plays in absolutely everything we do. Then, and only then, will we be in a position to know where in the value chain of conscious perception and interpretation we can take an active role in shaping our habits and outcomes. Once we understand how the brain simulates our perceptions and proactively shapes our experience from our prior experiences and beliefs, we can start to address the interpretative mechanisms at play within our day-to-day lives and decisions.

Turning our attention toward the otherwise invisible inner workings of our minds, we will become aware of its go-to habits. To not do so would mean that our internal habits would remain hidden to our attention and conscious awareness, obscuring an entire realm of our experience. In order to maximize the wisdom inherent in our own perceptual capacity, we will practice increasing the dexterity of our own awareness to detect what is underlying our assumptions, biases, and mental models. We'll also pay particular attention to how our narratives reflect back to us the logic and meaning of our own perceptions, behaviors, and choices. Finally, we will investigate how the storylines we create not only serve the purpose of helping us make sense of our current perceptions but predispose our future ones along with our responses and actions.

The Value Stream Map of Perception

As you've likely already begun to glean, our awareness, conscious action, and habits of mind play a far greater and more central role than we typically give them credit for relative to what we habitually think, say, and do. They are the variables we have most readily available and at our disposal to work with. Our goal will be to operationalize our insights about each and the profound implications they hold for the quality of our lives, our relationships, and our outcomes. To this end, the value stream map of perception (VSM) is meant to orient us, to provide both a framework and an anchor for our inquiry into our own habits of mind and where we have options for conscious choice within it. It is by no means meant to be an anatomically correct depiction of all that is presently known or studied about the brain, the body, or the human mind. It's simply meant to be a highly accessible, understandable, and practical working model that gives us a starting point. Since I've not yet met a model or framework that has this as its scope or aim, while not perfect, the VSM just needs to serve its intended purpose as a visual representation of perception and the cognitive and sensory processes that accompany it.