Читать книгу Beyond Emotional Intelligence - S. Michele Nevarez - Страница 10

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.