Читать книгу Beyond Emotional Intelligence - S. Michele Nevarez - Страница 13

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.