Emotional Intelligence Mastery 2.0: The Secret EQ Boosting Guide - How to Analyze People & Improve Your Relationships using NLP and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on Emotions for Happiness

INTRODUCTION

This manual was designed to move your focus on aspects that tend to be on the margins of our awareness, but play a fundamental role in helping us achieve results.

How many times does it happen that something doesn’t work as you would like it to, but you don’t understand why?

The fact that a big part of our experience (and the experience that we share with others) happens below our awareness, can make us powerless: if I don’t know what I'm doing that's not working, I sure won’t know what to do to make things better.

In the pages that follow, if you like, we’ll explore some fundamental aspects of our existence: how to relate, learn, and change. I would like for the outcome of this exploration to be a frame that you can apply immediately in your daily relationship with yourself, with others, and with the world, to introduce, if you choose to, some new variables in the schemes of action and reaction that currently create and maintain your reality. And maybe open up new ways to get closer to where you want to go.

CHAPTER 1 -OURSELVES

‘’Every good story must be told from the beginning.’’

Anonymous

THAT THING CALLED REALITY

Have you ever heard your friends describing a film that they had seen together at the cinema, and heard them tell two different storylines? And yet the show was the same.  How often does the same thing happen with our life’s events? You will for sure remember at least one time in which you had a discussion, a quarrel, or any other shared experience with someone, and you told completely different versions of the same situation, both of you convinced of what you were saying.

Who was right?

According to this paper’s vision, which is not THE vision, but is simply one of the infinite possible frames of thought, it isn’t the events, but how we perceive them, that creates our reality.

What does it mean?

Let's have a closer look. We can all quite agree on the fact that each of us perceives the external world (the one we call reality) through our five senses. They are our entrance to the world: through our senses, every second , almost two million urges pelt our nervous system, even while we’re asleep.

The raw data that go through our nervous system, however, aren’t known to us as reality until they are subjected to electrochemical transformations in our cerebral cortex. To be transformed into useful information for us, they must be enriched with meaning from our mind. As experienced chefs, us humans add the ingredient meaning to what goes through our nervous system, and, mixing together sensorial urges and meaning, we create a recipe that didn’t exist before. We aren’t cold computers that simply process already existing input from the outside world: we are living systems that create original outputs, which are more than the simple sum of the inputs that we receive. Our outputs are the result of recipes in which part of the ingredients and the way we mix them together are only ours. First of all, unlike computers, we aren’t able to collect all the inputs that come to us because our senses are limited.

From high school they teach us that our biological equipment (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin) can only perceive a given range of urges (for example, the human ear is equipped to perceive frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, unlike some animals). Instead our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin (the channels of our five senses) miss all the urges that are outside this range (such as ultrasound), but however exist, and can still have an effect on us. Therefore, human beings perceive only some aspects of existence through their senses: sensorial hallucinations of a psychotic or drug effects can make us sense how reality potentially offers much more. And, when talking to a psychotic, it’s easy to realize that different perceptions from the norm are not to be perceived as less true. Secondly, the information that our senses are capable of perceiving are not all thrown indiscriminately in the mixer of meanings: they are first subjected to transformations. They are transformations that our mind makes almost automatically, and of which therefore we tend to be unaware. In addition to the natural selection made by our biological filters in fact, our mind performs three types of operations on the remaining data. The first type of operation is a simplification: this happens because otherwise the amount of information that our conscious mind would have to process would be so big that we’d risk going crazy. This is why the abstraction process exists: to avoid having a brain as big as our chest. To abstract means to group all the information that seems similar to us in large categories, which makes life considerably easier. The problem is, however, that in doing so we lose a lot of information along the way. The abstract concept that I create of a dog combines all the dogs that I have met until today, making sure that when I meet a hairy animal with four legs in the street I can recognize it immediately. But abstracting our minds into categories also makes us connect the pit bull who tried to bite us when we were 4 years old, with the neighbors' basset hound that has instead never bitten anyone. Being able to recover the distinction between the two, on the other hand, sometimes helps me, maybe if I have to go through the neighbors' garden. The data that we lose along the way, generalizing the concrete data of our life in categories, is erased from our conscious mind,  remaining dormant below the threshold of our awareness: I could therefore have a bad feeling while walking through the neighbors' garden, and be afraid of their harmless basset hound, without rationally understanding why (we have a ‘’gut  feeling, we feel it in our skin, etc.). So part of our experience is erased, removed from our conscious mind. Finally, some of the information is deformed (changed compared to the original) in our mind, so that it coincides with the data that is already stored in our brain. Each new urge is measured on the basis of what we have already seen, and compared to it by resemblance or difference. When information doesn’t fall into categories that we have already created, it can be distorted to fit in them anyway . That’s why, in medieval Europe , where no one had ever seen an elephant, this  became a pig with big ears". These processes (generalizations, cancellations and deformations) are put into action by our mind following criteria. These criteria are determined by  filters that each of us has, which can be cultural, social and personal. Cultural filters are dictated by the perception of reality that is shared by the inhabitants of a specific cultural area of ​​the world (such as the perception of death as a sad event that requires mourning, as it happens in the West, or vice versa as a positive event that requires celebrations, as it happens in some tribal cultures).

Social filters are instead defined by the perception of reality that is shared by a given social group (such as the fact of not being bothered by two men who walk around holding each other’s hand if we are inhabitants of a large city in Northern Italy - or citizens of ancient Greece, and to perceive it as a reason for indignation if we are inhabitants of a small village in Southern Italy). Cultural and social filters are collective constructs that, according to our cultural and social origins, tell us how to generalize, cancel and deform what happens outside on the basis of what they think is worthy of note. Individual filters are instead built individually during the course of our life. Since we give meaning to the present on the basis of what we have already seen, what we perceive is never neutral, but always contextualized with regard to our personal history. For those who have risked to drown, the sea has a completely different meaning than for those who have always enjoyed the summer sun. Warning: with this I don’t mean that our past determines our future. I mean that the filters of our past  determine what we tend to put our attention on today. A