MASTER YOUR EMOTIONS: A Roadmap to Emotional Intelligence and Personal Empowerment (2024 Beginner's Guide)

By THEO JOHNSON

"Master Your Emotions" is your definitive guide to cultivating emotional intelligence and unlocking the key to personal empowerment. Navigate the intricate landscape of your emotions, understand their origins, and harness their energy to lead a more balanced and fulfilling life. This book provides practical insights and strategies to help you ma

• Language: English
• Publisher: THEO JOHNSON
• Release date: Dec 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9783988316868

THEO JOHNSON

Theo Johnson, hailing from the vibrant city of New York, is a seasoned expert in psychology and personal development. With a passion for empowering individuals, Johnson's 2024 guide, "Master Your Emotions," serves as a roadmap to emotional intelligence and personal empowerment.

Book preview

Introduction

Do you consider yourself a rational person?

All of us do. We like to think that we are usually in control of our emotions. Most of the decisions that we carry out are usually considered the result of careful contemplation and research. But the real question that needs to be asked here is: are we truly in control or is it merely an illusion of control? In 2008, Adam Galinsky, who works in Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Jennifer Whitson from the University of Texas in Austin noticed something about control (Hallinan, 2014).

They noticed that when people feel that they have lost control or have poor control in their lives, they will begin to see nonexistent things, such as patterns when no such patterns exist. In the many experiments that they conducted, they discovered that people increase creation of patterns and structures when they experience a lack of control. With the above information, can we now start to think that we might not always be rational creatures? The truth is that psychology had already proven that we are not often rational. We go through life accumulating experiences, ideas, and information and together, they create the person that we are today.

In fact, we often believe that being rational is the way to go through life. But, psychology has proven otherwise. Take the experiment conducted at the University of Virginia by Timothy Wilson (Gladwell, 1991). He had asked students to choose one of two collections of paintings to take home. One of them consisted of impressionist paintings while the other consisted of pictures of animals. When choosing, half of the students had to explain why they chose the painting. The other half of the participants could choose any painting without giving a rational explanation.

The result?

Those who were forced to analyze their choices were more likely to pick the pictures of the animals. Those who had the freedom to choose without being chained to logical reasoning preferred impressionist paintings. But that was not the most surprising result of the study. After about three weeks, Wilson returned to the students and asked them how they felt about their choices.

Those who had to think about their choice were less happy with their result while the other group was satisfied with theirs. But why is this so? Shouldn’t the rational mind have automatically analyzed the pros and cons and chosen the best painting collection? Let us try and examine this from another perspective. We are going to see just how rational you think. Like most people, we believe that our convictions and conclusions are the result of a logical, rational, and impartial course of reasoning. We are confident in our ability to gather the facts before we can form a belief about something. Unfortunately, that is not necessarily true.

All of us are susceptible to a psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias (Heshmat, 2015). This bias simply states that our opinions, conclusions, and beliefs are a result of only considering information that confirmed our beliefs and ignored information that contradicted our preconceived notions. Is Marvel better than DC? Should the milk go in the bowl first or the cereal? No matter what choices people make, they are likely going to stop to think about the other option.

If Marvel is indeed their preferred choice, then they will do anything to defend that choice. This bias even extends towards the way we solve problems. We believe we are right that we don’t stop to think about an alternative solution. In fact, an experiment to prove this was conducted back in 1970 by two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Goldhill, 2015). Their work is still used as a case study by many psychologists. The two psychologists had discovered that human beings are not rational creatures. We make decisions that somehow seem to defy logic.

So, with this in mind let us try an experiment called The Wason Selection Task — developed by Peter Cathcart Wason — to prove how logical you are (Bye, 2012). This should be fairly simple so answer as honestly as possible. You have four cards in front of you that have shapes on one side and colors on the other. From left to right, you see the following arrangement of the cards:

Card#1: A square

Card #2: A circle

Card #3: The color red

Card #4: The color yellow

You have one simple task. You have to pick cards that match the below

criteria:

If a particular card has a circle shape on one face, then the opposite face —

once you turn the card around — should have the color yellow on it.

Which cards would you have to turn over to prove the above theory? You

are not allowed to pick more than two cards to turn over?

Now take your time with the above experiment. You can move on to the

next section once you have made your selection.

Once again, the cards show square, circle, yellow, and red. What cards must

you turn over to prove the statement: If a particular card has the circle shape

on one face, then the color yellow should be on the opposite face.

If you had chosen the circle and yellow card, then is the most logical

answer indeed.

But it is also the wrong answer.

By arriving at the conclusion of turning over the circle and the yellow card,

we relied on obvious observations to make the decision for us.

So, what is the right answer? We need to turn over the circle card and the

red card.

If we truly had to use our rational mind, then we would begin to understand

the below:

Card#1: We do not need to turn over this card. The criteria does not say

what color has to be there behind the square symbol. Even if it does show

the color yellow, it does not break any rules.

Card #2: You should turn this card over. You need to check if there is the

color yellow on the other side of the card. If there is, then the criteria have

been broken.

Card#3: You do not need to turn this card over. The reason lies in the

statement itself. We are looking to see if the face with the circle shape on it

has the color yellow on its opposing facet, not the other way around. It does

not matter if the yellow face has a square or a circle on its opposing one. It

is inconsequential to us.

Card#4: We need to turn this card over to see if there is a circle on the

opposite face. We are, after all, proving that the face with the circle on it

should have the color yellow on its opposite face. If we turn over the red

card and see a circle, then the criteria have been broken.

What do the above theories, examples, and tests show? Now that we have

proven that humans are not exactly rational and logical creatures, what is

our conclusion? Why is it necessary to prove that rationality is not exactly a

human being’s best trait?

The best way to answer the above questions is by answering this single

question.

What guides us if not rational and logical thought?

The answer is emotions.

And emotions are what we are going to understand and manage in this

book.

Chapter 1: Understanding the Mind

The mind is complex. It is home to logical fallacies, heuristics, and cognitive biases. We go through our lives using these three aforementioned psychological conditions to our advantage. They help us guide our beliefs, ideas, hopes, goals, ambitions, reactions, and everything else that helps us navigate the complexities of life. Logical fallacies refer to processes where your mind skips a few steps to arrive at a conclusion (Nordquist, 2018). It happens to you so naturally that you don’t even realize it. Think of all those times where you heard someone theorize about something and you said something along the lines of, It’s probably (insert idea here). Heuristics are shortcuts that your mind takes to solve a problem (Heuristics, 2017). Rather than observe every bit of information, you automatically discard things that you do not want to focus on. Finally, cognitive biases refer to certain patterns of behavior or thought that lead us to draw incorrect conclusions (Cherry, 2019). But why do we have all of these mental patterns and psychological phenomenon with us? To find out, we need to delve into the subconscious.

Conscious vs Subconscious

We all think that we consciously choose our actions. After all, the conscious part of our brain is what guides our rational