How To Change

Emotions draw on past experiences

In our last chapters, we’ve gone through the three required mindset traits in order to become the most impactful person we can be. As we now proceed with our exploration, the question it becomes fundamental to answer is: How do we incorporate them in our life? How do we turn the person we are today into someone that is perfectly fine with being himself or herself, trusts their capacity to think critically and independently and is very responsible and focused on always doing what is right? In other words, how do we start behaving in line with what we are, tap into our true potential and have a lot of impact in the world?

Admittedly these are not easy questions. Human behavior is very complex and understanding how one can ultimately change has proven to be, in our experience, one of the most intricate problems to solve. However, like always, answers exist and throughout this chapter, we hope to give you a detailed and accurate description of what has been, to this date, the most effective approach to grow into a more impactful human being as well as a clear and simple roadmap to put it in practice.

Now in order to understand how something can change, we need to first identify why something is there. In other words, why are we the person we are today? Why do we behave the way we do? What are we genetically wired to seek? How have our experiences in life shaped our emotional makeup, and our particular temperament and personality? These are all questions that when answered will allow us to pinpoint the foundation of our behavior and give us important clues about the ways in which we can change.

An obvious place to start is with our emotions. As humans, we are emotional beings. This is reflected on the structure of our brain where at the bottom sits the most primitive parts and on the outer the most advanced ones. We are physically wired to feel first, and only subsequent to our emotional response, do we respond consciously or unconsciously, with awareness or without.

That humans are driven by emotions is, of course, not a new discovery but what is certainly new (and very relevant to our explanation) is how emotions are generated. A breakthrough in this area of study is now revealing that, contrary to the ‘classic view’ of emotion (which has been the scientific belief for a long time and purports that emotions are ‘built-in’ reflexes that simply fire off), our emotions don’t come prewired in our brain. Instead, emotions are constantly being constructed as our brain filters all the available raw data (our bodily sensations, our thoughts, the particular situation) through both past experiences and learned emotional concepts, and comes up with a feeling or sensation that best characterizes the situation.

This is a very valuable piece of information. If what we experience moment to moment is not a separated instance in time but is rather the result of an incredibly complex process that takes into consideration a lot of different factors, most importantly our experiences in life, it means that the range of emotions that is nowadays dictating our mood and behavior is intimately connected to the range of emotions that we have experienced previously in the past. In other words, who we are today is merely an extension of how we have been emotionally conditioned throughout our lives which is why on our next topic we will go back in time to understand how our life experiences might have shaped our emotional makeup and ultimately the person that we are.

That our emotional makeup of the past is nowadays influencing the ways in which we intuitively react to the world also makes, of course, a lot of sense on a neurological level. We’ve seen before that our brain is plastic and neural connections that are frequently stimulated predominate within it. So it is only natural that the more we have experienced certain emotions in our life, the more their corresponding neural pathways became minted in our brain configuration and are therefore today more representative of who we are.

Inherited traits that are specific to the individual (like for example, a propensity to be depressed or to be fearless) also play a big role in the definition of our particular behavior and character but since these mostly come down to chance, we have chosen not to address them here.

We 'are' what worked to feel safe

As we have explored before, given that the emotions we experience today are an extension of the emotions we have experienced in the past, in order to understand our current character and behavior, we need to go back in time to identify what has shaped us on an emotional level.

To do so, it is imperative that we begin by understanding what we are genetically wired to seek and to avoid. Our biological drives set the foundation of how we interact and react to the stimuli from the environment so pinpointing what those drives are will give us a better understanding of where our emotions are originating from.

Now at the most basic level, what we seek in life and where our actions stem from is simply wanting to feel safe. Evolution has hardwired in us a strong emotion for fear and a longing for safety because those drives proved to be fundamental in helping our ancestors survive and reproduce. And as we’ve explained in Chapter IV, when young, at a time of our lives when we are not yet autonomous in our actions, our safety will be fundamentally tied to the love and acceptance of our caregivers.

When that love and acceptance is present and we feel like simply being ourselves is enough to be accepted, we feel safe. We develop good self-esteem and accept who we are. We usually become more independent and confident, especially when encouraged to think for ourselves and experiment with the things we are passionate about. Overall, we become an individual with a stable emotional foundation.

However, if that love and acceptance are missing and we feel like being ourselves is not enough to be accepted, we don’t feel safe. We usually create the idea that something is wrong with us, develop a lot of insecurities and are rarely able to accept who we are. In most situations, we live in constant fear of what others might think or do to us and grow up to become an individual with an insecure and unstable emotional foundation. Under these circumstances, wherein being ourselves doesn’t work to feel safe, we often start pretending to be someone we are not. From adopting an overly confident or aggressive attitude to coming across as superior, funnier or smarter, the fear that others might not accept us drives us to gradually create and behave in line with a fake self-image that allows us to mask our insecurities and, at the same time, gathers more respect and recognition from those around us.

But whether we felt like we had to change our behavior or not, we always acted in line with what worked to feel safe. In a positive and loving setting, we were simply ourselves. In a more precarious one, we did what we could to best camouflaged our insecurities. Ultimately, this is what has shaped the emotional makeup that is today underlying our behavior and what explains, in general lines, the person we’ve become.

It is important to realize that this is a simplified explanation. The overall dynamics seen in these two groups are real and help explain why people behave the way they do but in order to have a complete and accurate understanding, we would need to analyze case by case.

To make it clear, the formation of a self-image is not exclusive to the second group. To a greater or lesser extent, everyone goes through this process of creating a self that, within his or her environment, worked to feel accepted and safe. The difference is that while those who grew up in a stable and balanced environment developed their self-image on top of supportive emotions, in a natural way and without added pressures, those who grew up in an unstable one built theirs on top of fearful emotions, mostly as a defense mechanism to conceal their vulnerabilities.