Everything is self-evident if you have high emotional intelligence and are good at reality-testing. If you’re clouded with emotions, stuck in past, inflexible, inauthentic, or inept at verbal and nonverbal communication, alas, everything is not self-evident.

When you develop your emotional intelligence, and ability to understand and manage your emotions and those of others, you see things clearly. You can avoid following pitfalls to accurate perception and smart choices:

1. How you WISH things were. 2. How you think things SHOULD be. 3. Believing that how things have always been in past is way they are now, and ever will be. 4. Assumptions about situations in-the-moment which seem at surface level to be similar to experiences and people in past. Assumptions always need to be checked out. 5. Your persona or inauthentic, unintegrated self, which shifts according to mood, emotion, person and situation leaving you without compass or anchor. 6. Your ability to delude yourself because of lack of self-knowledge. 7. Self-sabotaging because of lack of self-knowledge, self-management and low EQ. 8. Fear, anger, jealousy and other strong emotions which distort thinking. 9. Hearing what you WANT to hear or NEED to hear instead of what’s actually being said. Failing to take into account other person's nonverbal behavior. 10. Distortion from relying on other people’s perceptions of reality and/or "catching" their emotions.

IN SUM: We are our emotions. They influence our perception of reality. The more you understand yourself and your own emotions, better you can understand their effect upon your perceptions of reality and manage them so you can make smart choices.

Emotional Intelligence, being able to process your emotions, means understanding which of your three brains is operating (reptilian, limbic or neocortex), and which brain[s] you need to be in. Emotions guide us and give us information, but sometimes we need to get to neocortex to make decision. For instance, you may be angry and feel like hitting someone, but your “thinking brain” will tell you this isn’t a wise course of action. By same token, you may love someone (limbic) while your neocortex keeps giving you reasons not to.

The most important decisions generally need to be made with both heart and mind.

Here are some examples.

DELUDING YOURSELF

If you strongly desire to like person you’re dealing with, or if you have a need to like them, you may miss what’s actually going on. This is what’s happened when you hear someone repeat an anecdote, saying, “He did [something mean] BUT HE’S REALLY A NICE PERSON.” It’s clear to you person mentioned is NOT “a nice person,” because nice people don’t do things like that, and you wonder how person telling you anecdote can be so mislead.

Another good example is one I read on a Russian bride website. It was giving advice to male suitors re: such important factors as wanting or not wanting to have children. They cautioned that because need of Russian woman to come to US might be so strong, she would delude man, because she had truly deluded herself. She would say what man wanted to hear even if she didn’t mean it.

How do you guard yourself against such disillusionment? High EQ, time, reflection, feedback, intuition, and understanding people and their emotions.

HEARING WHAT YOU NEED OR WANT TO HEAR

Often when I work with people who are anxious or uncomfortable with public speaking, they recount past experiences of perceived failure. They tell me their stories of screw-ups, stumbles and faults, all with a tone of humiliation and self-flagellation. They use critical, blaming language to describe themselves such as “I was so stupid”, “I was pathetic”, “I’ve never forgiven myself for that.” It’s bad enough to have had bad experience in first place, but we just make it worse when we spread pain out over a lifetime by reliving experience-—and punishing ourselves for it-—over and over and over again.

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