Beyond Emotional Intelligence

3What We Have Influence Over

We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

Because I've opted to approach the not-so-new topic of habit and behavior change from the angle of what we have influence over among a sea of things we don't, I've needed to make what, at times, is an uncomfortable leap between the realm of how things appear and how we experience them and what, if anything, is understood philosophically or scientifically about the same topics. Unlike the approach I'm taking, scientists tend to steer clear of making leaps deemed unjumpable or highly unlikely to land. Like consciousness, or mind, agency represents one of those chasms. Yet, if we take what we experience at face value, without fully vetting it alongside what we've gleaned from an evidence-based standpoint, we can quickly find ourselves trying to maintain untenable or holey positions or thinking we have agency over things we don't. While I'm not a scientist, I respect science, despite the tremendous gap that often exists between scientific research and the translation of those ideas into practical insights we can apply to our lives. It's never my first choice to be at odds with scientific evidence or prevailing scientific thought. Thus, I've made a concerted effort to try to understand and incorporate the latest scientific perspectives on the topics that overlap with the ones I've chosen to write about, but from the perspective of what we can extract from these emerging ...