The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting
peculiarities.
The task of emotional intelligence is not to indulge in control, in the usual sense of this process, but to focus on understanding the experience. In order to be aware of emotions, they must initially be felt, experienced, but this does not imply following them. We need to follow our goals and needs, which often diverge from the direction that our emotions show us. Either we control our emotions, or they control us.
Using emotional intelligence allows you to purposefully influence and draw attention to what it is necessary for. The amount of information that enters the brain through all channels in one second is approximately 11 million bits. Mental activity processes only about 50 bits. Because there is so much incoming information, we focus on the main things, and many reactions or decisions are executed in the background of the brain. In turn, the brain itself, in order to create a representative image for us, gets rid of more incoming data and uses data that is already available and exists in it. And in this competition of priorities, only emotions indicate to us what is really worth paying attention to, which contributes to the consolidation of incoming information in memory.
We believe that emotions focus our attention on things or events that are our priority. But emotions are just as likely to focus attention on the priorities that are presented to us by our surroundings. Through emotions, bypassing rational consciousness, we have access to more ancient brain structures. This allows us to control our behaviour by paying attention to how desires emerge. And this gives an opportunity to influence the behaviour of a person as a consumer. Who owns the attention, owns the market. Who owns the market, owns the world. Through attention, we can control the world. Attention is capitalised.
The use of emotional impact in economics explains the well-known mantra: ‘If you take enough of nothing, you will get something in the end.’ Emotions are the tangible ‘nothing’ that can be turned into a real ‘something’.
Narrative Intelligence, Your Personal Secret Advisor
How narrative intelligence affects behaviour and why life is a constantly changing narrative.
Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories. ― Alan Kay
According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the system of concepts that exists in a person’s mind, and therefore in his or her thoughts, is determined by their language. Our behaviour, in the end, is a sequence of our actions in relation to the world around us. It is a kind of programme that we follow under certain circumstances.
These programmes are executed through their internal interpretation. We remember such interpretations and accept them as necessary responses and sequences of actions for certain circumstances or tasks. Every time we retell this algorithm of actions to ourselves, we reinforce it so much that we do not notice or pay attention to it. We can equally follow the algorithms that our surroundings have interpreted for us. These programmes are our internal executive narratives.
Let us explain this using a simple illustration. Answering the question ‘How do you cook scrambled eggs?’ respondents tell us what they need, in what quantity, what they do and in which particular order. They give comments – why exactly this or that ingredient, in this or that sequence – and, finally, describe the result, in which they explain the significance of each action. Some respondents may note the differences between their own cooking preferences and the generally accepted ones.
All this sequence of actions and the purpose of each stage, as well as the ingredients of the dish, are not improvisation. People tell exactly what they had done many times before. And if you wake them up at night and ask them to cook scrambled eggs – they will do them just that way.
But what we are interested in lies elsewhere. There are always those who have never cooked scrambled eggs, but they, although in a simpler way, will tell you how to prepare the dish. Without lengthy gastronomic comments and interpretations of culinary secrets, but they will tell you.
There are hundreds of thousands of such sequences of actions that lead to the desired result stored in our memory. And they are not about scrambled eggs at all. ‘What to do when…’ or ‘What to think about when…’ and so on. When some circumstances change and lead to others, the brain determines this, associates it with similar ones, and selects the most appropriate programme of actions from the existing ones.
If you are hungry, you make scrambled eggs, if it is raining, you take an umbrella, if the boss shouts at you, you duck your head. The brain uses ready-made programmes and does not create new ones. Why is that? Because it saves energy, and this will be discussed further.
The sequence in presenting facts, events, and actions, as in the case of scrambled eggs, which has its cause and result, or its meaning – is a narrative.
The term ‘narrative’ (from the Latin narrare – to tell a story) in a general sense refers to the description of interrelated events in the form of a sequence of words or images, or both. The term was first introduced in historiography and, in particular, in the concept of the so-called ‘narrative history’. It considers historical events not as a result of the conformity to natural laws, but in the context of their description and in conjunction with their interpretation.
Contexts and interpretations are very important since they express the fundamental idea of this approach – they can be used to bring subjective meaning to the statement, to insert in the narrative something that, without distorting the facts and actions, can radically change their perception.
You should distinguish between narrative and story. A story is a sequence of events based on the actions of characters. There is always a plot in it. Narrative is a way of telling this story and includes the story itself.
Recently, the term ‘narrative’ has acquired an additional meaning – ‘a statement that contains a world view or prescription’. To paraphrase, this is a programmed action that is determined by some strategic meaning.
Narrative bias, literally meaning 'distortion of the story’, is a human tendency to link together information from different sources and establish cause-and-effect relationships. An innate human need is to give everything consistency, regardless of whether the resulting story corresponds to reality or not.
With the help of such stories, a person can organise their own experience, which is a description of their activity, and fill all this activity with meaning. The way a person builds and organises their narratives gives an idea of what behaviour they prefer and how they see this world and their life.
It is easier for us to perceive our own life according to the laws of the plot. Because life ‘by itself’ does not exist. Since childhood, we form ideas of the world based on the stories told by people who are important to us. Step by step, we imitate, learn, and build our world view, our library of narratives. And this is a very important ability – by retelling narratives, to determine the goals and meanings behind events, as well as another one – to change them and create new ones.
Our children readily forget their parents’ moralising, but without hesitation they quote fictional characters from numerous Disney and Marvel stories. A person is brought up and trained on narratives. It is more convenient and familiar for our brain to perceive knowledge processed in stories than to memorise regulations, forms, and lists that lack the qualities of a narrative.
Adults have their own forms of narratives. The methods of relaying narratives may differ depending on the occupation. They are different for consultants, politicians, directors, journalists, and coaches… You can continue this list yourself.
Narratives, meanings, and goals are all tied in one powerful, tight knot. The more often we examine them, the more accurately and correctly we define our goals as well as those of our surroundings. Narratives ultimately determine the reality we want to have. And people prefer the reality in which their narratives