Penelope is a good friend of mine. She has a handsome husband, Kevin, who in some ways is almost perfect. He comes home right after work and plays with the kids, giving her a break. He’s a fledgling poet and writes her love poems from time to time, and he even brings her flowers once a month or so. They talk about things and Kevin is a good listener.

However, Penelope has a "problem." She often fears that Kevin will leave her for another woman. While he's at work, she’d think maybe he was flirting with his secretary and she’d start to get mad at him. Then when he walked through the door in the evening, she would be cold to him or pick a fight just because of her own fears during the day.

When they would put the kids to bed and then snuggle on the couch, she would often feel distant and unable to enjoy intimacy because of her fears that he would leave her sooner or later.

Penelope wanted to know why, when she had almost the perfect marriage, she couldn’t just relax and enjoy it. Even though there was no evidence he was cheating on her, no late nights at work, no strange perfumes or lipstick marks, she was at times almost tormented by her fears and angers about him possibly leaving her.

Eventually, she went to a therapist, and began to understand what was happening. She remembered when she was five her father used to come home every day from work and lift her in the air and spin her around and give her a big hug. She loved to play with Dad that way and would look forward to him walking through the door.

Then one day he didn’t walk through the door. She didn’t know why and she didn’t know why her Mommy was crying when she asked about it. The next day, he didn’t come home either, and Penelope began to understand that something horrible had happened.

In fact, her father had abandoned the family. He had been fighting with the Mom a lot and one day when she was five he left, never to return or call.

Penelope was crushed. At five years of age she felt awfully sad and lonely, and after listening to her mom rant and rage about her dad she figured something out about life that changed her forever. She figured out that

"Men can’t be trusted.  Men leave."

And with the emotional force of her hurt feelings she imprinted herself with that perceptual filter.

One of the first things to understand about developing emotional IQ has to do with perceptual filters. Perceptual filters are unconscious, they are very powerful, and can affect our lives tremendously for good or ill. They are like blue sunglasses, they make the world look a certain way to us even though its just the filter, the sunglasses that are blue, not the things we actually look at. Perceptual filters operate "before" the conscious mind, filtering what we perceive so that the world shows up a particular way.

Now, Penelope at the age of 5 didn’t just think a few angry thoughts about her dad and how men can’t be trusted. She had an internal shift inside, she found a way to avoid feeling all that pain and the anguish of loss. She ‘figured something out about the world.’ "Ah, I know, I hurt this much because I hadn’t figured it out. Now I ‘know.’ Men can’t be trusted.’  I'll have to be careful around them!"

That internal process, imprinted by the force of her anguish and loss, shifted the way she saw the world. She didn’t go around thinking about it, it wasn’t some mental decision, it was an actual ‘ontological shift’ in the way she was being in the world. Thereafter, men showed up for her differently. They could and would be lovely and entertaining and fascinating and interesting, but they’d leave. Underneath it all, she just knew this to be true, this is just the way things are, like she’d figured out that trees were a color called green and water was blue.

HOW WE LEARN IMPORTANT THINGS

Now, perceptual filters have powerful impacts on our lives. They are closely related to perceptual shifts. We all make perceptual shifts as part of learning and figuring out the world. For example, at one time you didn’t know how to swim. Someone coached you or talked to you about keeping your head above water, kicking your feet, moving your arms, etc. You had all this intellectual knowledge and then you got in the water and struggled for a few minutes and then you "got" swimming. You had a perceptual shift, your body knew how to stay afloat and keep breathing in water that was over your head.

Once you have a perceptual shift, you no longer have to remember all those intellectual instructions about swimming. You’ve taken something from intellectual knowledge to working knowledge. When you learned how to ride a bike, you had to struggle to learn "balance." Once you got the perceptual shift called balance, you didn’t have to remember it, it was permanent.

Perceptual shifts cause us to see and deal with the world in different ways. Once you got "balance," bikes showed up for you differently ever after. You could ride them or not as you pleased, go further, go faster, learn a finer point of balance called riding with no hands, etc.

Perceptual shifts are powerful and often life enhancing. There was a time you couldn’t read the words on a page. But then you had a perceptual shift called "reading," and suddenly whole new worlds opened up for you. Another word for perceptual shift is "distinction." You distinguished "reading," and all those lines on paper meant something entirely different.

You also distinguished writing, addition, subtraction, and that pesky relative, division. Sure, you could get that 8 + 8 + 8 equals 24, but how in the world does 24 divided by 8 equal three? It doesn’t make sense to kids until they struggle with it and have an internal perceptual shift the world calls division.

Once we have a perceptual shift, we have it forever. It helps keep us from cluttering our mind with all the intellectual knowledge and facts, we don’t have to relearn how to read every day or how to drive a car every day.

Now, back to Penelope and her perceptual filter. A perceptual filter is a form of perceptual shift that we create usually with strong emotional energy. Penelope was feeling anguished loss over her dad’s abandonment. Those feelings were too overwhelming for a five year old girl. So with the force of those emotions she imprinted herself with a view about men. "They can’t be trusted."

And just like swimming and biking and reading, she didn’t need to remember that or go around thinking it the rest of her life. It just became the way things are, like when I’m in water I swim and on a bike I balance and around men "they can’t be trusted."

So here she is with a great husband and she doesn’t feel intimate. She gets mad because she thinks he may leave her. When they snuggle on the couch she often can’t just relax and feel loved and loving.

Why? Because, once you’ve created a perceptual filter, it isn’t conscious. Perceptual filters are subconscious, they occur or show us their view of "reality" before we can consciously think any differently.

Perceptual filters even color the evidence! If you know men can’t be trusted and your man writes you a love poem, what does it mean?

It means that he wrote it for someone else, really!

If you "know" men can’t be trusted and your man brings you flowers, what does it mean?

It means he cheated on you and he’s feeling guilty!

Once we’ve created perceptual filters, we tend to organize/rationalize reality to fit our filter. It doesn’t matter what the truth is, we’ll color it to fit into the world view of our filter.

Our distinctions color the evidence in our lives.

So here Penelope is with a huge problem. She wants intimacy and can’t get it. She’s got all the external signs of a great marriage, and yet she feels uncomfortable, anxious, and often cold towards her husband.

Now, through her therapy, she discovers this perceptual filter called "men can’t be trusted, they leave me." Does it go away because she’s aware of it? Does it disappear?

NO! Because perceptual filters, once distinguished, don’t disappear. Once you know how to ride a bike, you don’t forget how. Once you know how to read, you can read. Once you’ve got men can’t be trusted, that’s the way it is.

However, bringing this filter into consciousness does make a difference. Just because you know how to read books, you don’t have to read horror stories. If you don’t like horror stories, you don’t read them. Just so, making perceptual filters conscious allows you to begin to not automatically see the world through that view.

And with Penelope, this is what happened. She began to work with relaxing into intimacy and appreciating him rather than just automatically fretting and doubting his fidelity. Knowing about the filter allowed her to begin to make different choices. It doesn’t happen overnight, but Penelope reports its getting better as time goes on.

What is the point of sharing Penelopes’ story? Well, to begin with, you may be thinking "poor Penelope, what a tough thing, she’s got what she wants but can’t enjoy it. Too bad for her…"

Actually, however, YOU AND PENELOPE ARE EXACTLY THE SAME. You’ve got perceptual filters operating in your life that get in the way of you having what you want. We ALL do.

Everyone taking this course has distinguished things just as unworkable to protect themselves from some pain or anguish, and they are affecting your life just as detrimentally.

Your thing probably isn't "men leave me." YOU AREN’T EVEN AWARE OF WHAT YOUR THING IS, for the most part. The filters we’ve put in place are long since unconscious, but we’ve all got core distinctions that get in the way of us having and or enjoying the kind of life we want. We’ll be getting into what your "thing" (core distinctions and perceptual filters) is as the lessons develop.

But for now you are starting a course to develop powerful new relationship and emotional skills. THE PROBLEM WITH MOST KINDS OF TRAINING AVAILABLE IN THE WORLD TODAY IS THAT THEY ONLY DEAL WITH GIVING YOU INFORMATION.

You don’t need more information to dramatically enhance the quality of your life. You don’t need more intellectual knowledge about emotional iq.

To substantially change anything in your life, you need to deal with WHAT’S ALREADY THERE, the filters and core distinctions that are operating beneath the surface that keep you from having or enjoying what you want. The filters that are operating in your life now are giving you the life that you have. To change your life, what you need more than information is to make conscious what is creating your life to be the way it is now.

This course is, wherever possible, going to ask you to look at some of the filters and distinctions that ARE ALREADY OPERATING IN YOUR LIFE RIGHT NOW that get in the way of you having what you want, that make your life show up for you the way it does.

In one of the first lessons, you are going to learn about the biggest emotional mistake we all make every day. But more than that, you’re going to bring to conscious awareness the perceptual filter that causes you to make that emotional mistake. IT WOULD DO NO GOOD TO JUST SAY IN TWO SENTENCES WHAT THE MISTAKE IS AND HOW TO STOP IT. That’s just more information that won’t make a difference. The value of the lessons is for you to "see" what core distinction is operating in your life that almost forces you to make that big mistake time after time.

In another lesson you’re going to learn a core intimacy skill. This skill is powerful and can alter your experience in all of your relationships forever. REALLY. But what you’ll actually be doing in the lesson is making conscious some of the filters that automatically get in the way of true intimacy. Once you "see" those, you can begin to make different choices.

The point of the Penelope story in this introduction is to simply have you begin to see that developing emotional IQ is not really about having more intellectual information. More information rarely makes a difference in people’s lives.  Working with the perceptual filters you've already got operating and creating new ones, however, can make a dramatic difference in a short period of time.

So as you work with the lessons, DO THE EXERCISES, play along, have fun, and allow new understanding to dawn as old filters are revealed.

There is no pressure to learn, here. Take the lessons at your own pace. Kinda like going to school, if you just show up day after day eventually difficult lessons like reading, writing, and division make sense. Enjoy the journey!