Escaping Mental Prison
The most useful idea from Neuro-Linguistic Programming
Hi there and welcome back 👋
Today I want to share with you one of the most helpful psychological ideas I've ever seen. Understanding this idea will help you remove limiting beliefs and achieve your goals.
We will use this map to demonstrate the point and its value to you:
“The Map is Not the Territory.”
The big idea is simple: the map is not the territory.
In other words, the way you see reality, your “map,” is not reality itself (the territory). Seems obvious but the application is profound. Your map is a subjective representation, shaped by your beliefs, experiences and perceptions.
Why does this matter?
Because the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your internal state. And the quality of your internal state depends on how you represent reality.
About five years ago, this idea changed my life.
What started as a horrible day (5 hours standing on line during Christmas morning), became the best day of my life after I heard a podcast with this quote:
“First you must accept the frame at least as a filter, that there could be a subjective reality and that you can manipulate it.”
So I tried it and it worked!
Shockingly well…
I literally chose to have the best day of my life and my state changed. It created an overwhelming sense of joy that radiated for days.
How to apply this:
Today we’re going to take this idea and make it practical for you.
This may sound a little woo-woo or too good to be true but the truth is I was skeptical too. But after investing hundreds of hours into studying persuasion, and investing thousands of dollars into personal coaching, I promise you the ability to consciously reshape your map of reality is a top 5 skillset.
Most recently studying NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), deepened my ability to manipulate or reframe my mental maps, which inspired this post.
So I invite you to keep an open mind, read to the end, and try the exercises before writing it off.
Understanding Mental Maps
Let’s break down the idea clearly.
A map is a simplified tool we use to navigate complex realities. To give a literal example, last Friday, I used this map to bike from Lower Manhattan to Northern Manhattan to meet a girl:
Obviously, this map helped me reach my destination.
But here's the problem:
Maps, by definition, are inherently flawed.
Why? Because a perfectly accurate map would be useless. Imagine if every grain of sand, every pothole, every rodent in Manhattan was depicted in detail.
You'd never reach your date.
So to make maps useful, humans have three main “altering” processes:
Generalizations
Deletions
Distortions
How they affect your mental map of reality:
Generalizations:
Despite the fact that every street is unique, they are all represented by a simple grey line.
Humans do this all the time. We have a “map” of how a door works. So every time you interact with a new door your brain simply generalizes and says “ok it’s a door open it with push or pull.”
If you had to reevaluate every door every day you would be paralyzed.
Or we may have a map of how a certain group of people is likely to act. If you have a sales call with a German, you’d be wise to show up early or on time. Other groups, have different tendencies. I’m sure you can see how at times generalizations can be helpful, while at times they are limiting.
Deletions:
Effective maps delete unnecessary detail.
Our Manhattan map doesn't show rodents or potholes because those details aren’t relevant for navigation. Try recapping your last 30 minutes in full detail without deleting any small details. It’s impossible.
We constantly delete information to function effectively.
Distortions:
Broadway, at 13 miles, could never fit perfectly on your phone.
Instead, it’s distorted to scale:
If we didn’t distort the size of the map, we could never use it.
As another example, imagine you walk past two women who giggle in your direction. An insecure person may think they are mocking him. If you’re confident you may interpret it as a mating call.
Truthfully, we have no idea why they are giggling.
Maybe one of them spilt their ice cream. You can image how often we distort reality based on false expectations.
Why this matters:
So you can see how generalizations, deletions and distortions allow us to create maps of reality which allow us to simplify and interact effectively with reality.
So what’s the trade off?
By creating maps or models, we get shortcuts and save brain power.
But we often forget that what we are experiencing is a map of reality, rather than reality itself and so we get stuck with long standing beliefs that may be harming us.
Let me give an example:
Girl who viewed men as dangerous
I was talking to someone once about her longstanding phobia of men.
Since childhood, she viewed men as predatory and potentially dangerous. Obviously this belief was not serving her so I wanted to help her overcome this limiting belief.
How to update an unhelpful map
The first step in replacing a limiting belief is instilling doubt in the current belief.
The easiest way to do that is to challenge the three alterations (which are supporting the unhelpful belief):
Generalization:
She mentioned several experiences of men gawking at her when she was younger in a large city. While the experience is real, how big of a sample size is that? We decided it was somewhere between 7-7000 negative experiences with men in her lifetime.
Assuming, 4 billion men, that’s about 0.000175% of the population.
So an experience with 0.000175% of the population created a belief about 4 billion humans. Sounds silly when you put it that way but how often do we all do this?
Then we moved to deletions:
I asked her, “How many other times were men neutral or kind to you?” Obviously that number was significantly larger than her negative experiences.
But it’s easy to delete these positive interactions when we have certain expectations.
How about distortions?
What happens if I tell you to not think about a red banana?
You think about a red banana. And so clearly because of her first few negative experiences her brain became fixated on seeing that again and this became a repeat part of her map.
Our brain will often search out whatever it expects to find and distort reality to match your expectations.
This experience is not unique to that girl. We all do this all the time and while her example may not reflect your experience, certainly we all do this to varying degrees with certain beliefs.
What to do with this information?
How to apply this:
Find any limiting belief that causes you frustration or anxiety:
making money is hard
I am not attractive to the opposite sex
I am not personable or good with people
Run it through these three tests:
Generalization: Is this belief based on a representative sample? Could you generalize differently? What one negative experience have I extrapolated out indefinitely?
Deletion: What contradictory evidence have you ignored?
Distortion: How have your expectations distorted your perception?
Choose a new, empowering belief. Consciously update your mental map to something that serves you.
Once you have the new belief, you simply have to stack a bunch of bricks under it so that it really sticks.
For example, “I’m bad with people,” I am 100% certain anyone reading this could find 100-1000 examples of contradictory evidence to override this. Volume and associating positive emotions with the new belief wins here.
Then revisit the new belief a few times to make sure it sticks.
Thanks for reading
That’s pretty much what I wanted to share with you.
If you wanna talk about this idea I would love to give anyone reading this free coaching on something holding you back because I know it works well. So you are welcome to send me an email.
Thanks for reading and I hope this is helpful to you.