Wherever the biggest stress in your life is: look for an outdated Mental Model
There are many ways to speak, write and think about how we see the world and how we grow our capacities.
Indeed, how we change.
Here’s one of the ones which feels most tangible to me.
We experience the world through a set of Mental Models.
(Those of you who grew up in the North of England are probably asking - do you mean models that are mental or mental models? The answer of course is: sometimes, both.)
More seriously, here’s how it works:
As the Talmud (and Stephen Covey) once said: we see the world not as it is, we see it as we are.
We need to remember this: all the time our nervous system is filtering all the inputs from the world into something we can process. This is a good job, as even a system as sophisticated as ours can’t deal with all the things that are happening all at once.
You know this: you don’t hear the birdsong until someone points it out, and then you can’t stop hearing it. You scan over a view and don’t notice the deer until someone tells you where it is. And then you see it.
This is happening all the time.
Consciously and unconsciously we are filtering the world.
One way to think about this is that we have a set of Mental Models that help us filter.
To understand why this matters, we need to reflect on two things:
Some Mental Models are more useful than others. Sometimes, even one that is ‘more true’ may be less useful. In these cases, it can be useful to choose a different mental model in order to have an easier or more productive life.
In this article, I give the example of believing that someone who overtakes you dangerously is on the way to see their dying mother in hospital. Not necessarily true - in fact, relatively unlikely to be true. But more useful than any other Mental Model which leads to frustration and anger while hurtling along in a big metal deathbox at 60mph.
Some Mental Models become out of date. This is essentially how our minds develop according to developmental psychologists like Jennifer Garvey Berger. In her work, she explains that we develop a worldview (a Mental Model) which we use to interact with the world. But sometimes, that clashes with reality: we learn something which shows us that that old Mental Model can’t possibly be true. This can be a painful, sometimes terrifying experience. But it is vital to growth. Once we’ve had our Mental Model broken, we are forced to create a new one: one that transcends and includes the previous one and our new piece of information.
This can happen to us all the time: it can be exciting, with the rush of insight, as well as incredibly uncomfortable.
In particular, when we are under pressure we seem to sometimes create particularly strongly embedded Mental Models. This commonly happens in our childhood and adolscence, but can come through particularly difficult adult experiences too. We develop incredibly clever coping mechanisms (Mental Models) which guide us in how to behave.
We only even notice them years later - having used them for so long we are confusing the tint in our glasses for a tint in the world - when they cause us real trouble: when the way we learned to respond to being scared at school causes our relationship with our co-founder to fall apart; or the way we dealt with rejection from a parent causes us to freeze in high pressure work environments.
The unlocking and shifting of Mental Models is a vital and powerful process as we look to fulfil our potential in our lives and work.
In essense, it’s why coaching works: you could describe a coach as someone specially trained to help people evolve their Mental Models.
Good questions to enquire into are:
What Mental Models do have about my work? My life? The people around me?
Where might there be a more useful one, even if less true?
Where might I be dealing with one that is out of date, but deeply ingrained? (Clue: likely it’s wherever you’re encountering struggle or stress.)
And if you want some help in evolving your mental model, then let’s talk.
—
PS Read my latest long-read article in the Leading With Honour series, here: The Transformational Practice of Telling the Truth (Leading With Honour II)
—
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. (I cheated a little on this one - took about 15)
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.