I remember a while ago going to see a movie with a friend and afterwards I thought the movie was a great movie, however my friend thought it was rubbish!
How come he could have such a different point of view to me? Was the film good or was it rubbish?
The real answer is NEITHER.
So how come we see the world in different ways to other people?
We judge things based upon the way that we filter our experience. On an NLP Practitioner training people learn in depth about this – how we view the world and how to understand how other people view things – essential to achieve in any important communication. The filters to experience include beliefs, values, memories, language and other jargon that we won’t go into right now!
For example, if you were bitten by a little dog when you were a child, you might have formed a belief that little dogs are dangerous and will bite you. Years later you walk down the street and see a little dog watching you in a certain way and you start to feel your heart pounding, palms sweating and feeling anxious. All the people around you are saying ‘what a cute dog!’, but you know it is really a little killer puppy!
We give meaning to all events based on our past experience – no events in themselves have inherent meaning, except for the meaning we give to them.
So, if you had teacher who used to give you a particular look every time he was annoyed with you, when you see someone else give you a similar look, you are likely to think they are also annoyed with you.
We go through our daily lives interpreting things based on our past experience, memories and beliefs we form about them. Most of the time this is fine, however sometimes we start to interpret things in ways that don’t serve us.
The great thing is that you can change this – and it starts with an awareness that this is what we are doing.
