I remember, years ago (back when I was a personal development junkie) listening to Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and hearing him say (but not fully understanding):
“The map is not the territory.”
…and then trying to get my head round what a principle was, and a paradigm and what was the difference between a personality and a character, and values and beliefs and ethics. And trying to remember all these definitions, and what they meant I should do.
There was a lot of figuring out to do, back then. And it all felt really hard.
These days it’s much simpler, and as a consequence, life is much easier.
Giles P Croft
As for the quote, what he’s pointing to is what I’ve said many, many times: that we’re not experiencing reality directly. Nobody ever has. Nobody ever can. Nobody ever will.
We have a human-limited aperture, called our senses, through which we get a teeny tiny, unique-to-us picture of it. As Alan Watts said:
“The ordinary, everyday consciousness that we have leaves out more than it takes in.”
So what we’re experiencing is not the territory, it’s a map.
What we experience is not the world, but our concepts and beliefs of the world.
Going back to Covey for a moment, he sums it up really nicely, by saying:
“We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”
We’re never experiencing “out there” … we’re only ever experiencing our selves, reflected outward.
🤯
(It’s inside-out, not outside-in.)
Now, there’s a problem here, and that’s the fact that the world (the territory) is constantly changing (something that becomes apparent to me every time I walk through the lounge while my daughter is watching TV: the stuff she finds engaging is utterly incomprehensible to me!!), while our concepts & beliefs (our map) remain largely static.
It would be like me going out for a bike ride using a beautiful, 1905 vintage Bartholomew map of the area (those things really are gorgeous; I still have a few dated from the 1940s) and expecting not to get lost when cycling through a big town; something that would be inevitable, given how much the landscape has changed in the intervening century.
What we need is an update to our map, and the great news is that this is something that is built in to the human operating system: automatic updates.
We can call them “insights.”
So we’re trundling along, doing the best we can with our old map, innocently unaware it’s out of date, and going along with the best available solutions that we can come up with while using that old map:
- unhealthy coping mechanisms
- anxiety in the face of uncertainty
- overthinking everything…
…a wrong turn here, a missed junction there; ending up comprehensively lost and stuck in the back of beyond…
All because our map is out of date and we just didn’t notice.
We can tell what map version we're using, by the behaviours we observe. Just like all the people using 1905's map, believing it to be true, would likely end up lost in the exact same place, people operating under the same outdated map of reality will find themselves exhibiting the same patterns of behaviour.
(Hello, the DSM of mental dis-orders.)
The good news is that Innate Health coaching is like hitting that “Software update” button, allowing the system to recalibrate; the old, outdated map of reality to fall away and a tailored-to-you, much more updated version to be installed.
Your concepts and beliefs—which we will always have (deal with it)—become much more closely aligned with how the territory actually is.
You stop getting lost, and it’s much easier to find your way through life.
Old, unnecessary patterns of behaviour just fall away, because you’re no longer being guided by an outdated map.
And the Human Operating System purrs along nicely again.
💟
Giles
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