We fight about money. We fight with ourselves about finding the right parking space. Sometimes we’re ticked off and don’t even know why.
Do you ever get angry and just don’t get why it’s happening? I know I do. And then I get mad about that.
Why does this happen?
And – what the devil do we do about it.
Held Prisoner by our Mental Models
Each of us has a mental model of how the world works.
Or at least how it is supposed to work. When the world – and the people in it – conform to the whats, whys, and wherefores that make up this model of life, then we are fine.
The headache here is that our mental models are hopelessly wrong. They’ve all dated themselves hopelessly. If, like a computer, you were able to update it daily, today, it is old information. These prototypes of the world are made through the ravages of time, our mental and emotional baggage, and our personal histories. And your mental model is different from the one that’s operating in the head of whoever you are dealing with.
Our Models of the World Keep Us Stuck
The world and all the people, places and things in it are too complicated to be depicted by a model. An old teacher once told me that very smart people have tried to make a model to predict the stock market. They were trying to create a crystal ball so that they could invest at the right time.
What he told me was that it could conceivably be possible to create an equation to predict where the market would go for the next, say. fifteen minutes. The difficulty is that the equation would take longer than that to solve and it would take a computer bigger than the most powerful supercomputer available at the time.
Life doesn’t come with a crystal ball. It doesn’t even come with an instruction manual.
So, what do we do if we are stuck with this mental model of the world, with all its flaws and inaccuracies.
We bring it out in the open. We shine a light on it and see it for what it is. We take a step back and see the thoughts, feelings, moods, and emotions that make up this model and then act, not on them, but on what we value most in the long-term.
We realize that our mental model may simply be colliding with the model of the other person we are dealing with. We all live in an absolute separate reality. We would all benefit from celebrating our differences and not fighting about it.
On the other hand, if your mental model says that you are supposed to be able to find a parking place when you want one, you’re on your own!
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