What Are Mental Maps?

We all live in our perception of the world, don't we? Therefore everything is filtered through our beliefs, experiences, mental state, upbringing, etc. One person’s perception will never be the same as someone else’s.  Two people can argue about the meaning of something simply because they see it differently.

To be a successful influencer, it’s important to be able to understand and respect other views and perceptions. In terms of coaching and understanding others, you can improve your skills by:

- Improving observation capacity and understanding verbal and non-verbal languages of others scientifically.

- Working from within the other person’s mental map (Empathetic understanding)

- Exploring novel concepts and broadening knowledge base for easily understanding others model of the world.

-Improving the conversation so that you can help yourself and others to get to what you seek.

How do you test if a mental map is a useful one for the client to have?  Put simply – does their world view make them feel happy? Do they get the results that they think they should?  If they conflict all the time – if their mental map doesn’t fit with their experiences, then neither of these will be true.

If their mental map is ineffective, it’s not that they are lacking intelligence, nor is it the fault of outside circumstances, but it may be that their world view is out of line with their experiences of it.  You can help align them through various techniques in NLP which I would enlighten you shortly.