WELCOME TO YOUR WORLD

The single most important factor in determining the quality of your life is the way you experience the world around you. If you want to change your life, you have to change the world. Simple. Yeah right! When most people learn about setting goals or achieving success they are taught to keep it simple; chunk it down; take baby steps. And here I am telling you that if you want to improve your life you have to start by changing the world!?! Absolutely. Changing the world is the only way you can even begin to see the manifestation of your hopes, dreams and desires.

But of course I’m not expecting you to go out there and change the world in a physical sense. I’m not even asking you persuade other to change their behaviours so they are more congruent with your own preferences. I’m certainly not going to suggest that you single handily tackle world peace or put an end to poverty. I am, though, going to be challenging you to take a deep and honest look at what the world means to you, personally; internally.

Have you ever heard of the expression “the map is not the territory”? It was first introduced by Alfred Korzybski, the polish born philosopher and scientist. His words perfectly illustrate the point I am making here.

If you were planning a road trip to somewhere you’d never been before the chances are you’d get some kind of map to work out your route. At no point during this process would you begin to confuse the map as being that actual roads, towns, countries you’d need to pass in order to reach your destination. That’s just absurd. I hope you agree with this, because if you don’t we’ve definitely got our work cut out! It is a blindingly obvious and unquestionable truth that the map of the territory that lay before you is just a representation of the land itself.

Likewise, when you read through a restaurant menu you use the words that describe the various dishes to help you select what you want to physically eat. How many times have you mistaken the menu for being the actual food itself? You have no idea how much I’m hoping you just answered “none” to that last question.

So what am I getting at? My point is we’re all reasonably intelligent human beings and we can tell the difference between actual things and other things that are only meant to represent those actual things. In other words we know what’s real and what’s not.

Or do we? Alfred Korzybski’s statement, “the map is not the territory”, is a metaphor to remind us that just because we think the world (or reality) is a certain way, that doesn’t mean its how the world actually is. Essentially what Mr K is saying is that we each have a unique internal map of the world that we use to navigate our way through life. But it’s just a map; not reality itself.

Most of the significant problems we face in life are directly related to the inaccuracies of our internal maps – the differences between what we perceive as reality and what is actually taking place in the physical word. I’d even go so far as to say that the extent to which we feel fear, anxiety, nervousness, pain, uncertainty (all those uncomfortable emotions that keep us from firing on all cylinders) are generated in exact proportion to the size of the mismatch between reality and our perceived representation of it.

Conversely, the more closely aligned our internal maps are to the ‘territory’ they are referencing, the happier we become. This is simply because we can see the truth of the situation more clearly in front of us. Only when we are presented with truth are we given the power to change, or at least influence, circumstances for the better.

Without truth we are power-less. We become victims of circumstance. Our internal map tells us we are at point A, when in actual fact we are point Z. We start reacting to false information because the map we are using is flawed; it doesn’t reflect the truth.

Sometimes the map is only slightly wrong. This is like buying the latest version of a city street map from the local bookstore, only to discover there’s a new one way system that opened yesterday. No big deal; we can adjust to a new route quite easily and remember it for our future travels.

But sometimes the map can be so wrong it’s like trying to get across Europe with the highway guide of the United States.