NLP: THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY-LEARNING THE LEGEND
The key to unlocking any map is the story the map tells. That’s true for communicative maps as well.
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
— John F. Kennedy
We’ve discussed how the brain processes senses into feelings and feelings into thoughts. We’ve learned that we can guide those feelings through techniques like anchoring, future pacing, and the learning trance. With each code you crack, you have moved from being an unconscious communicator to a conscious one and hopefully from being an incompetent communicator to a competent one.
The next and last step to cracking the code is to become an unconsciously competent communicator; then effective communication simply becomes second nature. As such you will master the art of effectively sharing opinions and ideas as well as the science. Once you master this last section of the communication code, you will move from being able to persuade the person sitting next to you to being able to persuade large groups of people.
When we move from persuading a single individual to the much larger and more complex task of political persuasion, we need a whole new set of tools. Unconscious competence requires understanding not only how the communication code works but also why it works. Without understanding the why, even competent communicators can fail to persuade.
Understanding the Why
A core NLP principle is that “The meaning of a communication is the response you get”: what matters is not what I say but what my listener thinks I said. We talked in previous articles here at Wisdom School about ways to make sure that your listener would get your meaning. That’s one key to the communication code.
What we didn’t talk much about, however, is why communication works this way. Why don’t other people see or hear or feel the world the same way I do? Don’t we all see, hear, and feel the same things? If we walk into a room with a desk and a chair, don’t we all see a desk? If we sit down, don’t we all feel the same seat?
The answer, in short, is, “No. We don’t.” We don’t all see exactly the same thing, and we don’t all feel that seat in exactly the same way. There really is a desk and a chair in the room, but each of us experiences that desk and chair differently.
Let me give you an example from my own life. I once lived on a houseboat on a river. That was the territory I lived in. “Territory” can be used to describe any part of the physical world. A room with a desk and a chair is a territory, for example. And “territory” can also be used to describe our psychological and political worlds (more on that shortly).
I can describe to you where I lived—my territory—even if you were not there with me. Sitting in my houseboat, looking at the river, I could have told you that the water is brown/blue/greenish, there are ripples, there are ducks along the bank, and so forth. My description of the river becomes a map of the territory for you. You are not experiencing the territory yourself, but you can experience my map of it.
Now, what happens if you came to visit me when I lived there? What if you and I were standing on my dock, looking at the river together?
We’d be looking at the same territory, the river. We’d both see the blue heron fishing on the riverbank, feel the cool-water breeze, and smell and hear the water as it flows around the pilings on which our dock and home float up and down with the tides. We could discuss the river and share what we each see and hear and feel. But here’s a secret that most of us know but never really accept. It’s the secret that will make you an unconsciously competent communicator:
Even though we are both experiencing the same territory, our individual experience of that territory will always remain different.
When we both stand and look at the river together, we both notice and experience different things. I might be knowledgeable about trees and thus see beech trees and willows, whereas you might see just trees. You might like to fish and know where they’re most likely to be found, seeing those places that I don’t even know exist.
We also come with different emotions that change how we understand our sensory experiences. I might have memories of the Willamette River that color my feelings about it and how I see it—and those are memories and feelings that are different from yours. Your experience of rivers in is certainly different from mine. Because our senses are tied to our emotions and memories, and mediated by our individual nervous systems, neither of us will never see or hear or smell or taste or feel things in exactly the same way as another person.
We already know this. One of our kids loves peppermint ice cream; the other kid hates it. Same ice cream, different experience.
One person listens to a Beethoven symphony and hears patterns of sound; another hears a story; another is bored and tunes out.
We have these experiences of our differences among each other all the time. It’s what makes life so rich and interesting.
Those differences have significant consequences, however, for communication. Anytime we communicate, we are never going to be successful at giving people a pure experience of objective reality—the territory.
No matter how well I describe my river to you, my map of the territory will never match your map of the territory. And neither map is the territory!
Distortion, Deletion, Generalization
There is a reason why our maps usually don’t match up. We put our sensory experience of the world through three different kinds of filters: distortion, deletion, and generalization. Our brain instantaneously and continuously uses these filters to be more efficient in our communication and our experience of the world.
As you read this series of lessons on NLP here at Wisdom School, you are engaged in these three kinds of filters. Until you read this sentence, you were probably not aware of what is on the wall to your left or the temperature in the room. You deleted that experience—and you will delete it again by the time this chapter is over—because our minds simply can’t process more than five to nine things at once.
You’re also distorting your experiences right now. In distortion we misrepresent parts of reality, often as a way of simplifying experience. We almost always distort our memories of events because we file those events in ways that make the most emotional sense to us (remember the Pentaflex folders metaphor from an earlier lesson?) rather than according to what our senses actually told us at the time.
We also distort and generalize when we make assumptions about others. You may have made a whole set of assumptions about what was in this series of lessons when you read that “Thom Hartmann, radio host” was the author, or that I was on a Vermont roster of psychotherapists and once was the executive director of a residential treatment facility for abused and emotionally disturbed children, or that I was an advertising industry executive and consultant, or that I’m the author of more than thirty books and an entrepreneur, or that I did international relief work on and off for more than twenty years on five continents in several war and conflict zones, or that Louise and I have been married for fifty-three years and have three grown children, two dogs, and four cats, or that doing all of these things pretty easily qualifies me as a poster child for attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
Each evokes a frame, and each frame is filled with shorthand: distortions, deletions, and generalizations.
You’ve also been generalizing your experience of the place you are in as you read this book. We don’t have enough time or energy to analyze every object we see that has four legs. We generalize, and say to ourselves, that is a chair, this is a table. Right now you may be aware that you are in a room, or on a plane, or wherever you happen to be, but you are probably not paying attention to all of the details that make up the place you are in. You probably did not spend time thinking about the floor, the walls, or the objects in the room before you decided that you were in a room.
To get through life, most of the time we have to label the world around us without thinking about its specificity.
Deletion, distortion, and generalization are necessary filters that enable us to process and make sense of the tremendous amount of information available to our senses. Yet when using these filters, we also sometimes delete, distort, or generalize in ways that may not be appropriate or useful. We may lose information we need, or we may misapprehend information.
When I tell you about the Columbia River I now live on, my map of the territory has been filtered through my deletion, distortion, and generalization process into language. That is, the map I describe to you is already not the territory. It’s just a generalized and distorted version of my map, filled with deletions and handed to you in the form of words. (Forgot to mention that bald eagle in the tree on the riverbank, didn’t I?)
When I communicate that map to you, I communicate through language. That language is then filtered by you through your own internal deletion, distortion, and generalization process into your map. Your map is, in turn, a deleted, distorted, and generalized version of my map, which is in turn a deleted, distorted, and generalized version of the actual reality, the territory.
You may think when I describe the river to you that you’re getting the territory, but you’re not. All we can ever get from another person is a deleted, distorted, and generalized version of their map.
Map versus Territory
Let’s make the metaphor solid and talk about a Rand McNally highway map. As children learn in grammar school, a map’s code is necessary to read and make sense of a map. That code is called the legend. It’s a nice metaphor, legend, because the map’s code really is the story of the map, and it tells us how the map was created.
For example, if I am going to drive from Chicago to Ames, Iowa, I will look at my road map, which will show me which roads to take. But if I want to know what kind of roads they will be, I have to look at the legend, which will let me know that expressways are red, highways are bold black, and 2-lane country roads are thin black lines.
If I want to know how long the journey will take, I have to consult the legend again, which may tell me that 1 inch on the map equals 50 miles. I can measure the inches, multiply by 50, multiply by my driving speed (which I won’t reveal here!), and figure out how long it will take me to get from Chicago to Ames.
Geographers study the stories that maps tell. They can discern how people think about their world by the kinds of maps they make. Christopher Columbus, for example, had a map of the world in which Europe was at the center, and all the places he visited were “discoveries” because they had never been known to Europeans before.
The people living in those places had their own maps, of course, telling themselves stories about the relationships between their people and the many other people who they knew lived on the land. For them the appearance of Europeans represented a discovery that necessitated altogether new maps. And for every culture in the world, the center of its map was the center of its living space (so much so that during the Middle Ages in Europe, people who suggested that the Earth wasn’t at the center of the universe were put to death).
Think about how you would map your neighborhood. One map is the satellite map, showing how your home looks from outer space. Another is a road map of your city or county that shows all the streets near you but doesn’t show your house at all. A third map is the computer map your friend uses to get to your house, which may show streets or may be just a list of directions. A fourth map is the map of real estate values, which becomes very important when you want to sell your house. A fifth map is the map you carry around in your head of your neighbors—who lives next to you, who lives across the way from you, and so forth. You may even have a map of everyone’s dog, if you’re a dog owner, or a map of all the playgrounds in the neighborhood if you have young kids.
Which of these maps is the map of the territory? All of them, and none of them.
Each map engages in deletion, distortion, and generalization. What makes these maps valuable to us isn’t whether they accurately represent the territory but how useful they are to us.
If I don’t have kids, I probably don’t care where the playgrounds are. If I rent, I probably don’t care about real estate values. I may not care what my house looks like from outer space.
What matters to us is what story a particular map can tell us—the story of who lives nearby, or what our financial value is, or how someone can find us.
It helps to remember that the code for maps is called a legend. The key to unlocking any map is the story the map tells. That’s true for communicative maps as well. What matters isn’t how accurate the map is—because no map will ever accurately reflect the territory—but rather how useful it is.
Which sets up our lesson for next month, The Identity Code.