Choose Your Destiny – Mastering Your Internal Map Of Reality

Having choice in your life is THE KEY to happiness, success, health and love. Everything that you can control in this world happens downstream of CHOICE.

I often talk about two aspects of creating more choice in your life: the world of the mind, and the world beyond the mind.

In this article, I want to give you an overview of the world of the mind, which creates four extremely important aspects of your life:

Nearly all people create these four things unconsciously, on autopilot, though it’s possible to create them intentionally, with choice.

I call the part of you that creates these four things your Internal Map of Reality, a collection of internal cognitive process that are running all the time inside of you.

You created this Internal Map of Reality as you grew up in the exact way you needed to create it to navigate your way through your childhood.

If you had loving parents, a safe and nurturing environment, and compassionate mentoring, your Internal Map of Reality probably works pretty well and creates, most of the time, positive outcomes.

If you had parents who were in some way emotionally dysfunctional - afraid, angry, anxious, or abusive - if your environment was less than safe, your Internal Map of Reality very likely creates some amount of outcomes you don’t like and negative emotional experiences.

As your Internal Map creates how you feel, how you behave, which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and what meanings you assign to what happens around you outside your awareness, those things will happen on autopilot, without choice.

However, if you learn to observe your Internal Map as it creates those four things – in other words, if you learn to create those four things with awareness to that degree they will become a choice.

Imagine your feelings, behaviors, which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and the means you assign to what happens being a choice. That would change everything.

So here’s how that Internal Map works:

You receive input from your environment. You see, hear, touch, smell, or taste something. You have experiences. As information comes in, you filter it through beliefs, values, memories, decisions, etc.

These filters delete, distort, and generalize this sensory information.

In fact, you delete almost all of it - millions of bits in each moment, almost none of which you notice. Your eyes, ears, and other senses receive the information, but your mind doesn’t notice most of it.

For instance, we delete whatever doesn’t agree with what we believe, or what we don’t think is valuable.

These filters unconsciously determine what you focus on, and as you know, when you focus on something your mind finds a way to create or attract more of it.

If you delete all information and strategies about success, for instance, you can’t focus on it, which means you won’t create or attract success.

These filters also distort what comes in - again, in order to confirm what we already believe or value.

To do this you might add something that really isn’t there, or create some other misperception so that what comes in agrees with your current Map of Reality.

Distortion could be harmful or beneficial. You could distort information telling you that you are loved so as to confirm that you aren’t, but you could also distort information in a way that opens up unrealized positive possibilities.

When you envision a better future, make plans, set goals, imagine something that doesn’t yet exist, we’re distorting in a positive way.

These filters also create generalizations. Without generalizations we’d have to re-learn how to open every door we encounter. If, however, we generalize that some aspect of life is dangerous, every encounter with it will create at least mild fight or flight, even when there’s no real danger.

Traumatic experiences lead to broad generalizations.

Then, we unconsciously focus on what we don’t want, which is a great way to get or attract more of it. So, information comes in and we filter it without even knowing that we’re doing it.

With what’s left over we make internal representations of reality: pictures, sounds, kinesthetic sensations, smells, tastes, plus our internal dialog about it.

Focusing, in fact, really means “making internal representations”. You create these internal representations all day long, in sequences that cognitive psychologists call 'strategies'.

These sequences directly create your feeling state in each moment.

Generally speaking, when you make internal representations of what you want or what is possible, you feel good.

When you make internal representations of what you don’t want, what you’re afraid of, what you’re worried about, you create bad feelings.

These feelings create your behavior, and your feelings and behaviors create the cues you give off or notice in others, causing you to attract or become attracted to certain people and situations.

Finally, your internal representations lead you to create the meanings you believe to be true about whatever is happening around you.

Here’s the bottom line:

If you learn how this process works, intellectually, and then learn how to observe it as you do it, that observation, that awareness, causes what you create to become a choice.

And you can create nearly anything you want in life - based on those 4 things you have control over.

To begin, watch your internal representations for a few minutes several times a day, and see what happens. Remember…

...awareness creates choice.