Some random facts:

• I’ve lived in my tiny house for more than three years.
• I have a parrot and love birds of all kinds.
• I have an electric incinerator toilet.
• The instructions for using the toilet are printed on the lift-up lid.

And, until last week, I thought the right hand image in those instructions was a bird.

Take a look at the image on the right  — under the word START.

What do you see?

For three years, I’d occasionally wondered why the manufacturers had included a bird in the instructions for using an incinerator toilet.

I assumed it was something to do with protecting the environment. Perhaps it was a little visual reminder that incinerating your waste was somehow good for nature, birds and the planet.

It seemed slightly random, but not random enough for me to investigate.

After using the toilet a couple of times, I no longer needed the instructions. I only noticed the alleged bird when I cleaned the lid, so I’d give it a passing thought and carry on.

My mind had decided what it was.

Case closed.

Except it wasn’t a bird.

We don’t experience everything that is there

We experience the world through our senses. We see, hear, feel, taste and smell what’s happening around us.

But there is far more information available than we could possibly process consciously. If you noticed every sound, colour, movement, physical sensation, change in temperature and passing thought at once, you wouldn’t be able to function.

Your brain would still be examining the texture of the carpet while everybody else had gone home.

Filtering experience is essential

It allows us to select what seems important and ignore most of the rest.

We do this in three main ways:

• Deletion: We leave out information. You might notice the one critical comment and barely register the five positive ones.
• Distortion: We alter or add meaning to what we perceive. Someone takes hours to reply to a message and you decide they must be annoyed with you.
• Generalisation: We use one or more experiences to create a broader rule. One tedious meeting becomes, “Meetings are always a waste of time.”

We also filter information according to our beliefs, values, memories, interests, expectations, language, emotional state and the context we’re in.

That is a lot of filtering.

Your perception is a map, not reality itself

Once all that filtering has taken place, what remains is your perception of the situation.

In NLP, this is often described as your map of reality.

The map isn’t reality itself. It’s your internal representation of it, created from the information you noticed, the information you missed and the meaning you added.

And that map is what you respond to

Get together with siblings or other family members and discuss an event from your shared past. You may wonder whether you were all at the same event.

One person remembers what was said. Another remembers how uncle Jim reacted. Someone else vividly recalls the pudding but has otherwise deleted the entire happening.

The same thing happens when a group of people receive identical instructions. The words may be the same, but each person interprets them through a different collection of experiences, assumptions and expectations.

Different doesn’t automatically mean wrong.

It means filtered.

We add meaning to incomplete information

Imagine your boss says:

“I need to talk to you before you leave today.”

One person immediately pictures themselves being sacked and leaving the building with their possessions in a cardboard box.

Another thinks:

“He probably wants an update on the project.”

Someone else wonders whether they’re finally getting the pay rise they were promised.

The boss hasn’t yet said what the conversation is about. Each person has filled in the missing information using their own internal map.

We do this remarkably quickly. Often, we don’t notice that we’ve made an interpretation. It simply feels as though we’ve recognised what is happening.

That’s what happened with my bird. The image was ambiguous enough for my brain to find a familiar pattern and settle on an explanation.

Once it had done that, I stopped looking.

What do you notice first?

Think about a familiar place, perhaps your kitchen, workspace or living room.

What comes to mind first?

Is it something you like? A job waiting to be done? The light through the window? The sound of the fridge? The feeling in your body?

You didn’t consciously search every stored detail before selecting one.

Your mind presented you with something.

Another person thinking about the same room might notice something entirely different because their attention is guided by different interests, needs and expectations.

You can experience this in real time when you decide to buy a particular type of car and suddenly see that model everywhere.

The cars were already there. What changed was what your mind considered worth noticing.

Your emotional state changes the map

Your state also affects what you notice and what you think it means.

When you’re anxious, you’re more likely to notice possible threats.

When you’re angry, you may detect disrespect in something you’d ordinarily dismiss.

When you’re not feeling self-conscious, a harmless glance can feel like judgement.

When you’re curious, you’re more likely to notice possibilities and seek additional information.

This doesn’t mean every concern is imaginary or that changing your mood makes genuine problems disappear. It means your state influences which information receives your attention and how you interpret it.

If you’ve ever reread an email after a good night’s sleep and wondered why it seemed so offensive the previous evening, you’ve already experienced this.

Changing your state can change the map enough for you to see choices that weren’t visible before. If an automatic reaction keeps limiting your choices, SHIFT coaching can help you understand and change the pattern behind it.

Filtering affects communication too

We often assume that other people will understand what we intended to say.

After all, we know what we meant.

Unfortunately, they only have the words we used, accompanied by our tone, facial expression and body language. They then filter all of that through their own experiences and expectations.

This is why a perfectly clear instruction can produce five different results.

It’s also why saying, “But that’s not what I meant,” doesn’t erase the other person’s experience.

Instead of assuming that your meaning arrived intact, you could ask:

• “What did you understand me to mean?”
• “What does that mean to you?”
• “What did you notice?”
• “We seem to have experienced that differently. What happened from your point of view?”

Replacing certainty with curiosity allows you to compare maps without immediately deciding that one of you must be an idiot.

Replacing certainty with curiosity allows you to compare maps before deciding what went wrong. Further information may, of course, confirm your original assessment. But it’s useful to gather it before reaching for the labels.

So why did I see a bird on my toilet seat?

A friend visited recently and wanted to use the toilet.

Incinerator toilets aren’t quite as intuitive as the more familiar sort, so I went into the bathroom to give her a quick explanation.

I pointed to the instructions and mentioned that I’d never understood the bird.

She looked at the picture.

Then she looked at me.

“That’s not a bird. It’s a hand with a finger pressing the button.”

Oh.

Three years of inventing an environmental message from a manufacturer who was merely asking me to press START.

Because I love birds and live with Shaggy, my parrot, my attention is already primed to recognise bird-like shapes. The image was ambiguous, my mind found a familiar pattern and that interpretation became part of my reality.

Once I had decided it was a bird, I kept seeing a bird. I didn’t go back and examine the evidence because I already “knew” what it was.

The picture hadn’t changed.

The moment my friend offered a different interpretation, my perception did.

And now, of course, I can’t understand how I ever saw a bird.

How else might you be filtering experience?

Filtering isn’t a fault in the system. Without it, everyday life would be unmanageable.

The trouble begins when we forget that filtering is happening and mistake our interpretation for the only possible truth.

So, when you feel absolutely certain about what somebody meant, what will happen next or why a situation is the way it is, it may be worth pausing long enough to ask:

• What have I noticed?
• What might I have left out?
• What meaning have I added?
• What am I assuming?
• How might someone else interpret this?
• What changes when I become curious?

You may discover that your interpretation is accurate.

Or you may discover you’ve spent three years looking at a finger and seeing feathers.

If this article has made you curious about what else your mind is doing without consulting you first, you might enjoy Thinky Things.

It’s my short, weekly-ish email containing reflections, questions and useful things to notice, written for your inbox rather than the website.

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If you’d like to explore why your perception won’t be quite the same as anyone else’s, read NLP Map of the World: Why We All Experience Reality Differently. It includes two fascinating visual and auditory illusions that reveal just how much your mind quietly edits.

Listen to the interview

Aaron and I recently talked on Raglan Radio about how we process our experiences, the filters that shape our perceptions, and why different people can experience the same event very differently.

Our 53-minute conversation covered considerably more ground than this article, including unconscious patterns, why willpower isn’t always enough, and how understanding our internal processing can help us create change.

Tags: Communication skills, Interpersonal skills, Language, Perception, Podcasts and audio tips