We are meaning-making creatures that notice, interpret, and give meaning to the subtle clues of others.
The magician’s sleight of hand only works because we allow it to. We take delight in being fooled. Our eyes dart about trying to observe the trick. However, we can only observe a small amount of what is going on as the magician moves his or her hand around.
For the magic trick to work, two things must occur:
Research shows that only 40% of what we think we see comes in through our eyes. The rest is made up from memory or patterns from past experiences. This means the majority of what we think we see is our brains filling in the gaps — giving us the illusion that we are seeing the complete picture.
We create similar illusions daily.
All of our decisions are shaped by the culmination of experiences from our memory that form mental models about how we think things are supposed to work. Our mental models are shaped by our views of our lifestyle, concerns about our fair share, feelings about status, our judgments about other people, and our judgments about ourselves.
Most of us walk around thinking we are the only ones who know what is best. Yet our reality is the only reality that we know. We must remember that the perceptions and experiences of others are vastly different from ours.
Our default instinct is to resist and ignore things that challenge our mental models. We must acknowledge that our mental models are mere approximations of reality — and that the conclusions we draw cannot help but be prone to error.
When we don’t honor this truth, it erodes our ability to connect and transcend differences. It erodes our ability to see that we, all of us, are not separate — but one.