Part 4: Narratives, filters and connecting — what the hell is going on with people?

This is the fourth part of a five part series. You can go to Part 1 to learn about the foundation of this idea, narratives, filters and connecting. Part 2 moved to personal narratives. Part 3 covered how it is we process things, what get’s our attention and why.

Today, in Part 4, we’re going to go deep into filtering and how they form our personal narratives.

Filtering

Those complex filters play a crucial role in how we all operate. In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, there is a well worn phrase, “the map is not the territory”.

What this means is all of us experience the world through our own map, our own view finder, we are looking through it into the world. We are not seeing the world as it is, we are seeing a map, a representation of it. That view finder, that map is composed of our wonderfully complex filter system. You experience the world through your filters, I experience the world through mine. We are all using a map.

Here’s a little side note, just for fun. Really good designers are really good at using empathy for their…