How Your Personal Mind Map Shapes Reality: Reframe Your Life with Cognitive Reappraisal

What Makes Up Our Personal Mind Maps? 

Personal mental map is made up of opinions, beliefs and assumptions. We keep updating it every day as our conclusions get challenged one way or another. Because of what we assume, we form attitudes and opinions towards things and behave accordingly.

Our external stimuli and how our sensory organs perceive things form our complex reality. Our circumstances and situations and the filter through which we see them form the basis of our mental map.

Having an open mind and trying to understand how other people see the same set of circumstances with a different view point always helps us. Our truth and what we strongly believed might not be the same as others might view something. And that make us communicate and build bridges with others for a common future.

If you want to build your mental map into a global map, here are somethings you could do.

Let’s Create New Beliefs

1. We don’t have much of a choice but to assume positive intent from others. We don’t have context or full visibility of their lives, so assuming anything else will build hopelessness and contempt.
2. We’re not broken or terrible. People are capable of changing their behaviors as choice of action can be modified later based on information and context available.
3. Make an effort to put yourself in others’ shoes to experience their reality. How their perceive their reality and form their own truth is far different from yours.
4. The map is not the territory. People often don’t react to circumstances based on objective reality itself. Through a filter of their beliefs, their mental map, they perceive what has happened to them.
5. Beliefs –> Thoughts –> Emotions –> Behaviors –> Action. We must understand our own thought patterns and internal dialogues that motivate our responses and behaviors.
6. Failures and setbacks are just cautionary tales for us to side step them in a later, braver attempt of our goals. The past is not an indication of the future.
7. Taking extreme ownership of our life makes us empowered. When the going gets tough, taking personal responsibility for our choices and actions helps build unstoppable confidence.

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