In many of the books I’ve been reading in the recent years, I’ve been introduced to the concept of “mental models”.
A ‘Mental model’ is the idea we have in our heads about how the world works.
For eg- if you work hard, you succeed.
Now this might not necessarily be true.
You might work really hard, but might not find the results you were hoping for.
Someone might put zero effort into something and still succeed.
A mental model is just the story we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the stuff happening around us.
A few days ago, I was cross with my husband for not responding to an emotional bid in the way I was hoping for. In the mental model I have about relationships, I had come to believe that if I make a loving approach and didn’t feel adequately reciprocated, that meant that there was something wrong. Maybe he didn’t care enough. Or maybe he didn’t like me anymore.
A mental model doesn’t factor into account things like your partner being utterly exhausted after a 48 hour duty and not being in the space to give. It just operates on a default mode. I had to unlearn the limiting beliefs I had about love. There is no perfect world in which your partner responds to each and every bid of yours like in a RomCom movie. We are, each of us, just flawed humans trying to get it right. When we are hungry or sleepy or tired or scared, we cannot offer up the best versions of ourselves.
And that’s okay.
The ideas we have about how success should look like, how a happy relationship should come across or what a ‘good life’ means have been built and fortified by the programming we received as children and the conditioning we undergo every day as adults. We are ambushed by advertisements that tell us that owning a Mercedes or the latest iphone is what success looks like. We are constantly given the impression that if we wear expensive clothes or earn a six figure salary, we made it.
The truth is that, all of our mental models are biased and mostly just plain wrong. Although it might be a little difficult to question if what matters the most to you right now could perhaps matter less, it is work that really needs to be done.
People want to please. They want to be liked and appreciated. This is why the constant ringing of “What will people think?” exists.
But if we wish to evolve into a higher version of ourself,
and live a life true to ourselves,
Then we must begin by questioning what we believe about love and life and what matters. And when we find that some of these rigid beliefs need to be let go of, lets just let it go.
Maybe we all end up dancing a little bit more every day.
