Our inner map of reality

“There’s two kinds of people in this world, there’s winners and there’s losers. Okay, you know what the difference is? Winners don’t give up.”

That is Richard (Greg Kinnear) in the comedy “Little Miss Sunshine” – perhaps addressing one of his pep talks to his daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) about pursuing her dream to enter a beauty pageant.

Richard is struggling to establish his career as a motivational speaker, including getting a book deal, but he is connecting with his family and others mainly in fractious and fragmented ways, on account of his autocratic ideas about himself, and life and success.

His superficial, black-and-white “Refuse to Lose” ideas, and the way Richard arrogantly interacts with people, are undoubtedly outcomes of his self-perception, emotional history and inner reality – just as it is for all of us.

Bill Harris (CEO of Centerpointe Research Institute) writes in his article Inside the Black Box: How Your Internal Processes Create Your Life that “certain internal thinking processes (what I call your Internal Map of Reality) generate several key aspects of your life: 1) nearly all of your internal feeling experiences, 2) your behaviors, and 3) the people and situations you attract into your life, or become attracted to.”

Actor Greg Kinnear dynamically portrays the driven desperation of his character with revealing verbal and non-verbal cues that reflect his inner realities.

Bill Harris writes that these cues “cause others to notice (or fail to notice) you, or to become attracted (or not be attracted) to you. Based on these cues, people are led to become involved with you in some way, or to not notice you at all.”

He adds, “It’s as if our Internal Map of Reality has a script, and it finds the characters and situations you need in order to create that script in reality… Your life, however, does not need to be script-driven. You can step outside the world of automatic, scripted outcomes.”

Another perspective is provided by self-realization seminar leader and author Guy Finley, who says, “This interior life that we are supposed to have access to and live within is ostensibly kept from us because of this nature that we live from that wants to know what it is, what it’s to do, how it’s to do it — at all costs, all the time — and so we miss the truth that what we are from moment to moment is what determines our experience of the moment we are in.

“When we begin to understand that, the moments themselves become beautiful reflections, expressions of ourselves to ourselves. We learn to be present to ourselves. That is what the path is.”

From his book Living Now – Secrets of the Extraordinary Life, available on his site: Life of Learning Foundation.

See more related quotes, books etc on the page Awareness – thinking.