Imagine sitting in a meeting where someone offers feedback on a project your team has been working on. Everyone hears the same comments. The words are identical. Nothing different is said to one person than another.

Yet as the meeting ends, it becomes clear that people are walking away with very different experiences.

One colleague is encouraged, seeing the feedback as useful suggestions for making the project even stronger. Another feels quietly deflated, hearing mostly criticism. A third dismisses the comments altogether, convinced that the reviewer simply doesn’t understand the realities of the work. Someone else leaves thinking not about the feedback itself, but about the opportunity it presents to try a different approach.

If you were to ask each person what happened in that meeting, their accounts would be surprisingly different. Not because anyone is being dishonest or irrational, but because each is describing what they genuinely experienced.

This isn’t unique to the workplace. We see the same phenomenon in families, friendships and everyday life. Two siblings grow up in the same home yet remember their childhood very differently. Two people receive exactly the same compliment, yet one feels appreciated while the other dismisses it as politeness. Two friends face the same setback, with one viewing it as a temporary obstacle and the other as confirmation that they were never good enough.

We often explain these differences by saying that people have different personalities, backgrounds or values. There is truth in all of these explanations, but they do not fully answer the deeper question.

How does the same experience come to mean such different things to different people?

The question becomes even more intriguing when we realise that these different meanings do not simply disappear once the moment has passed. They stay with us. They influence what we notice, how we interpret new experiences and, over time, how we come to see ourselves and the world.

That raises an even deeper question.

Where do these ways of seeing come from?

In the previous essay, The Map Is Not the Territory, I explored the idea that we do not respond directly to reality. We respond to our mental maps of reality. Those mental maps help us navigate an impossibly complex world, but they are never the world itself.

This essay picks up where the previous one left off.

If our mental maps are not reality, how are they formed? How does a fleeting experience become an enduring way of seeing ourselves, other people and the world around us?

It is tempting to believe that our experiences simply shape us. While there is some truth in that, I think it overlooks something important. Experiences do not automatically become beliefs, assumptions or enduring ways of seeing the world.

Between what happens and who we become lies a far more interesting process.

We notice some things and overlook others. We interpret what those experiences mean. We draw tentative conclusions about ourselves, other people and the world around us. Some of those conclusions fade with time. Others are reinforced by later experiences until they become so familiar that they no longer feel like interpretations at all. They begin to feel like reality.

This essay explores that journey. It traces the path from a single experience to an enduring mental map, and in doing so, explains why two people can look at the same world yet come to live in remarkably different ones.

From Experience to Meaning

When we reflect on our lives, it is natural to point to significant experiences as the moments that shaped us. We might say that a supportive teacher gave us confidence, a difficult manager made us distrust authority, or a painful failure taught us resilience. Looking back, it often feels as though the experience itself changed us.

There is truth in that observation, but it leaves out an important part of the story.

Experiences do not arrive with meaning already attached. The same event can leave one person feeling encouraged and another feeling discouraged. It can strengthen one person’s confidence while deepening another’s self-doubt. If experiences alone determined who we become, we would expect people exposed to similar circumstances to reach broadly similar conclusions. Yet everyday life tells us otherwise.

What seems to matter is not simply what happened, but what we understood the experience to mean.

It is a subtle distinction, but it changes everything.

Imagine two young professionals presenting their work to a senior leader. At the end of the presentation, they both receive the same piece of feedback:

“You need to think more strategically.”

One walks away feeling motivated. They interpret the comment as an investment in their growth. They think, “If I develop this skill, I’ll become a better leader.”

The other leaves questioning their capability. They hear the same words but conclude, “Perhaps I’m not cut out for this.”

The feedback was identical. The meaning was not.

The same pattern appears throughout our lives. A parent who sets high standards may be experienced by one child as deeply encouraging and by another as impossible to please. A career setback may become the beginning of a new direction for one person and a lasting source of self-doubt for someone else. Even moments that seem insignificant at the time can take on extraordinary importance if we attach a particular meaning to them.

This is why I have come to think of human beings not simply as learners or problem-solvers, but as meaning-makers. We are constantly trying to answer questions such as:

What just happened?

Why did it happen?

What does it say about me?

What does it tell me about other people?

How should I respond in the future?

Most of the time, we are not consciously aware that we are asking these questions. The process unfolds quickly, often outside our awareness. Yet the answers we arrive at can become surprisingly influential.

The more I explored this process, the more I realised that there are several distinct stages between an experience and an enduring mental map. We do not move directly from one to the other. Meaning is constructed gradually, through a series of small but significant steps that often unfold outside our awareness.

It begins with the experience itself.

Every day we are exposed to thousands of sights, sounds, conversations, emotions and interactions. We cannot possibly pay attention to all of them. Our minds therefore begin by selecting what appears most important in that particular moment. A tone of voice, a facial expression, a sentence spoken in passing or even something that was left unsaid may stand out while everything else fades into the background.

These become the salient cues—the parts of the experience that capture our attention and become the raw material from which meaning is constructed.

From those cues, we begin to interpret what has happened. We ask ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, What does this mean? The interpretation may be accurate, partially accurate or completely mistaken. At this stage, we usually have no way of knowing. We are simply trying to make sense of an experience with the information and understanding available to us at that moment.

Those interpretations then give rise to tentative conclusions. Sometimes they are specific: “I should prepare more thoroughly next time.” At other times they become more personal: “People don’t value my ideas.” Or broader still: “It’s safer not to speak up.”

At first, these conclusions are just that—conclusions. They are not yet enduring beliefs or fixed aspects of our identity. They remain open to being confirmed, challenged or revised by future experiences.

Seen this way, mental maps are not created in a single moment. They are built gradually. A single experience may plant a seed, but whether that seed grows depends on what happens next.

That is where the story becomes even more interesting.

When Meaning Becomes a Mental Map

If every conclusion we drew from our experiences lasted forever, our mental maps would be changing constantly. Fortunately, that is not how our minds work.

Many interpretations are short-lived. We misread a situation, learn something new or have a different experience that causes us to think again. The conclusion quietly fades away.

Others, however, follow a very different path.

Sometimes an experience carries particular emotional significance. Sometimes it is repeated. Sometimes similar messages come from different people or across different situations. Whatever the reason, a tentative conclusion begins to feel increasingly plausible.

Imagine a child who is excited to share an idea, only to be interrupted before they can finish speaking. One experience alone is unlikely to define how they see themselves. But if similar experiences continue to occur—perhaps at home, at school or among friends—the child may gradually begin to draw a broader conclusion.

“People aren’t interested in what I have to say.”

That conclusion may still remain tentative. But then another experience occurs that seems to fit.

“See… that’s what I thought.”

A teacher overlooks them. A louder classmate gets attention. Someone changes the subject before they finish speaking.

Each experience is interpreted through the conclusion that has already begun to form, and each interpretation appears to provide further evidence that the conclusion was right all along.

The new experiences did not create the conclusion. They strengthened one that had already begun to take shape.

Gradually, something important begins to shift. The mind is no longer simply making sense of individual experiences. It is beginning to organise them into a coherent picture of reality.

Over time, individual conclusions stop existing in isolation. They become connected.

Someone who repeatedly concludes, “People aren’t interested in what I have to say,” may gradually begin drawing related conclusions:

“I shouldn’t speak unless I’m certain.”

“Other people’s ideas are probably better than mine.”

“It’s safer to stay in the background.”

Eventually, they no longer feel like separate thoughts. Together, they begin to form a broader mental map—an interconnected set of assumptions about ourselves, other people and the world.

The same process can lead to very different maps.

A child who repeatedly experiences encouragement may gradually conclude that mistakes are part of learning, that their ideas have value and that challenges are worth attempting. Another who repeatedly experiences criticism or dismissal may arrive at very different conclusions despite having similar abilities or opportunities.

Neither person’s map develops because they consciously choose it. It develops because, over time, certain interpretations become repeatedly reinforced until they begin to feel self-evident.

This is one reason mental maps can become remarkably resilient.

By the time they are firmly established, we rarely remember the individual experiences from which they emerged. We remember only the conclusion.

We no longer think,

“I wonder if people aren’t interested in what I have to say.”

We simply experience,

“People aren’t interested in what I have to say.”

The interpretation has quietly become a fact.

Or at least, it feels like one.

This is the moment at which a collection of experiences and interpretations becomes something more enduring: a mental map that begins to organise how we understand ourselves, other people and the world.

At this stage, however, something even more significant is about to happen.

Until now, the person has been constructing the map.

From this point onwards, the map begins constructing their experience.

When the Map Starts Seeing

There is an important shift that takes place once a mental map has become established.

Until now, we have explored how experiences are interpreted, how tentative conclusions are reinforced and how those conclusions gradually become an interconnected way of understanding ourselves and the world. It would be easy to assume that this is where the story ends—that our mental map is simply the product of everything we have experienced.

In reality, this is where an even more interesting part of the story begins.

Once a mental map has formed, it no longer sits quietly in the background as a record of past experience. It begins to participate in how future experiences are understood.

In other words, the map no longer simply reflects reality.

It begins to organise it.

This does not mean that two people are living in different worlds. They are still interacting with the same external reality. But they are no longer paying attention to the same aspects of it, attaching the same meaning to what they notice or drawing the same conclusions from what happens around them.

Our mental maps quietly influence what catches our attention, what fades into the background and what feels significant enough to remember. They shape the questions we ask, the explanations we find convincing and even the possibilities we are able to imagine. Without realising it, we begin looking for a world that fits the map we already carry.

Imagine someone who has gradually developed the belief that they are not good enough.

When they receive positive feedback, they may dismiss it as kindness or good luck. When they make a mistake, however, it feels like confirmation of something they already suspected. Neither response is deliberate. The map simply makes one interpretation feel more plausible than the other.

Someone else, carrying a different map, may experience exactly the same sequence of events very differently. They acknowledge the mistake, learn from it and move on, while accepting the positive feedback as evidence that they are growing. The external events are similar. The meaning constructed from those events is not.

This is why mental maps become self-reinforcing. Once we have reached a conclusion about ourselves or the world, we naturally become more sensitive to experiences that appear to support it. We notice them more readily, remember them more vividly and often give them greater weight than experiences that challenge our existing assumptions.

At the same time, experiences that do not fit our map may be overlooked, explained away or regarded as exceptions. This is not because we are being irrational. It is because our minds are constantly trying to create a coherent understanding of an extraordinarily complex world. A mental map provides that coherence.

Seen in this way, mental maps are neither good nor bad. They are adaptive. Without them, we would have to interpret every situation from first principles. We would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information demanding our attention.

The difficulty arises when we forget that a map is still only a map.

An interpretation that once helped us make sense of our experience can gradually become an unquestioned assumption. A useful shortcut can become a limitation. A conclusion that was appropriate in one stage of life may continue guiding our decisions long after the circumstances that gave rise to it have changed.

Perhaps this is why our ways of seeing the world can feel so convincing. We are not simply remembering the past. We are continually experiencing the present through patterns of meaning that have been built over many years.

We rarely stop to ask whether the map itself has become part of what we are experiencing.

Bringing It All Together

At this point, it may be helpful to step back and look at the whole process.

Over the years, as I reflected on my own experiences, worked with coaching clients and explored different perspectives from psychology and sensemaking, I found myself returning to the same sequence again and again. Different disciplines illuminated different parts of the journey, but none quite captured the whole picture I was beginning to see.

Gradually, those reflections evolved into a simple framework that helped me make sense of how our mental maps are formed. I do not see it as a new psychological theory. Rather, it is a synthesis—a practical way of bringing together several complementary perspectives into one coherent picture.