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This is FiveMinuteFriday, Meaning is Everything.
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Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast everybody. Super excited to have you back here on board. Today, I wanted to share something that I learned at a Tony Robbins event. This was, described at the Date with Destiny, when I went to back a few years ago. And it’s been very powerful. This is something that he teaches. You can find this online as well. It’s about how we construct meaning of things.
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And, yeah, so it’s a very powerful concept that can help, or has helped me to identify why there are certain differences, why I had certain differences with certain people, why I interpret things one way, other people can interpret them in another way. And really helps if you use this framework, you apply it in day-to-day life, it can help you avoid falling into conflict and kind of resolve conflict, or at least see conflict, from a different perspective.
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So the framework goes as follows: When we live our lives, there’s external events that happen. Then we perceive these events through our senses that get into our brain. And there, in our mind, we construct meaning for these events. We derive what these events, what the circumstances, what the words people are saying, what the actions people are doing, whatever’s happening around us, whatever we’re witnessing, whatever we’re taking in, we are creating meaning for those things.
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So, basically, an event turns into meaning in our minds, and meaning turns into an emotion. An emotion turns into a decision. A decision turns into an action, and the action thereby dictates our life. That’s how we live our lives with those actions. So, once again, the sequence is event, meaning, emotion, decision, action, life.
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And the key here is how we construct meaning. So, events, external events, we can’t really control them. We can influence them, as Tony Robbins says, but we can’t really control things that happen around us. What we can control is the meaning that we give to external events, circumstances, things people say, actions they do, and all these other things.
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And how do we construct meaning? Well, the meaning that is constructed in our minds, it doesn’t just come automatically for everybody the same way. For different people, they construct different meanings to events because we have blueprints. We have blueprints in our minds that take in this external stimuli. And once it’s passed through the blueprint, and the output is the meaning.
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And people’s blueprints are created through their nature, through their nurture. So, as you grow up, partially it is, of course, comes with when you’re born. But also it partially it comes with, as you grow up the culture that surrounds you, what you witness your parents doing, how they interpret things, which are taught at school, how your friends behave, and things like that.
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So your blueprint is structured mostly through that early part of your life, where you’re not doing it by choice. It’s just happening. It’s a result of things that happen around you, and eventually we end up with some kind of blueprint that we didn’t choose. It was put there by other people, by the circumstances we got brought up in, and so on. And it turns out that everybody has their own kind of blueprint and their own blueprint.
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And that means we all interpret events with different meaning. And the same event for two different people can have different meaning. And, as a result, different emotions, as a result, different decisions, as a result, different actions, and as a result, completely different lives.
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In his event, Tony Robbins gives us a great example of two people that went to Vietnam, two people that served in the military in the Vietnam, and came back with non-veterans, and he interviewed each one of them. And what happened there was, in both of those situations, a tragic thing occurred. For each one of those people, their best friend was killed in battle right next to them.
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So for one person, they were shooting from a trench or some similar set-up in combat, and their best friend was killed right next to them, shot in the head, and died on the spot. The other person, for the other veteran, they were running through a field, and their best friend stepped on a mine right in front of them, and they got blown to bits.
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Both very tragic events, very similar events, best friend dies in battle right next to the person. However, these two people, these two veterans afterwards, had completely different lives. One of them became very depressed and sad and was finding it hard to cope with life. I’m paraphrasing, of course, the exact description that Tony Robbins gave because it was a while ago, but the essence is that. They became depressed and very sad, and it was very difficult for them.
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Whereas the other veteran became very happy, very joyous, very grateful for life. Why is that? Well, Tony Robbins explains it, because these two people constructed two different meanings. They had two different blueprints, which gave an output of two different meanings for very similar events.
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In one case, the person interpreted it as the meaning of this is that life is short. It’s not worth living. We could die at any moment. Life is unfair, unjust. It’s all terrible. And that led to certain emotions, certain decisions, certain actions, and a life where they were feeling depressed and sad. And it was difficult for them.
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On the other hand, the other person interpreted this very similar, almost identical, event with the meaning that life is precious and we could die at any point in time. We have to cherish every moment we have with our loved ones, just every moment on this planet is super valuable. And I’m so grateful for being alive, and I want to make the most of my time here.
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So that’s the meaning they interpreted. They got certain emotions from that, certain decisions and certain actions. And, as a result, their life full of gratitude, full of admiration for the world, for being here, and making the most of every moment.
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As you can see, two almost identical events, tragic events, go through two different minds, go through two different blueprints, come out with two different meanings. And, from there, the chain goes on, different emotions, different decisions, different actions, completely different lives.
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So, why is this important? Well, this is important to keep in mind because when you’re speaking with someone, or you’re in the same room with someone, or you’re maybe in a relationship with someone, you’re in a working relationship with someone, an event that means a certain thing to you, can mean something completely different to them.
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And the conflict comes, not from that the event was … For instance, somebody says something to you. You’re discussing something with them, and they say something to you. So, they didn’t mean to say something bad to you. They actually said something, maybe that is positive, based on their culture, based on their upbringing, based on the things they’ve experienced in their life. They maybe gave you a compliment.
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But because of your blueprint, the meaning you derive from it is negative, and you now see that they’re attacking you, or you see that they don’t understand you, or that they want to be aggressive towards you, or that they don’t care about you, and things like that. So then you go ahead and act. You feel an emotion from that meaning. You make a decision, you take actions, and that impacts your life.
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What can we do about it? Well, what we can do is, whenever we catch ourselves feeling like … especially if we feeling a negative emotion. Emotions just come up. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re triggered. An emotion comes up. But then it’s our choice whether to act on that or not.
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So we can catch ourselves and actually ask ourselves the question, “I’m having this emotion, this negative emotion of feeling hurt,” for example. ‘That is because I attribute certain meaning to the words that were spoken to me or to the action that was done. Is that meaning warranted? More importantly, does that other person attribute the same kind of meaning to what was just said or what was just done? Do they attribute the same meaning, or maybe their meaning is different. Maybe they didn’t mean it as a negative thing. Maybe, actually, they meant something positive. It’s just my blueprint is different to theirs.”
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And when you ask yourself those questions, it becomes easier to see the other person’s perspective and not get caught up in this whirlwind of just diving into the emotions that are brought up by a meaning that you had and a blueprint that you have, which you didn’t choose to have in the first place. It’s been put there through all these things that happened to you, especially in your early childhood. It’s just there.
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But we don’t have to always follow along with it, and we can catch ourselves, especially in times when we’re feeling hurt or that somebody is trying to be negative towards us and other things like that. We can catch ourselves.
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And it doesn’t have to even involve another person. It could be like, for instance, being stuck in a traffic jam, right? We can attribute meaning to that, that “I’m late. I’m frustrated,” or “People can’t drive. I’m always getting caught up in these bad situations.”
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Or you attribute some other meaning that, “Yeah. Maybe somebody is in trouble. Maybe somebody just needs help right now.” And it completely changes the emotion, the decision, the action, life.
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It a difficult thing to do. I personally find it difficult very often, but at least knowing about this framework and even a bit later, not in the moment, but a bit later, to sit down and just reflect on how a certain event resulted in certain meaning, emotion, decision, action, just reflecting on that, can help dissect these things and slowly, bit by bit, to better understand yourself. And I think that’s a first step to creating a better … or a life more free of negative emotions, a life more full of joy, love, and peace is through understanding yourself. And, to me, this really helps.
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So, once again, event goes through a blueprint, triggers meaning, which results in an emotion, results in a decision, results in an action, results in a life.
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So there we go. My challenge for you, if you like, for this weekend, is to apply this framework in a situation that you might find yourself in, whether it’s positive or negative. This can be applied to positive, when you’re feeling positive emotions, basing actions on that, just see what kind of framework, what kind of meaning are you attributing to certain event? And how would you feel if you attributed a different meaning? What other possible meaning could you be attributing to it?
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And I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Looking forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
