One of the most powerful things you can realise is that as humans we create mental models of the people we interact with. It’s like we create a hologram of the person in our mind, made out of the few bits of information that we know about them and our minds fill in the rest.
Have you ever talked with someone on the phone for a while and then when you meet them for the first time you think “they look nothing like what I thought!” – hologram.
And this doesn’t just happen with the way they look, but with their character, their beliefs, their preferences etc. We do this even with people we’re familiar with. Our parents, siblings, friends, colleagues, our spouses and partners. Our minds fill in a lot of the gaps we have in our holograms with assumptions, beliefs, imaginations.
