In the late 1950s Noam Chomsky completed his Ph.D. thesis Transformational Grammar. In it he explained that there are three processes by which people make sense of the world: deletions, distortions and generalisations. These processes help us to create reality as we perceive it – because that’s all reality ever is – our perception of it. And our perceptions are limited by the amount of information we can hold in our awareness at one moment in time.

Should you want to describe an experience to another person, you would use only the words that you chose based on what you filtered in or out of the actual experience. It is estimated that you would only be giving about 2-7% of the details. Your listeners will then have to make up the rest based on their own filters and experience. Or if they are a skilled communicator they may be able to question some of your deletions, distortions and generalisations.

The only way we can tell what someone’s map of the world is like is by listening to the words they use to describe their experience. There is a wealth of information for the discerning listener in the form of the words people use. How someone says something is just as important to understanding them as what they say. In any given context there are usually only a few traits which make the difference between behaviour that is very effective and behaviour that does not provide the desired results or strains communication and relationships.