Being a human is hard. We are constantly bombarded with far more information than we can properly process so our brains are always looking for shortcuts. One of those shortcuts is to create schemas or, according to structural-learning.com, “a mental framework that helps individuals organize, process, and store information about their environment.” While that definition is fancy and accurate, I like to think of schemas as the lens through which we see the world. Depending on what lens we are using, the exact same information can be interpreted in completely different ways. This helps explain why two people can walk away from the same interaction with contradictory takeaways. They are using a different lens to interpret the same information.
For example, if my schema surrounding strangers is that most people are inherently good and your schema surrounding strangers is that most people are inherently bad, I might think our conversation at a party with a man talking about his new business venture was harmless while you might assume he was trying to manipulate us into investing. Meanwhile, the truth of the man’s intentions might lie somewhere in the middle. (Or not! Some people are in fact harmless while others are manipulative.)
Understanding our own schemas and whether they are serving us well is a great way to better understand ourselves and how we might improve our self-worth, relationships, and overall internal world. They aren’t the kind of thing you can change overnight, but being able to recognize “hey, I am clearly interpreting this event with a certain filter” is a way for us to take a step back and start to pick apart what interpretations are actually based in reality and what might be affected by an unfair bias.
To better show how schemas work and what it would look like to change them, I’m going to break down some of my own! I’ll include both past, present and desired future lenses for different areas of my life. (And, if you’re feeling up to it, maybe you can do the same for yours!)
So without further ado…