You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are. Clearly, each person is the product of his or her experience, and no two people can have identical imprinting. Two children of the same sex, one year apart, raised by the same parents, see the world through different lenses. If that’s true of these two youngsters raised under the same roof, what about people from totally different environments? To quote journalist Walter Lippmann, “We are all captives of the pictures in our head—our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.”
Therefore, to understand how you think and interpret events I must get into your world. To fathom your behavior, I must try to elicit your feelings, attitudes, and belief system.
In the vernacular of today’s young, I’ve got to know “where you’re coming from.”