Mental models
Prof Debashis Chatterjee of IIM-L emphasises the value of knowing the inner self

There is one question that I very often ask students at the IIM: if livelihood is for life, what is life for? Naturally, most students aren’t prepared with an answer. The hectic pursuit of a professional career does not come with this essential life skill: to know one’s own self.

A few years back I was a mentor to a group of 12 talented students who were in the postgraduate programme at IIM-Lucknow. I called this the LOVE group. LOVE was a convenient name for Leaders of Voluntary Enterprise. We met quite often for almost a year to have conversations about life and work life. My favourite student Manjunath, who was killed by the oil mafia in Uttar Pradesh last year, was part of this group. Sometimes the group would meet in the bitter chill of a north Indian winter morning and raise storms over cups of coffee. That was the best part of our day at work!

I had never seen as much passionate participation in the formal classroom sessions as I saw in our informal LOVE group. I used to wonder why? I guess all our education is more and more about knowing the world. Unfortunately, this leaves us with less and less time to know ourselves. Like neighbours in adjacent flats in Mumbai, our body and mind, live very close to each other without knowing each other well. In my decades of teaching in two IIMs, I found out that the really successful students had always a greater degree of self-awareness than their more academically bright counterparts. In short, self-knowledge and self-awareness were very critical to the impact they had in their places of work.

The best way to know yourself is to start observing your own mind in action.

An unobserved mind leads to all kinds of trouble. For example, if you do not observe the presence of fear in your mind, you will engage in unconscious actions that are fearful. If you have developed a pattern of anger, you will be blindly angry at some innocent people. Your behaviour and your actions follow the patterns that you have created in your mind. The way to lead a creative life is to follow how the mind moves from moment to moment.

I was speaking to a large gathering in IIT-Kanpur. This mid-career gentleman in the audience says to me in his squeaky voice, “I am an engineer, not quite the creative type. I wish to live a creative life but I’m afraid I am not good enough in that area”. So I ask him, “How long was it that you had your engineering degree?” He says, “About ten years!” I respond, “Obviously you are not an engineer, you only have an engineering degree, that too a degree that has passed its expiry date.” Ever since he has passed engineering, this man is in the business of selling sanitary napkins for a multinational. So, ‘I am an engineer’, although factually right, doesn’t quite hold true for him.

Facts are not truth. Facts that we hold on to by constantly repeating or defending them become our mental models. A mental model is a lens of self-image through which we project ourselves in the universe. These lenses are made up of our assumptions about life, about ourselves and about others. Unfortunately, many of us are blind to our own lenses. When they harden, they become concepts. If we see the world through concepts, we become like patients of cataract. The light of the creative and playful self then dies on us.

We hold on to different mental models for different situations at work and at home. Some of the usual ones are:
• I am better than
• I have family pressure
• I am not as good as
• I am always busy
• I deserve
• I cannot drive

All the above are based on some facts of experience in our lives. Facts are only bricks of mental models. What holds these bricks together are ‘felts’. These felts act like cement. A mental model = facts + felts. Now what are felts? Felts are feelings associated with certain facts of life in the past. The facts of life we remember the most, such as our first kiss or our first job or our experience of the death of a dear one, are those that have had a deep ‘felt aspect’.

Mental models are like cocoons or comfort zones of habitual patterns that prevent you from breaking free. So how does one get out of them? One exercise that works for me is to deliberately slow down my activities for a day to be aware of the mental models I carry. Amazingly, mental models lose their influence when I just become aware of them. The man from IIT asks me, “How can I live a creative life?” I tell him, “You can if you know that fire will be discovered for the second time in human history. Only this time, the spark will come from within your self.”