Chapter ThreeThe Map and the Milestones for Your Conversation

“The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn’t gold.”

Leo Tolstoy, from Tolstoy’s Diaries

One of the coaching questions I often ask is: “How do you know that to be true?” The answer is always based on personal perception and not absolute laws of the universe, if there are any. Individuals build their own models of reality from whatever bits and bytes are stored in their minds. Even “true facts” relating to the physical world have been up for hot debate in the past century.

Although hundreds of models and theories from philosophy, biology, and psychology seek to explain how humans know things, they all support the fact ...

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