The map is not the territory!

The map is not the territory?
I took a long time to work that one out when I did my NLP Practitioner training.
For a start I've always been very comfortable with maps "so why should anyone else have problems?"  was my reaction. Navigation is a straightforward exercise. I instinctively know my east from my west and I've always followed those instincts whenever needing direction - whether in a big city at home or on holiday in a dusty hire car.
Of course there was the one exception when I drove from Lake Garda to Milan some 6 years ago. 

I left Garda and drove south to join the A4 - my "hard-wired" mental map directing me that I should turn left and head east towards Milan and Venice. Now whilst Venice is indeed to the east - Milan is actually to the west.  And with Italian motorway junctions being a bit tricky it was easy not to notice that in following the Milan sign I'd turned right and was heading west. Later when returning from Milan and rejoining the A4 the first sign I see is Venice - my mind map says "not that way - head west away from Venice."   
It was as much denial as disbelief when I neared Turin. When a helpful local insisted I must turn around and drive back my mind wouldn't accept.  Even the Dolomites to my left was not "mountain of evidence" enough to convince me that I was travelling east not west.  Bardolino is only a short distance up the east side of Lake Garda. When I finally hit the lake - which inexplicably had now shifted south of the A4 - I chose to drive round it's entire west, north and east sides before reaching Bardolino from the "wrong end??"
That "mind freaking experience" of 6 years ago prompted understandable curiosity in an article published recently in Current Directions in Psychological Science which covers our capacity to orientate ourselves.
Dealing particularly with architecture and the layout of buildings it explains how the mind builds a cognitive map as you enter a new building. It creates a layout of objects and shapes which we then use to navigate our way back out as we leave and back in when we revisit. Apparently, what the mind doesn't do very well is store a record of the route we took - that  sequence of left and right turns that we made. 

Now that very much explains a problem I have when asked to remember directions that are coded in the format: "1st left ...2nd right ...4th on the right."  Forget it! Because I will.
My processing preference is definitely for recognizable landmarks: "left by the park ....right at McDonalds ....and right by the Ford dealers."
There are some inevitable parallels that we can make here with the ways in which we communicate with others and attempt to influence their thinking.
You will have built your own "mental layouts" of knowledge and experience of - well pretty much everything really. The way you encountered situations and stored the parts became your map.
Now your map it isn't going to be wildly different from other peoples but different nonetheless.
So at the simplest level of communication - if for example you're wanting something done and you assume understanding and don't check - you'll probably not get the job done as you'd hope.
At a more extreme level when you're putting people under some pressure - like overselling ideas or being demanding then there is a very good chance that you and the other party are going to be in two different places altogether - like Turin when it should be Garda!