This morning I was about to skip yoga.
Someone in my team had something that needed to be done. I could feel the familiar sequence beginning: she won’t get it done in time, I’ll step in and sort it, I’ll feel vaguely resentful about the fact that I stepped in, she’ll sense the resentment, nothing fundamental will change, and we’ll do the whole thing again next time.
I’ve been in that loop enough times to recognise it. And this time, something made me pause.
What I noticed was that I was projecting. Not in the vague, hand-wavy way that word gets used in some circles. Precisely projecting: I was running a picture of her as someone who couldn’t be trusted to deliver, and I was already acting from that picture as though it were confirmed fact.
So I made a different choice. I went to yoga. Had a full hour. Had lunch. Came back and checked.
It was done.
Now, I’m not claiming this as evidence of mystical intervention. What I’m saying is something more useful: the moment I stopped running that story in my field, the dynamic shifted. And that is not a coincidence. That is the projection model in action.
What Perception Is Actually Doing
The idea that perception is projection has been around for a long time and is frequently misunderstood in ways that make it either useless or actively harmful. So before we go any further, let me be clear about what it means — and what it does not mean.
It does not mean that you are responsible for other people’s behaviour. It does not mean that if someone treats you badly, you caused it. It does not mean that abusive, coercive, or harmful conduct is yours to own. It absolutely does not mean that.
What it means, used as a working hypothesis rather than a moral verdict, is this: the things that disturb us most in other people tend to correspond to something unacknowledged in ourselves. Not the same behaviour at the same level of specificity. Something operating at the same underlying frequency. And because it’s unacknowledged in us, we can only see it when it appears — magnified and made visible — in someone else.
The irritation you feel about someone else is a signal. Not always about them. Often, it is a diagnostic pointing inward.
The Technique That Reveals the Connection
Here is where it gets practical.
The method I use is called chunking up. It comes from linguistics and NLP, and it works like this: instead of staying focused on the specific behaviour that bothers you, you ask a question — what is this an example of? And then you ask it again. And again. Each time, you move to a higher level of abstraction, away from the particular behaviour and toward the underlying dynamic it represents.
The reason this works is that the specific behaviour is rarely the level at which you’re actually carrying the pattern. Your version of it lives somewhere else entirely, at a different level of expression, in a completely different area of your life. Chunking up is how you find it.
I ran this process live in a recent Transcendence session. A participant was carrying a year-long conflict with her sister: a pattern of passive aggression, a major outburst, months of silence. We took the specific behaviour — the angry phone call, the accusations — and started asking the question.
Angry venting. What is that an example of? Distancing. Cutting off. What is that an example of? Going alone. Having to do it by yourself. What is that an example of? Not being supported. No one to turn to.
And then the question: where in your life do you feel unsupported?
Her answer came without hesitation: her business finances.
We spent four minutes on her business finances. She had been avoiding them, feeling isolated around them, believing that needing help with them meant something had gone wrong. She took one concrete action. And by the end of the session, something about the sister situation had shifted. She described feeling lighter. She knew what she was going to say, and how. The energy around it had changed.
Her words: “I would never have linked those two things.”
Most people wouldn’t. That is exactly the point.
Why Staying at the Level of the Behaviour Never Resolves It
There is a very understandable instinct to focus on the behaviour itself — to analyse it, explain it, argue with it, defend against it, or try to change it directly. This approach has its uses in practical terms. Naming unacceptable behaviour and stating what you will not tolerate is important, and we will come to that.
But it rarely shifts the underlying dynamic. Because the behaviour you’re reacting to is the surface. The thing generating your reaction lives below the surface, in you, at a level that direct focus on the behaviour cannot reach.
When I nearly cancelled yoga to fix the situation in my team, I was operating at the level of behaviour: her behaviour, the potential consequence, my response to that consequence. What I wasn’t addressing was the projection itself — the story running underneath about someone being untrustworthy, about things not getting done, about needing to step in and control the outcome. That story had nothing to do with her. It had everything to do with something I was running.
The moment I changed that, the outer situation resolved without my intervention.
This is not always so clean. It is not always so fast. But it works. With far more consistency than anyone comfortable with the Western rational model is prepared to admit.
What Changes When You Stop Fighting the Projection
The most immediate shift is internal. There is a very specific quality to the disturbance that comes from projection — a kind of magnetic charge, a disproportionate emotional weight attached to something that, viewed from outside, might not seem worth the energy. When you find the inner version of the pattern and address it there, that charge dissipates. Not because the outer situation has changed, but because it no longer has a corresponding hook inside you.
What follows after that varies. Sometimes the outer situation resolves on its own, as it did in my case. Sometimes it doesn’t resolve, but your relationship to it changes completely — and that changes how you respond to it, which changes the dynamic between you and the other person, which eventually changes the situation. The route is different each time. The mechanism is consistent.
You also stop burning energy fighting something that wasn’t going to respond to direct pressure anyway. The energy you were spending on the disturbance becomes available for something else. That matters more than it sounds.
How to Apply This — Starting With One Behaviour
Choose one person whose behaviour is currently getting to you. It can be someone in your personal life, a colleague, a public figure — anyone whose behaviour is landing with that specific quality of disturbance I described above.
Now: get specific. Not “they’re difficult” or “they’re like this.” What exactly did they do or say? Name the concrete behaviour.
Then ask: what is this an example of?
Whatever comes up, ask it again: and what is that an example of?
Keep going. Don’t analyse, don’t evaluate, just keep moving toward greater abstraction. You’re looking for the moment when something resonates — when you feel a small recognition, or a slight discomfort, or a thought arrives about a completely different area of your life.
That’s the signal.
Once you’ve found it, ask: where in my life am I doing a version of this? It won’t be the same behaviour. It will be the same underlying dynamic, expressed differently, at a different scale, in a context that feels entirely unrelated.
And then: what is one specific action I could take that would address it at that level?
Not a general intention. One specific action. Take it.
That is where the work is. Not in confronting, explaining, or understanding the other person. In addressing the pattern where it actually lives — in yourself, at the level it’s actually operating.
The Signal Was Always Yours to Work With
There is a version of this idea that gets weaponised in certain coaching and spiritual circles — the suggestion that because everything is a projection, you are responsible for what other people do to you. I want to be precise here, because this matters: that reading is wrong, and it causes real harm.
The projection model is a diagnostic, not a verdict. It tells you where you have leverage, not who is to blame. Someone’s bad behaviour is their responsibility. Your reaction to it, and the inner pattern that gives it its particular charge, is yours to work with.
These are separate things. Conflating them is how an insight becomes a silencing mechanism.
What the model gives you — used correctly — is a place to work that is actually within your control. Most of the time, the outer situation is not. The inner signal always is.
The person irritating you most right now is not the problem you think they are. They are, in the model, carrying a message. It arrived in the most inconvenient possible packaging, in the form of behaviour you find genuinely difficult.
That’s how these things tend to arrive. The signal uses whatever is most likely to get your attention.
The question is whether you’re going to read it.
