What does it mean that everyone operates on schemas?

You already have schemas for everything — making them explicit is the work.

Example: You walk into a restaurant and immediately know to wait at the entrance, expect a menu, understand the sequence of ordering, eating, and paying. Nobody taught you this explicitly — you absorbed a 'restaurant script' through repeated experience. That script is a schema. You have one for job interviews, first dates, morning routines, how your boss reacts to bad news, and what 'success' means. You didn't design most of them. They were installed by repetition, culture, and emotional experience — and they're running right now.

Try this: Pick three domains of your life: one professional, one relational, one about yourself. For each, write down the operating assumptions you bring to that domain — not what you think you should believe, but what your behavior reveals you actually believe. For example: 'In meetings, I assume the loudest person has the most power' or 'In relationships, I assume that if someone goes quiet they are angry.' These are your schemas. The gap between what you discover and what you expected is a measure of how much implicit infrastructure is running without your awareness.