Perception Is Not Reality, Just Your Reality

I get a kick out of listening to other people's comments after leaving a lecture or presentation. Everyone seems to have varying opinions. We all heard the same thing and I am sure the speaker had a specific intent, but everyone took away something different. It was too short or too long, passionate or lethargic, informative or not informative and everything in between. Everyone had their own perception.

Many of us heard the story of the man on a bus who was oblivious to his kids running wild and the women who was angered by his unwillingness to address their behavior and assumed he wasn't a very good father. She approached him with righteous indignation and asked him to take care of his kids. He apologized as he tried to calm down his children and stated that they just came from the hospital where his wife just died and was trying to deal with it. Needless to say, the woman was now a little embarrassed to have judged him so harshly. Her perception changed.

I added a phrase to the saying, "Perception is reality." Perception is reality to those unwilling to dig deeper. We make judgments' and assessments based on our own perceptions which may not always be true. When we don't take the time to find out more information, our perceptions can be hurtful, detrimental and unfair to the person we are judging. It often leaves us in a negative frame of mind that does not serve us well at all.

We have all dealt with perceptions in our lives; our own and those we deal with. "My boss doesn't know what he's doing!" "You are so lazy, selfish, ungrateful and on and on and on!" These are typical responses to situations that happen to us based on our perceptions. In my experience, my initial perceptions on many things were pretty far from the truth or the reality of the situation.

I also was on the receiving end of not so positive perceptions of my own behavior both in my work and personally. As we all know, it doesn't feel so good. The toughest things about it, we often don't know how people perceive us. As someone who believes in continuous improvement, I would welcome the feedback and hear someone's opinion or perception. As someone who has learned to be mindful of my intent in the things that I do or say, I realize that I cannot control other people's perception or work to please everyone, and cannot allow myself to get caught up in the drama.

Even though digging deeper may give us a more realistic view of a situation, it can never give us the total truth of a situation. As much as we may strive to put ourselves in someone else's shoes, we can never truly know what they are going through. I found a couple of quotes that certainly rings true.

"Anybody who's ever gone through a hard time - any outsider's perception, no matter how much information they're given, they have no idea what the person's life is like." Amy Grant

"People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth." Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Be careful with your perceptions and realize that they are just opinions.