Arts Entertainments admin  

Perception is not reality, only your reality

I enjoy listening to other people’s comments after finishing a lecture or presentation. Everyone seems to have different opinions. We all heard the same thing and I’m 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 uninformative, and everything in between. Each had their own perception.

Many of us heard the story of the man on a bus who didn’t realize his children were running wild and the women who were angry at his unwillingness to address their behavior and assumed he wasn’t a good parent. She approached him with righteous indignation and asked him to take care of her children. She apologized as she tried to calm his children down and said that they had just come from the hospital where his wife had just died and that she was trying to deal with it. Needless to say, the woman was now a little embarrassed that she had judged him so harshly. Her perception changed.

I added a sentence to the saying: “Perception is reality.” Perception is reality for those unwilling to dig deeper. We make judgments and evaluations based on our own perceptions which may not always be true. When we don’t take the time to learn more, our perceptions can be harmful, detrimental, and unfair to the person we are judging. It often leaves us in a negative frame of mind that serves us no purpose.

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

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

Although going deeper can give us a more realistic view of a situation, it can never give us the full truth of a situation. No matter how hard we try to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we can never really know what they’re going through. I found a couple of quotes that certainly ring true.

“Anyone who’s been through a tough time – the perception of any outsider, no matter how much information you give them, you have no idea what the person’s life is like.” amy scholarship

“People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.” Roberto Bolano, 2666

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

Leave A Comment

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1