"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination" -John Lennon" Perception = Reality! One of the things I really learned in my years as a litigation lawyer is that there are as many views on reality as there are parties in the legal process.
It is up to the judges to ultimately cast a verdict based upon all these different views, which I now, after years of study, think is a (near) impossible task...
In Neuro Linguistic Programming, a major principle states that reality can only be our PERCEPTION of reality.
It is impossible to see, hear, feel everything in our personal and professional lives.
Still, we make decisions on a daily basis, and feel emotions on a daily basis, all resting on these generalised, deleted and distorted bits of information.
There is nothing wrong with that in itself, we've been doing that for centuries.
It can go wrong, though.
One of my "Knowareness" principles dictates that we want to be very careful with judging situation others, because we may not have sufficient information to do so.
If our own perception on reality makes us feel bad, we may have to self-reflect, and check whether we are justified in feeling that way.
Imagine this: Parents punish their child for bullying other children at school.
Later on it turns out that their child wasn't the bully; names got mixed up...
A presidential candidate makes a statement, and the press takes that sentence totally out of context, spinning a picture, detrimental to that candidate (happened to Barack Obama recently when he was talking about Sarah Palin...
).
There are many examples to show that our perception may not be the most effective and honouring perspective, neither for the "perceiver", nor for the "perceived".
I had it happen to me recently, and again, it proved NLP to be right: reality is our perception of reality.
We wanted to go for a BBQ, together with our 8-year old daughter.
We then found out we had to look after our daughter's best friend too, as her mother had to work.
This being the case we decided to invite even more of her friends to the same bbq; the more kids, the merrier.
Most of the mums wanted to come along, which was fine of course.
Now here's the spin: a dear friend of ours, who joins in most of the social gatherings, wasn't invited -as she is not the mother of one of our daughter's friends.
When our friend found out she wasn't invited, she was very upset.
Various other interpretations about earlier events had made her think we were avoiding contact, and something was wrong.
The "BBQ-invite", or at least her perception of it, was the straw that broke the camel's back.
She was seriously thinking about cutting all the ties with us, and was deeply hurt by our actions.
When I explained why we hadn't been in contact that much lately, and why she wasn't invited to a party with a bunch of 8-year olds, it turned out that all her negative emotions and bad feelings weren't based on all the facts, but on just some of them, combined with her interpretation of what had happened.
Again, we all work that way to a certain degree, but when that makes you feel THAT bad, there may be reason to delve a bit deeper, and check whether you know all the relevant facts, and if your interpretation of them holds any water.
The Knowareness Principle for this month is this: when you feel strong (negative) emotions about aspects of your personal or professional life, check the facts, and check your interpretation.
Realise that your perception creates your reality, and your reality creates your emotional response.
Often, what you think and feel is going on, is not what's really going on! Set a landmark: Firstly: always make sure that you have as much information possible as you can reasonably acquire before you make important decisions in your life or business.
This is what's called informed decision making.
Secondly: when you have a reaction to some happening in your life or business, STOP! Check whether you know all there is to know about the event, and whether your interpretation is the right one to have in that specific instance.
Thirdly: be vigilantly aware that YOUR interpretation of reality creates YOUR reality.
What you consider to be true, may not be someone else's truth.
The "I am right, you are wrong" attitude, is the ultimate recipe to global conflict.
Lastly: go easy on yourself.
we all make mistakes in our judgements.
Hitting yourself over the head for having made mind-error is not honouring, and not effective.
Commit to deciding more carefully from that point forward.
Can we ever know reality as such? Well, I'd really like to discuss that with you over a drink, but my reality says we cannot.
The only thing we can do is be aware of that, and do our best to make as informed a decision as we can.
That is good enough for me.