What is perception?

What is perception? Most people just think of perception as what they see with their eyes, but understanding ones perception through their viewpoint is not just limited to their physical sight, but also their emotional, philosophical, and spiritual sight as well. By understanding that our opinions, beliefs, and teachings make up the essence of our perception, we can first let go of the ego that makes us feel that our perception is the only truth and by doing so we then free our perception to be a useful tool in understanding situations and people in a better way. So in reality, we have changed our perception from being a chain that binds us, into a key that frees us.

Perception is the key to success. Some find it by understanding it, others find it simply by stumbling across it, but it difficult to be successful and not understand perception as a tool. Only by understanding perception can you fully use it. When you limit your perception, you are also limiting your potential, your opportunites, and yourself.

What is our goal with all communication? Understand this, and you understand yourself. Is your goal to share your opinions and ideas, or to gather the needed information to alter your opinions and ideas into an opinion or idea that you feel is closer to the truth? At what point do you stop gathering information and start sharing what you have concluded? When you do share your information, do you keep your mind open and still focused on gather information while you are sharing what you already know? Don't be fooled, there is always more to learn, in any situation. Once you have resigned yourself from gathering information, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. Even if you gather the information, without processing it and giving it the validation that it deserves, you are still putting yourself at a disadvantage.

So, by understanding that, our goal should be to learn the lessons that we can from each situation, share our experience, not as a forced opinion or idea, but as experience, because that is what it is. Experience is the raw data that we take in from our situations, we use our perception to then process the experience, and it forms our ideas and opinions. So by sharing the experience itself, you are giving the raw data of information instead of information wrapped in your opinion. Sharing information like this will make others less defensive in situations, because you cannot debate experience, just the way that experience should be interpreted. Our other goal should be to help others in the same situation to come out of the situation with as little conflict as possible, even if they have a different opinion than us. Just because two have a difference of opinion, it doesn't mean that one is right and one is wrong, because which one is fit to judge the other? Both opinions might differ from the truth and the truth more likely falls in between the two opinions anyway.

You can control yourself and limit your own actions and behavior, but what about situations where it would be more beneficial to understand the other people involved as well? How much more could you accomplish by meeting the needs of the other people involved in the situation? I'm talking about your day to day problems instead of any rare life altering situations. A man must understand himself prior to moving outside of his circle of understanding his own perception. You have to respect your perception and yourself before you'll be able to respect others and their perceptions.

One problem with communication among people today is that most individuals want to push their own perception onto others instead of attempting to understand other perceptions. This causes people to get defensive, as it should, because they are forced to defend their perception and they are made to feel like their perception is being judged. People want to understand truth, but most fail to grasp that by understanding more perceptions they are able to see more of the big picture, which leads them closer to truth. I’m not talking about static truths of black and white, but dynamic truths of how things are in the situation. This dynamic truth is what opens doors and clears obstacles. Sometimes people have to let go of certain static truths to handle each situation with its dynamic truth of the way it is, because "it is what it is". Situations should not be grouped and judged by static truths no more than people should be stereotyped.

Perception and truth can be thought of as a group of people sitting in a circle looking at a ball in the center of the circle. To each individual, they perceive the ball as just a circle. Only by sharing their perception and listening to the perception of others around the circle can each person fully understand the truth and true shape of the ball. Now imagine that the distance one individual is from another (around the circle) is a measurement of how different their perceptions are in contrast to everything else. So the two people at opposite ends of the circle would have two totally different perceptions of what is in front of them, with exception to the ball and everything else that is between them, because their perception of things behind the other individual would be of things that cannot be seen by the other. Understanding this image, one can see that even though perceptions can be different, a willingness to listen and understand those differences will allow you to have more information. The more information you have , the better you understand the situation (the ball and the room), which in turn will give you better options to overcome the situation.

Perception has the greatest impact on our happiness, stress, and health. By simply learning how to alter our perception of the situations in which we find ourselves, we can enjoy the people and objects in our life more, and appreciate them for what they are, instead of allowing daily situations and stress to cloud our judgment.

Your perception of yourself is a guide to who you will become. If you think poorly of yourself, you are limiting your ability to make yourself better. By thinking poorly of yourself you are actually creating more obstacles to overcome, than you would normally have in front of you. If you think highly of yourself, then you limit the ability of situations and your environment to pull you down.

However, self-esteem is not ego. Ego is an obstacle when it comes to understanding yourself. Where self-esteem is healthy and is beneficial, ego is unhealthy and destructive. Ego blinds one to where their perception cannot change without a dramatic experience or intense self reflection. Ego prevents one from understanding the importance of perception. In order to learn anything, one must first admit that they need, and are without, the knowledge that they seek, ego makes this admission difficult. They can still study, but they fail to put anything into place, because they believe that they are already right in their actions and their thoughts, so where is the motivation for true self reflection? Self reflection is the act of understanding your perception of yourself, or understanding how you view yourself, it is not critiquing yourself.

Think about some of the situations and environmental problems that some successful people had to overcome to be who they are today. Some people are born with this ability and see nothing special about it and others have to learn it, and sadly some never learn it and limit themselves far below their potential. If you critique yourself, you run the risk of over analyzing every step you take in any situation, which will slow down your decision making process or it could stifle it all together.

People waste too much time analyzing the things that they have done and studying ways to handle situation that have already passed. Instead, just look at what you did, and compare it to what you wanted to do, and decide that next time you are going to do it better, and then let it go. You could spend the rest of your life analyzing situations that have long past and they become nothing but baggage. There is nothing left to learn from them, so discard them from you analytical mind and contain them in your memory for any proper use you can find for them later. If you want to change your perception of yourself, the easiest way to do it is to just act like you are someone you want to be. Not a different person, but just act like you already have the characteristics that you want to get.

There is nothing to keep you from becoming who you want other than your analytical mind telling you that you either can't do it yet, or that you are missing something. In essence, your mind is just telling you that you're not good enough because of some other perception that you have created of yourself. However, by changing the view of the perception from yourself to you acting like someone else, you can trick your analytical mind and give it an excuse to not undermine your attempts at self-esteem enhancement. The wonderful thing about the mind is that, in time, your mind will forget that you are acting, and you will become who you want to be, and it will cease being an act, and will become reality.

You have in essence, trained your self-esteem, and shaped it yourself. So instead of reacting the way you would normally react in situations, try to stop and think to yourself, how do I want to react to this, and then do it. This is very difficult to do at first, but in time, you will train your mind to think that way. The mind can be trained the same way muscles can be trained in what is called "muscle memory". After repeatedly doing something a certain way, your body will take over and start to do it with less effort from you. When you reach a point where no effort is mentally required anymore, you have trained yourself. Our mind is a very analytical tool, and instead of turning it loose to tear down our self-esteem, we should turn it loose to understand the situations that shape our perception of ourselves, our environment, and our goals.

Now what is truth? No, not getting philosophical, just asking. Truth is what you perceive as truth, or as a larger group, truth is decided by what the majority perceives as truth. So basically truth is based on perception. I'm not talking about a Static Truth, like the grass is green and the sky is blue, I'm talking about a Dynamic Truth, or truth based on individual judgment . Static Truth is something that all logical people agree on, while Dynamic Truth is something that people will debate and try to convince each other of their own perception. Why? Because people feel secure, liked, and understood when they are around people that share their Dynamic Truths. Another name for Dynamic Truth is "Beliefs" or "Sense of Morality". Some people will speak of their "beliefs" as if they are truth, and they are to them, but to others these truths are not truths but areas open for debate. I’m not saying that my belief isn’t a truth; I’m saying that it’s not a truth to everyone, and to communicate best, you have to lay a foundation of understanding to carry your ideas instead of trying to force your “truth” onto someone else by submitting it as truth expecting them to just accept it without any other evidence.

In order to best communicate with someone, it helps greatly if you understand what they perceive as true, and you can relate the information that they need to understand through their perception more than your own. By doing this, most of the time they will be more receptive to your idea, even if they disagree with you initially, because they will see that you are trying to understand their point of view, instead of just pushing your perception onto them. Besides, trying to convince someone that their belief is wrong, when you don't fully understand what they believe not only makes you look selfish, but also ignorant.

You must give credit to the beliefs that others have in order to respect them enough before you can ever lay the foundation to a meaningful debate with them about any subject that is built on their beliefs. If you invalidate their beliefs, you are invalidating them, and by disrespecting them in this manner, you have already put them in a defensive position. However, by properly respecting them and trying to honestly understand their beliefs, you could discover the needs that they have.

These needs form the base of why they believe what they do. By understanding this, you can not only reach them more easily, but you might learn something in the process as well. Besides, there are a lot of the Dynamic Truths that we put a lot of importance on, that were just told to us, and we believe it solely because of the relationship that we had with the one who originally explained it to us. If we have never been in a situation to understand how we would perceive the situation ourselves, why do we feel that we have a right to judge someone who is in that situation? Besides, how does our judgment actually help any situation? Is our mission to help or to just judge?

Understanding your view of the obstacle in your path will also help you to clear those obstacles more efficiently. How you perceive an obstacle really controls the limitations that you put on yourself to overcome it. If you see something as a huge obstacle it is, but mainly due to the power that you give instead of the obstacle that it is. Getting past your perception of the obstacle and focusing only on the truth of what the obstacle is will allow you to navigate the obstacle and overcome it.

Most people who have overcome great obstacles viewed those obstacles as challenges instead of obstacles. In doing so, they took something that was seen by others as impossible and changed it in their mind to a possibility, in doing so they opened their mind up to other possibilities. The great thinkers in the past put few, if any, limitations on their mind. Leonardo da Vinci was thinking about flight hundreds of years prior to someone finding out how to make it possible, but he knew it was possible, he just never discovered the method.

People give more power to their obstacles in their mind than the obstacles themselves deserve. By doing so, they limit themselves to overcoming one obstacle just to meet another one. If instead you come to very your obstacles as the challenges that they are, without giving them any more power than they warrant, you will be able to understand the situations that you are in more, and have more options to overcome the situations in which you find yourself.

The more situations you overcome, the more experience you gain from them, the more confident you become of yourself, and your abilities to overcome your obstacles. This simple faith in yourself, is the most important virtue that you can discover. Once you view yourself as having the possibility to be more than what your mind limits you to, success is just around the corner. People are successful due to the outcome of situations, but most successful people understand the situations, to dictate the outcome. Our perception has a dramatic influence on our reality. Reality itself is largely based on perception. If you think you are having a bad day, you are, if you think you are having a good day, you are.

This goes a lot deeper than just seeing the glass half-full or half-empty. Your perception places importance on different parts in a situation. Someone who is expecting bad times will seek them out and hold onto them as an excuse to justify their perception, just as someone who is expecting good times will do the same. The same situation could happen to two different people, but based on their perception, it could ruin one's day, and barely be a speed bump to the other. This method of justifying your perception trains your mind to view reality the way that it does. In a way, you are creating your own reality due to the influence that you allow your perception to place on it.

By understanding this, you can alter your perception and, in time through mental training by repetitious thought, you will alter your reality to where you feel more in control. I say feel more in control because you can't control reality itself, only your perception of it, and I also say it because people are always in control of their perception, even though they don't feel that way at times. So by changing your perception, you can control the priority that your mind places on different situations, or parts of situations.

You could then let go of situations that aren't very important or have little impact, and acknowledge them for what they are and then let them go, to where they don't burden you down. This is an excellent form of stress management. Give situations the amount of importance they deserve, handle them accordingly, when they can be handled, and when things are out of your control, devote more attention to your reaction to the situation instead of the situation itself. Worrying about something has never produced a solution, only stress and obstacles. Another benefit from changing your perception is the change that will occur in your attitude.

If you train your perception to be optimistic, your attitude will become that way as well. This will also cause you to be less stressed; more focused, allowing you to handle situations with less effort, but with more efficiency. This will give you more confidence in yourself and your perception of things. Then, this will create a continuous cycle of improvement and make your attitude seem unstoppable. You will be able to handle the bad situations because you will know and understand that they are part of life, and cannot be avoided, but you know that they are just a situation, and not a representation of your life.

By letting go of the "ownership" of these situations, it helps you understand and see the difference between your life and your situations. You cannot control every situation, but you can control who you will be in those situations. A good understanding of this is like sailing, you can be the captain of your own ship, but not the sea in which it sails.

Something we need to understand is that our perception has an influence on our motivation. Motivation is our desire or reason to do something. Our motivation is set by our priorities, and our priorities are set by our perception. Changing our perception when we are in a situation that we would rather not be in, but we have to be in, can greatly affect our motivation and attitude during the situation. We need to accept that we are in the situation and drop all expectations and priorities that are outside of the current situation. Reset our goals into resolving the current situation and getting it accomplished.

A perfect example is when I was in the Army, and we would be in the field for days without end, and the weather would start to get bad, it could easily demotivate you and you could lose your motivation, and it could affect your attitude. Once I realized what was happening, I would change my perception from "This is a bad experience" to "This is a rare experience that I won't have often" and I changed my priorities to something that I could benefit from. So I changed my priorities to learning everything I could about functioning in, and the difficulties of, the current weather we were having.

By taking every opportunity to gain experiences that you might need in the future, you maximize your potential. For each situation you find yourself in, you should ask yourself, "what can I learn from this?” When we understand that our goal isn't just to get to the end of the situation, but to learn what we can until it’s over, this helps us to reposition our perception, which changes our motivation. Once we accept that we are where we are, it allows us to look past what has happened, and it allows us to see what is happening now.

Most people have problems dealing with situations because they can't get past the fact that they are in the situation that they are in. Instead of finding excuses to justify us being in the situation, we should just accept the situation, and then look for actions that can take us out of the situation, and along the way we need to understand that this too is a learning experience. It’s not that we should try to make each situation a lesson, but that we should understand that there is a lesson to learn from each situation.

Learning should be our goal each day, and understanding that alone, can help change our perception to where we get the motivation that we need to get through the situations that we find so difficult. Handling situations in this manner will even make it to where the minor situations can even be pleasant, due to the lessons that we learn.

One of the most damaging things that you can do in a situation is to take an action that you have based on an assumption. Assuming takes the place of facts, and when you start replacing facts with assumptions, that may or may not be true, you start guiding yourself further and further away from the facts. The further you are from the facts, whether it is due to assumptions or emotion, the more volatile the situation can become. In addition, when you think that the other person is so far from the facts due to emotion or illogical thoughts, you fail to realize that your assumptions have carried you just as far from the facts needed to reconcile.

In disagreements, you should try to support your position with facts, kind of like building a wall with bricks. Each point is built on the previous point, and building the wall in this manner, makes you feel secure. The problem is that sometimes we value that feeling of security more than we value making sure that we have weighed all the facts present. We want to feel right, we want to feel secure, and we want the other person to acknowledge that we have taken the "correct" position. Well, first of all, the other person shouldn't have any effect on our actions, we should be doing everything we can to help them understand our position, not choose it. When we value that security more than the facts, we create assumptions to take the place of facts to where we can get our wall created, then stand at the top with a flag as if demanding acknowledgement.

The moment that one of those assumptions is proven to be false, the wall comes tumbling down, and we are let at the bottom of it bruised and battered. In the worst situations, we deny that our assumptions are wrong, and no amount of facts will make us acknowledge that. When that happens, no form of communication will prevail and the best way out is to just leave the situation as it is and hopefully later, under less pressure, the one in denial can admit that their assumptions are inaccurate.

If the one that is right presses the situation without leaving it to where the other can go over their own thoughts, the one who is right, is now wrong, because they are forcing the issue on the other, and nothing but emotions and stress will come from the discussion. Remember, your goal should not be to be right, but to understand the other's point of view and assist them in understanding yours, to where together you can decide which way is best way to leave the situation that you both are in. The problem here is that perception will change with each situation that you come across, perception evolves.

Perception is learning, and learning should never finish. You can never reach a point when your perception still cannot change. You can however reach a point where you might not change it anymore, but that it never a goal, because when you reach that point you start to close your mind. The overall goal is to best understand any situation that you are in to where you can provide the leadership for those around you to best come out of the situation with respect for each other, more knowledge, experience, and trust.

Situations should be handled in ways to strengthen relationships and to teach and pass on experiences and ideas. The best way to accomplish this is to understand as much as possible about the situation, including the perceptions of everyone involved and those not involved but influenced by the situation.

Remember above all things, we are here for a purpose that God designed us for. Use this knowledge to better prepare for that purpose. Instead of judging, understand. Instead of judging, help. Instead of judging, teach. We will all one day be judged by the only one worthy to judge, and when we start to judge others we weaken the fear that we have of God, because we fool ourselves into believing that we can sit in judgment with him, instead of before him.