“What on earth are you doing?” I demanded as I stood in the door to my son’s bedroom, eyes wide in alarm and mouth hanging agape. It was Saturday afternoon and we had just spent the morning cleaning the house. Now he was standing in front of his bookcase funneling water from his indoor water feature into an old two litter bottle through a plastic tube. “I’m learning, experimenting.” he tried to explain. “No!” I insisted, “You’re going to making a mess!”
Perception is everything; absolutely everything! When two people both look at the same situation, they may very well see two different things.
Our perception of a situation drives both our attitude and behaviors in that given moment and ultimately impacts the outcome. One application of this concept is the Pygmalion Effect. It is often taught in management courses.
The Pygmalion Effect basically states that our positive or negative expectations about a person’s ability will increase the chances that their performance will support those expectations, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Understanding how our perceptions are formed gives us the power to take responsibility for those attitudes and behaviors and allows us to direct or change the end result we experience.
Our perceptions are a blending of two components. The first is our internal beliefs. Some of these beliefs may be conscious ones we have chosen to adopt. Others are subconscious and have been woven into the fabric our lives based on our experiences.
In his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey illustrates this very concept. He describes a training session where half of the participants were given a picture of a beautiful, young lady. The other half were given a picture of an old woman. After they had been allowed some time to study their respective pictures, they were all shown the picture to the left.
Those who had originally viewed the image of just the young woman, continued to see her; while those who and initially looked at picture of the old woman still saw her in the composite. The participants’ perception was colored by the beliefs they had developed about their original images – seeing a necklace where others saw a mouth; a nose where others believed a chin and jaw line were. Covey stated,
“We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or, as we are conditioned to see it.”
The second part of perception is our personality – our overall outlook on life. Optimists will view situations with a more positively. Pessimists will see the less positive aspects of a situation.
Our beliefs provide us with a perceptual map much like a GPS navigational system. Our personalities bring the picture into focus and fine tunes the map view providing detail. You might think of it as using Google Street View to “see” the actual neighborhood. Increasing our awareness of our basic paradigms, beliefs and assumptions and the degree to which we have been impacted by our experiences improves our ability to take responsibility for our views and test them against reality, listen to others and gain a broader view of a given situation.
In that Saturday encounter with my son, I held a subconscious belief that boys are messy and any time my son is playing with water the end result will result will be a lot of work cleaning up behind him. My glass-half-split outlook provided the details of a ruined bookcase and soaked carpets.
My son was right that day; he was learning. He was gaining real life experiences to which he would build relationships of understanding in his future physics class. But in the heat of the moment all I could perceive was a Tasmanian Devil sized disaster. Perception truly is everything!
Picture courtesy of Volition Thought House.