“We dont see things as they are….we see things as WE are! – Anais Nin
I have been doing alot of work on personal effectiveness and with clients recently and the question, “How do I change my experience?” keeps on being asked. One of the most useful realisations has been that our perceptions, otherwise defined as points of view, the way we see things, or our interpretation of reality, is dictating what we are experiencing. Our perceptions influence the way we think, feel and act. They affect our decision-making in everything we do whether it be how we interact with someone we are meeting for the first time, or the people we work and live with everyday of our lives. Our choices are directly informed by our perceptions.
So what does it take to really start to recognise what our perceptions are and how we go about gathering the evidence to ensure we are ‘right’ about them? Well now, that is easy…or is it? Because if you were to really question the way you see things you may have to change your mind! Something I have observed none of us seem too keen on doing. It takes courage to acknowledge that perhaps we have stopped being explorers seeking out new ways of looking, judging and experiencing life, and that we have in fact become librarians, dull boring and uninteresting, content on being the guardians of how we think things are, only seeing and selecting the data (evidence) that supports our ‘rightness’. Spending our days, dusting down the archives and making sure everything is indexed and in the right place, ” What? A new idea? One that we don’t have yet? Sorry, no space for new shelves and theses are already full! It obviously can’t be worth considering, no new entries allowed…goodbye” I for one don’t like that idea. So i invite us all to find our explorer, the brave, energised, exciting, interesting one and go out there with a renewed sense of adventure and and start to ask ourselves, whether we are really seeing things as they are or just the way WE are?
