Seminar: Perception is reality.
Let’s do a little exercise. Focus on this picture for 30 seconds and count the number of shapes. When you’re ready, read on.
Without looking at the picture again – how many shapes did you find?
Ok, now tell me how many kids were on the bus?
What time was it on the clock?
Unless you’re equipped with an Elliot Alderson kind of brain, able to take in every detail, I’m guessing that your attention was directed where it was pointed. Chances are you may not have even seen that there were kids on the bus. Or even that there was a bus. You saw what you saw and that’s what existed. Your perception is reality – your reality.
This was the opening exercise that Dr. Tal Ben Shahar, noted Harvard professor and positive psychologist, performed when I had the tremendous opportunity to see him give a speech in my former job.
The point of the exercise was to show us, first hand, that our perception of our world is composed exclusively of the things that we choose to point our attention to. We can have a day where there seems to be a series of things that happen to us that we don’t welcome; our coffee spills, our computer crashes, traffic jam, late for dinner. Given how our brain is wired, these things would grab, and hold, our attention. If we weren’t able to, or didn’t purposely, rebalance our thinking by focusing equally on positive moments, it’s likely that the entire day would be deemed “bad”. Literally, that which we focus on becomes our reality.
Like the children sitting on the bus, or the time on the clock, it’s not that there weren’t “good” things around in our day, it’s that we weren’t directing our attention there, or rather we were choosing to stay on the things we didn’t enjoy. Perhaps there was a good laugh to be had a few minutes after the coffee spill. If we were focussed on the effects of the coffee, we may very well have missed it.
I remember one day, in particular, when I lived this first hand. It wasn’t long after I saw the speech with Dr. Shahar and, in my private life, I had recently began the Harvard MBSR online course. I was in a meeting with some people from a major company launching a major global product, let’s call it Acme. The people at Acme had very little experience in brand communication and they were working with my team of brand specialists on a project that carried the name of our company.
The meeting, to me, went terribly. Acme had come up with a plan that we didn’t agree with and they weren’t willing at all to change their mind.
This infuriated me. “How could they not see how wrong they were? (Article for another time!) How could they not see that their plan wouldn’t work? Why weren’t they trusting us to do our job?” I was so angry and anxious that I went to have a massage after work to calm down. However, while I was on the massage table all I could do was relive the meeting moment by moment.
I went over every detail analyzing, indignantly, what they had said. I was busy crafting, with extraordinary precision, what I should have responded. I was so in my head with my attention, I literally couldn’t even feel the massage.
And then it hit me: I DON’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS.
I’m sure that sounds crazy. I mean, of course I didn’t have to think about it. But it was earth shattering. That I could direct my attention to whatever I wanted, was groundbreaking. I could simply not think about it.
Yes, that meeting had gone in a direction that I didn’t want. Yes I was mad, yes I would likely have to find a win-win solution eventually. But there was absolutely no reason that I had to continue to stay mentally in that meeting, other than the fact that I was actively choosing to do so. I was making a very conscious choice to keep myself angry.
The realization was enough to change my mood in that moment and it became a tool that I began to use in my day-to-day life. When I found that I was dwelling on something that made me angry, sad, afraid…whatever feeling that would cause stress or anxiety, I would recognize the thought and then intentionally steer my thoughts elsewhere.
I could at any moment change my thoughts and, as a consequence, change my perception/reality of my life.
And so can you.
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Greatness awaits!
