Why Perception Becomes Reality and What To Do About It

The only way we can initially observe new experiences is through the lens of our prior ones. If we don’t take time to question what we observe, we unintentionally choose to let perception become reality.

One of the strong tenants of my faith is service to others. A few oft-quoted words of a well-known leader say, “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.” Within my community, there are many people of the same faith. Some of my friends in the community are members of my faith but do not practice it. Due to many circumstances in and out of their control, they were forced by a landlord to vacate the home they’ve rented for years. Typically, a respectable number of able-bodied women and men come from the surrounding neighborhood to help people move. With a crew of ten or twelve volunteer helpers, a move can be accomplished quickly.

Such was not the case this time, however. My friends expected a large number of people to come help. They didn’t. A small number of close neighbors, including me, showed up to help.

In scenarios like the one described above, there is a common narrative: people don’t like us. That’s why few people came to help with the move. It doesn’t matter that the move was in the middle of the day on a Friday when many people were working or that a bunch of people just happened to be out of town. Wherever they end up, that’s what the narrative will likely be: we’re not loved. (I hope you can see through my own filter of experience here. Even in trying to be objective the way I say things reflects my perception of the situation.)

If they don’t stop to question that narrative, it will most certainly become their reality.

Perception is, clinically, a way of interpreting something. We first experience the world through our senses. Our brains take in a ton of information and parses it based on prior experiences. It’s really all our brain knows what to do with new information unless we stop and challenge our own thoughts. Much conflict and contention in our own lives can be avoided by stopping and taking the time to ask the question: what else could this mean?

I love this quote from William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

The trouble for most of us is questioning what we think. In the United States, this isn’t something we’re taught to do in school. Instead, we’re taught to think like our teachers, our professors, our leaders. That is why we have the derogatory term sheeples in our day.

Sidebar: it’s important to note here that when you’ve done your homework and arrived at a conclusion to follow a teaching or a leader because you’ve considered your options, you’re not a sheeple. That term only applies to those who blindly follow someone because they think they agree with that person or message without actually making a conscious choice. Sidebar concluded.

Therefore, what? What do we do about it? How do we prevent our perception from unconsciously becoming our reality?

I’ve referenced this before. It’s something I’m still learning how to put into practice in my own life consistently. It’s the principle of stop, challenge, and choose made popular by Dr. Wayne Scott Anderson.

Before I go further, it’s important to recognize that you first have to want to reframe things. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. You have your own permission to stay in whatever frame of mind you want to be in. Understood?

Okay, let’s move on.

Stop

So you’ve had an experience. Immediately, your brain goes to work assigning meaning to that experience: your perception of it. Let’s say that experience has led to all kinds of sometimes-difficult-to-process (unless you’re like me then they’re almost always difficult to process) emotions: anger, resentment, hatred, sadness, rancor, whatever. Go ahead and pile any “negative” emotions here.

Now, take three deep breaths. That’s my method for stopping the hamster wheel from turning. It doesn’t take very long but it often works to create enough space for me to actually stop and move to the next step in changing my perception of a situation.

Challenge

Now that you’ve stopped the wheel of potentially negative self-talk, you can ask the question from above: what else could this mean?

Challenging means thinking as objectively as possible about a situation. Depending on the intensity of the experience, that can be really hard to do. If necessary, return to the stop step so you stay out of any unwanted rabbit holes or hamster wheels.

Try looking at the experience from as many points of view as you can. This generally means selecting other experiences from you own life or experiences shared with you and trying to reframe the current experience against those past experiences.

Choose

It’s cliché, but the choice really is yours. You get to choose how you respond to every situation. Often, we blame others when we’ve actually made the choice to be where we are for ourselves. Hopefully this is easy to see. Think back on an experience where you responded to something in anger and a similar experience where you didn’t. Why did you respond the way you did in each of those experiences? Be careful to avoid assigning blame here. If you start blaming, start over.

Our ability to change how we perceive a situation doesn’t always mean we have the ability to change the situation. Many situations in life are truly outside our control. How we respond to them isn’t.

Succeeding at this method of reframing our own perception of life can take years and even then, like me, you might still not be very good at it. However, if you can prevent even one situation from becoming unnecessarily bad in your own mind, isn’t it worth the effort?