I’m a firm believer that perception is reality. What we see is what we believe and based on that, we create our own individual realities. But therein lies the problem. They are individual realities and not necessarily collective ones. Everyone has their own versions of reality, based on their point of view. Does that make us all poor judges of reality? No, but it should make us more conscious that sometimes reality just boils down to a matter of opinion. Often times, those opinions are placed on us as ours to keep when they really shouldn’t be. Holding on to the perceptions of others sometimes causes us to live life through the lenses of someone else, and not our own.
Reality is rational, plays by the rules and definitely should be considered in every aspect of our lives. But the beauty of perception is that for each individual, we have the power to see past the constraints that reality sets for us. Other people’s perceptions of your reality may have told you that you’ll never get promoted to your dream job. You’ll never start up that business idea that will take the world by storm. Or you’ll always just be as good as the scraps of someone else’s reality. All of these things can be true if we buy into them and feed them to ourselves as our own reality. But the question is what reality are you creating for yourself? We all have one and with determination, we can make it bigger than what anyone (or ourselves) could have ever imagined.
We also have to realize when we have people in our lives that feed the perception of our success. This is not to be confused with “yes” friends who just agree with everything we say or do. But these are people who can see past the current reality of who we are now, to who we are supposed to become. Who doesn’t like these kinds of people? The brightest idea in the world sometimes simply stays as just that, all because there was no one there to help push it along. What’s your perception of reality? And if they are not in sync, what are your plans to get them there? Reality does have its boundaries, but a large part of it what we decide to make out of it.
My perception is not your reality and vice versa. Just think of how much better off we’d all be if everyone else around us had a better perception that we had of ourselves? Scary, isn’t it?
