Our actions and interactions with others determine how we are perceived. We cannot always control the way we are perceived by others. Almost all human judgement is clouded in some way by preconceived notions, past experiences, personal/cultural biases, and emotion. Our perceptions become our reality. Our nature plays a major role in the way we see both others, and the world as a whole. We also tend to isolate certain events and experiences when it comes to others. We fail to look past them and at the broader context. Also, we overlook certain bits of information that are misaligned with our beliefs/assumptions and overvalue other information that closely aligns with our beliefs/assumptions. We believe what we want to believe not what is actually true.

Us humans don’t view people as they truly are, but rather how they appear to us. When we first interact with someone we immediately try to compare them to someone else we know or are familiar with. We don’t use any imagination when we look at others. In our minds, we have categories that we throw people into based off our first impression of them. It is hard for us to look past the categories that we put people into. If your impression of someone fits a designation you have for them, you will struggle to see past that. No matter how much new information this person reveals about themselves. It is still easy to get caught up on that first impression. Our view of others stems from our memory and what we are given by the other person. Since all humans are different in some way, we all have different ways of interpreting and understanding the actions of others and the interactions we have with others.

So if everyone views everything differently, how do we differentiate between perception and reality? I am sure that at some point in our lives, we all have been perceived by others in ways that did not match our reality.

In order to explore this deeper, I have to provide some context on reality.

What determines our reality?

Our perceptions largely determine our reality. Everyone has their own version of reality because we all view the world from different perspectives. The lens in which we see the world varies amongst all people. That is because all humans are unique and go through their own unique experiences. There are many things that make up an individual’s reality. Even simple things like age, a 45 year old has a very different version of reality than a 4 year old. Gender, whether you agree with it or not, men and women play very different roles. They are also held to different standards and expectations. Women can also give birth, men cannot. Those are two very different realities. Also location, someone who lives in the slums of India has a very different version of reality than someone who lives in the Hollywood Hills.

There are many different ways that we can look at reality. We as humans are not only defined by who we are but the groups we are a part of. There are two types of reality that almost all humans deal with. Group reality and individual reality. People of the same age, gender, and location can experience a very similar reality as a group. Like, all the celebrities who live in Hollywood have a similar group reality. They live in the same area, all have similar financial and social status, and live similar lifestyles. Just like indigenous groups have similar group realities, since they live in the same area, eat the same meals, have similar beliefs and cultural practices, and carry on the same traditions.

On the individual level, realities can vary immensely from group realities. On an individual level, realities differ since all people have different unique experiences, assumptions, serendipitous moments in time, people they hang out with, and emotional reactions. Your reality can be similar to someone else on a group level, since you grew up in the same culture, and are the same age and gender. But on an individual level, your realities are still very different. No two humans can have the exact same experience. So those same celebrities in Hollywood who have the same group reality all have completely different individual realities. For the indigenous people, their individual realities are formed largely by their group realities, but they still are all wired differently. There is still uniqueness amongst all the individuals, which makes their individual realities different.

Is reality a real thing?

Going back to what I mentioned earlier, we as humans don’t see things how they really are but how they appear or seem to be. We can totally misinterpret a person, situation, or event based on our beliefs, cultural background, level of intelligence, or past experiences. We may not have wrong intentions when we misinterpret these things, but the makeup of who we are prevents us from seeing what is true. To answer my question of “Is reality a real thing?” you have to take a close examination of the word itself. Real is the most prominent word in the word reality. To understand reality you must understand what is real and true. Reality is not what you think is real or true based on your nature (everything that encompasses who you are.) Reality is getting to the truth about yourself, those around you, humanity and the world as a whole.

We will never be able to fully understand reality, because reality is constantly evolving. Humans have the ability to evolve over time as well. Our ability to evolve as humans, helps us make sense of reality, but we cannot always make sense of it in the moment. As time goes on, you gain more perspective on certain people, events, or ideas which can help determine your current view of reality. As time continues to move forward, so does humans understanding of it. So, to give you a concise answer, reality is simply based on what we interpret to be true for ourselves and those around us. We use phrases like “you need to get in touch with reality” to let people know that they have strayed too far away from what is real and known.

How can I even understand reality?

Our imagination is not reality, but our imagination can help us discover our reality. Reality only deals with what is known, and you can’t discover true reality without the ability to view the world through an objective lens. So how do you even begin to understand reality?

 There really is no reality that is true for everyone, but we all have our own versions of reality. We all experience reality in our own unique ways. The only reality that is true for all living species, is death. Humans, plants, and animals all have extremely different versions of reality. But death is a reality no living thing can ever escape.

There are certain rules and laws both on a universal and national and even personal level that govern us. These rules and laws are the only things that determine what is commonly known as “reality” or what is real and true for all. There are universal laws that help us understand what is true and real for all humans living on Earth. These universal laws help us see the world objectively and match our individual reality with universal truths. For example, one universal law is the law of correspondence. The law of correspondence is about how our inner world becomes reflected into our outer world. In other words, our thoughts determine our attitudes and actions. As Stephen Covey says, “All things are created twice.” You cannot have anything in its physical form unless you have thought about it first in your mind. You first create the thought in your head and then you create an action from that thought. For example, if you think positively and optimistically, your attitude will become positive and optimistic. You will tend to take action on things that are good and beneficial for others. If there is anything in your outer world you want to change, you must first change your thoughts and what is going on inside of you.

Another universal law that is reality for every living species is the law of cause and effect. There cannot be an input without an output. For every action you take, there is a reaction or consequence. If you are unfriendly or belligerent with others, then others will be unfriendly and belligerent to you. This law has no regard for your cultural identity, age, values and beliefs, or preconceived notions.

 Opportunity costs are also reality for everyone. When you decide to do something, you miss out on something else. This is a law that is most prominent in economics, but it applies to humans as well. Say you decided to skip lunch, you miss out on the energy and nutrients that food would have provided. Say you decide to spend your money on a car, that’s money you could have saved or bought something else with. Even when you make good decisions or meaningless decisions, there is still always going to be something you missed out on. For every action you take there is an action you lose out on. There are also national laws that everyone must obey. For example, paying taxes. Taxes are set by a national government for each country and every citizen of that country must pay taxes or they lose their freedom, which actually plays into the law of cause and effect. Whether they are universal laws or laws set by the country we live in, they help establish reality for everyone. These are laws that are true and part of our reality no matter who we are or where we come from. If you fail to abide by these universal, national laws you fail also in your duty as a human on Earth, which is to understand what is real and true.

Never let perception become your reality:

The only way to combat misinterpretation of reality, is by understanding ourselves. Self-awareness is the only tool we have to understand how our version of reality plays into the broader context of reality. When you truly know yourself, you understand why you have certain biases, preconceived notions, and emotional reactions around certain things. You can also use empathy to understand the reality that other people have. We not only have to manage our own reality but also the realities of others. To effectively accomplish this, you must have perspective.

We know now that our perceptions play a large role in determining our reality. We have to understand that our version of reality can look very different from someone else’s and someone else’s reality can look very different from ours. What you must be careful of is not letting someone else’s perception of their reality become your own. When you do this, you become driven by the opinions/judgments of others and you lose the connection with yourself. For example, say you are a salesperson. Many people do not trust sales people, they think they are cunning, deceiving, manipulative, and self-serving. If you are a salesperson you cannot let that perception become your truth because it will consume you and negatively impact your work. If you believe that perception to be true, then that perception will slowly start to become your reality, whether you are that type of person or not. When you buy into that perception, you start to pander to it. Slowly you become more manipulative and look for ways to take advantage of others to get more of what you want. You may have been an honest salesman who wanted to help other improve something in their life, and truly believed in the products/service to start out. Once you started to become aware of the perception around you as a salesperson, you started to buy into that perception. Instead of being honest, and painting a picture of improvement for the person you are trying to sell to, you try to deceive and manipulate them just like all the other salespeople. You actually become part of the reason why so many people dislike salespeople. This is an example of letting the perception around you change who you are and how you operate.

Letting perception become your reality can be poisonous to your self-awareness. Another example of this is with athletes. The hardest aspect of being a professional athlete isn’t just the physical and mental shape they have to be in to perform at their highest level. It is the fact that they have to do their job in front of millions and millions of people who scrutinize their every move. Just imagine if you came home from your 9-5 desk job and had millions of people critiquing your performance that day, you would go insane. Athletes have to deal with constant backlash, criticism, and critique from fans and media members that have no experience being a professional athlete or even care about the athletes as people. Fans only care about you if you are on their favorite team. If you get traded or released they immediately stop caring about you. The mass media coverage of sports and athletics often leads to many athletes being perceived in a way that is not actually true. Perhaps they let their emotions get the best of them in the heat of competition, or they lash out after a senseless question from a reporter. Fans and media can portray you as an asshole, jerk or just simply a bad person who is very self-centered. The truth is though that fans and media don’t actually know the person. They may think they know the athlete which means they think they know the person. An athlete, however, is a very different person off the court/field than they are on it. When fans and media members portray athletes in a certain light, the athlete can sometimes start to believe the things they are saying about them. You have one bad incident on the field/court and the media/fans make you a villain. If you believe that perception and take it seriously, you will feel like you have to uphold that image moving forward. So your actions on the field/court continue to be that of a villain, even if that’s not who you are or the role you want to assume. If you allow it, perception can become your reality. That’s why it is imperative to really know yourself.

To make this even more relatable, perhaps you are a leader of a business, doesn’t matter if it’s a small or big business. In order to be a good leader there are many traits that you need to possess. No matter what type of leader you are, whether good or bad, you will still likely be negatively perceived by some people. The fact is that some employees resent leadership because they don’t like being told what to do or don’t like the fact that someone else has control over the decisions they make and the actions they have to take. Humans in general absolutely hate when they don’t have the choice to do or not do certain things. We as humans like to feel like we are in control of all our decisions and actions, even if we don’t have the responsibility and maturity to. There are people who need the guidance of a leader but don’t truly appreciate what the leader does for them. The truth is that as a leader, not everyone is going to like you and agree with what you do. There will be employees who think that you care about their opinion or what they bring to the table. They may perceive you as a poor listener. They may hate sitting through meetings and perceive that you are just trying to waste their time. You may not work closely or one on one with certain employees and they may perceive you to be a poor mentor. You may have wrongly evaluated a certain event or incident and certain employees may perceive you to be unfair. Maybe you haven’t opened up a lot about your personal life or shown different sides of your personality, some may perceive you as unpassionate or secretive. You should always get a sense of what your employees are thinking and make sure they feel valued. However, you could run into some problems and confuse yourself if you examine the way you are perceived too closely. If you start to believe that these perceptions around you are true, they can become a part of who you are. There may be some people who perceive you to be a poor listener, but in reality you are actually a great listener. But since you believe in the perception that surrounds you, you start to feel self-conscious about your listening skills. So you decide to put more attention and focus into being a better listener. The problem is though, that might not be the best use of your leadership. Your greatest strength as a leader could be that you always have wise words to say, you always bring value and a fresh perspective. Since you are too busy trying to dispel the perception of you being a poor listener,  you start listening too much and you speak up less, which hurts the organization overall since they don’t have as much your wisdom and input. You start to take your focus away from the areas that make you a great leader, which is being vocal and always bringing value and perspective. Simply because you let perception become your reality.

The significance of self-awareness:

In order to combat perception becoming reality you have to be solid in your self-awareness. You have to be able to stand strong in your beliefs, knowledge of yourself and most importantly, trust of your inner voice. You have to value your own opinion ahead of anyone else’s. This doesn’t mean that you close yourself off to others and their ways of thinking. You should always be open minded, but you have to remember that you should know yourself better than anyone else does. When you start to buy into all the ways you are perceived, it can create confusion about who you truly are. If you don’t have a great understanding of yourself, you open yourself up to being defined how others see you or want to see you. It’s also important to remember that all people you know view you differently. If you asked ten of your friends to describe you, you would hear ten different answers. With this understanding you can filter out perception vs. what is actually real.

If you haven’t taken the time to increase your self-awareness, or establish your personal principles and truths, your self-image can become distorted. We all have a certain way that we perceive ourselves, based on our interests, what we are good/bad at, how we react to things, when we feel comfortable or uncomfortable, and how we interact with others. All of these experiences help shape what we know about ourselves and provide us with additional context about who we are. Knowing these things doesn’t necessarily mean that you have self-awareness, you really have just a general understanding of yourself. You can know these things about yourself without deep reflection or quality time spend with yourself. You learn these things mostly through your social interactions and the direction your parents’ guide you in.  We can understand these things about ourselves at a fairly young age, but most people do not become self-aware until they are older. There is a major difference between being fully self-aware and having a general understanding of yourself

 In order to cultivate true self-awareness, you have to understand the root causes of why you believe what you believe, why certain values and principles are important to you, why you react in certain ways, why you are good and not good at certain things, what your real motivations are, and why you are motivated by them. There are other important questions to ask yourself, but these will at least give you a good starting point. Answering these questions, takes a lot of deep thought and reflection. You have to answer these questions for yourself without the input of anyone else. So many people don’t know the answers to these simple questions because they are afraid to be alone and sit with their own thoughts. A study done by the University of Virginia in 2014, revealed that 67% of men and 25% of women, selected for this study, would rather inflict themselves with pain that sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. There are a myriad of reasons as to why this may be, it could be the constant notifications or reliance on smart phones, but it is a very discouraging statistic. It is crazy to think that people would rather induce physical harm on themselves than simply think for 15 minutes. Not a few hours, but 15 minutes.

You cannot be afraid to spend time alone and with your thoughts, I do not believe you can truly know yourself if you do not do this. I understand it may be scary to do so, but you have to face your problems, fears, and anxieties at some point if you want to solve them. They will only get worse and more complex the longer you put them off. It may be uncomfortable at first but once you get through them, you will feel so much better about yourself. It will really feel like a weight lifted off your shoulders. You don’t ever have to be stressed about your problems, fears, and anxieties again, because you now can face them head on and work through them. Another thing that will help you in this alone time, is writing down the things you want to think about or talk to yourself about. This will help keep you focused and when you start to become anxious or think about your problems, simply look at what you have written down and use that to get back on track.

Self-awareness is about getting to the truth. It is about getting to the deeper meaning behind why things are the way they are in your life. When you have a real understanding of yourself, you are able to objectively look at yourself. Objectivity allows you to make improvements or adjustments in your life. Without true self-awareness, you run the risk of overly valuing the opinions and judgments of others. When you value the opinions of others, you are in danger of letting perception become your reality. You start to believe that the perceptions of you are actually true, whether positive or negative. Perception can become your reality through others projecting their judgements or perceptions onto you. When you start to accept these judgements and perceptions they become a part of who you are and what you believe. These judgements and perceptions may be completely inaccurate but if you don’t have the proper self-awareness you can trick yourself into believing they are actually true. This is no different than when someone says something negative about you, it may not actually be true but the other person is simply projecting their insecurities onto you. The difference is that when you are dealing with negativity you have to recognize it is coming from someone else who is negative and insecure. All you can do is laugh because they are hating for no reason. When you start to believe perception, it is coming from your lack of self-awareness. This one is on you to get right. Perception comes from the attitudes and beliefs of others, so you are more likely to believe it since they believe it to be true about you. You cannot let someone else dictate your attitudes and actions.  It is so imperative that you know yourself and can look at your life objectively.  Being able to objectively look at your life prevents you from thinking, “This is how I am perceived by others, so it must be true” These perceptions start to become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you do not have the proper self-awareness.

We can never have full control over the ways we are perceived. Some people will perceive us to be a bad person who is selfish and has bad intentions, no matter how good our actions are. Others will perceive us to be honest, forthright, and selfless, no matter how poor our actions are. This is because our reality is largely determined by our perceptions. The nature and make up of we are determines how we see ourselves, others, and the world as a whole. We cannot let the inaccurate perceptions that others project onto us, become a part of our reality. Self-awareness will be your best friend and most dangerous weapon in the fight against perception becoming reality. If you truly know yourself, you will not let false perception become a part of your true reality.

The Rolling J / Jonathan McClure

Previous article – https://therollingj.net/why-you-should-focus-on-growth-instead-of-goals/

Today’s J of the Day – https://therollingj.net/j-of-the-day-how-to-be-a-genius/

University of Virginia study – https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts