Do You See What I See?
Our perception and focus determines much more than we realize. We often give more credit to our circumstances and external environment than they deserve for “causing” us to feel a certain way. At the end of the day, what’s on our “radar” is usually what we will see and it’s easy to forget that what’s on someone else’s is likely different. Perhaps overtime we can begin to learn how their radar works, but ultimately, the answer to the question, “Do you see what I see?” can be simply put, “No.”
As I have recently begun my hunt for a new vehicle and am researching different types, whichever ones I happen to be interested in, I now see everywhere! Did hundreds of people suddenly run out and buy these vehicles or is it perhaps just that my perception and attention has changed - so now I notice them everywhere? I think we can agree which is the more likely scenario. Chances are high that I’ve driven past many of the same cars everyday, I just didn’t take as much notice before. A similar thing happens when a friend or family member drives a certain vehicle or also (of utmost importance of course), when someone you don’t want to run into drives one. Consciously or subconsciously, our awareness has been increased and so what we used to pass by without notice, we now “see” more of.
Of course this principle of awareness and perception does not just apply to vehicles on the road. It applies to virtually everything in our day and is responsible for shaping all of our experiences. No two people are exactly alike. As we spend more time with someone we may develop similar perceptions and therefore reactions (or at least be aware of how they may perceive something), but we will likely never be able to “see” things in the identical way. We also never experience things in the same way either. One of the big challenges in healthcare is managing pain and part of the reason is that pain is purely a perception. We have a pretty good idea that some things have a tendency to cause a lot of pain for a lot of people, but there’s no golden rule. (As a side note - some women may suggest that we also have noticed the tendency for colds to be much worse for men than women ;)…) All kidding aside, what we do know for sure is that the extent of tissue damage or degeneration does not correlate with the amount of pain a person is in. There are many many factors involved in why we perceive things the way we do and pain is no different. In the case of symptomatology, beyond our past experiences and psychology, there are also tonnes of things that may be occurring in the body anatomically, physiologically and biomechanically that we can’t see that are also playing a role. In other words, one must not be quick to judge.
Because our perceptions of our surroundings and circumstances are based so much on our past experiences they are often initiated subconsciously. When things happen “automatically” like that, in order to change them, we will need to apply a strong conscious effort to divert our patterns. What one person hates another may think is great - so this means that somewhere along the line there is room for a different interpretation. It may be difficult to consider that it is possible we may not actually need to change much in our given situation, but that we might just need to adjust our radar a little bit. Adjusting our attention and challenging our initial perceptions has the power to drastically change the lens we are viewing our circumstances with. Our perceptions can be a great tool to keep us safe and recall some lessons learned in our past experiences and our radar also makes sure we see the things we’d like to, but it can keep us stuck. We must remind ourselves that when left to run automatically, our current perceptions are generated by our mind thinking it knows what’s going to happen as it quickly comes up with a conclusion based on the past. It is up to us to challenge our mind back and see if it is actually applicable to our present - and most importantly is it helping or hindering our progress to what we’d like to do in the future.
Unfortunately, if our radar is currently set for negativity, guess what we get to see more of? And if it’s geared more to positivity? Yep, you guessed it. If we think we’re going to have a bad day then our brain will probably take a highlighter and put in bold font the negative things that come our way. But if we try to approach each day with positivity, perhaps the identical scenarios and challenges occur, but they may go largely unnoticed - like the small print at the bottom of the page that everyone skims over in a contract. So do your best to challenge your mind when it gives you its initial perception and always try to set your radar so that you see more of the things you want to and notice less of the things you don’t.