Let me do you a favor, and relieve you of a weight you’ve probably unfairly carried for most of your adult life; one that’s inextricably tied to a pervasive, common, and well-worn phrase: Perception is reality.
Not only is this phrase completely untrue, but it’s insidious, dangerous, and often debilitating to anyone trying to navigate relationships with other complicated people. (Translation: All of us).
Here’s the beautiful, breath-giving truth, friends… Perception is not reality.
Perception, is someone else’s reality about you. It’s the lens through which they view you, your motives, and your actions; one that’s permanently, subconsciously colored with their preferences, opinions, needs, hangups, pasts, and hopes; most of which you are completely unaware of.
Reality, is what’s true about you, regardless of what someone else sees or understands. It’s the hidden, fixed, immovable spot where your character and life reside. It’s the place where you and God, are the only residents.
The reason this distinction is so important, is because of the way it can free you from the shackles of other people’s expectations, as you live, work, and serve alongside them.
As someone who is surrounded by hundreds of people each week, and who counsels those same people as they interact with others, I see the messiness of relationships, and the collateral damage they can do to our sense of identity. I’ve experienced vicariously, as well as firsthand, the way that other people’s opinions can dictate our self-worth, direction, and our decisions.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people nearly destroy themselves in the name of Perception-Management; business owners, co-workers, parents, pastors, and classmates, burdened down with the impossible task of becoming another’s ideal.
So many of us, desperate for approval, expend far too much energy every day, attempting to alter the way people see us, rather than simply addressing the truth of who we actually are.
I imagine you probably instinctively understand what I’m telling you. You’ve experienced the complete exhaustion of trying in vain to meet everyone’s needs; to somehow be for all of the people you interact with, who they each determine you should be.
If so, there’s a bit of “relational mathematics” that may help you discard perception, and hold fast to reality.
It goes like this:
– You are 50 percent, of every relationship that you have; with bosses, coworkers, friends, family members, and acquaintances. You are always exactly half of these partnerships; with one half belonging to you, and one half belonging to the other person.
But here are the deeper, powerful mathematical truths of ownership beneath that:
– You own 100 percent of your 50 percent.
– You own 0 percent of their 50 percent.
What that means, is that you are in complete and total control of your part; solely responsible for your reality. You can correct, and adjust, and respond infinitely, within your half of the relationship.
The flip-side, is that you have absolutely no control whatsoever, over anyone’s perception of you. You can’t change a thing about their side of the equation, either in what they do, or what they feel about you.
It’s certainly worthwhile to hear the other’s perspective; to know how people around you are being affected by you, and how your words and actions might be received, especially as a person of faith striving to love people well.
At the end of the day, though, with your greatest efforts and most sincere heart, you can only directly affect the portion of the relationship that you own.
In every interaction with people; your job, as half of the whole, isn’t to change how you’re seen by another, it’s to change who you are toward another. When you find yourself in that place of security and clarity, your goals move from outward political strategy, to internal character development. What’s more, you begin to find victory in the efforts themselves, not the reception they receive.
So today and in the future, as you live in the continual tension between your reality, and people’s perception of that reality, may you see the truth of you clearly enough, to adjust all of your half of the equation… and rest in that.
