The shadow side of your perceptions

What do your perceptions mean or represent to you? How do they benefit or restrict you? The definition of perceptions per Wikipedia says perception is 'the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information'. Some people talk of them as simply impulses that occur, others that it is a biological process that allows us to shape our reality of the world. In reading these definitions it is clear that the knowledge of what perceptions exactly are is unknown. However we know at least what they represent to us.

So my topic of today is to assess how our individual perceptions can negatively impact us in life, prevent us achieving our goals and living the life we wish.

As stated above our perceptions allow us to shape our individual reality of the world. Note the key phrase here is 'our reality'. What we believe is not necessarily what someone else believes. My feeling is that perceptions are based on assesssing events compared to our inherent values. Therefore differing perceptions simply mean that our values are different (by a little or a lot) or is perception is similar that our values are similar.

My advice is, when communicating or negotiating, to be open to different values and thus different perceptions and this will enable you to understand others better. Simply being conscious that there is no such thing as 'right' or 'wrong' but just an assortment of viewpoints of individuals will assist you in many circumstances.

Be aware of the negative or shadow side of perceptions in that you are aware of only what you perceive as right or wrong. Living life thinking that only your perceptions are indeed reality will cause a lot of conflict and prevent you from considering the full range of options available to you in life. You will never truly develop at a personal and professional level if you consider your perceptions to be true at all times without considering the possibility that there are other alternatives.

Embrace rather than fear change

I only decided to write this today after reading over the past week the layoffs that are destined to occur in the credit sector due to the subprime mess. It appears that the golden child of industries, financial services, has finally had a chink in it's armour exposed and who knows where it might lead. You only have to look at the leading industries in New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo and other major capital cities around the world to see the influence of finance and related sectors. Those employed run into the hundreds of thousands and maybe millions and their influence over society is enormous. Now with credit markets and financial markets in general waking up to the fact that the days of old will not continue indefinitely employers and employees alike must now consider that change is inevitable and they have two choices.

The two choices I speak of are to either embrace change or fear change. One choice offers you control over your destiny the other offers indecision, lack of control and no clarity as to your future. Obviously choice number 1 is the most obvious choice however I would bet a lot of money that many people in the financial services industry will stick with choice number 2. Though common sense would tell us that financial services cannot dominate forever the life of many is so comfortable that they do not want to even contemplate this world changing - where working in financial services cannot guarantee a comfortable or even luxurious lifestyle. They would say that financial services is not like manufacturing, agriculture, mining etc where the need for humans has seen dramatic decreases in labour requirements over the past 30 years (and has been a trend for the past 50). But you know this line of thought would have been that of employees in the latter industries at that time and this pattern will continue through to the end of time. Cycles begin and then die to create room for new cycles....this is one component of the evoluation of society.

So my advice is to change your perception around change itself. People fear change because of the unknowns it brings however this is only relevant for the person not in control, the person that does not plan for change, does not adapt to the evolution of society. Change is part of life, we all know this, so why not embrace rather than fear it and try to ignore it. Embrace change by planning your life, setting goals and taking the action necessary to achieve these goals. If I were in financial services right now I would be doing the following (1) looking at where I want to be in 3 years (2) validating that my goal is congruent with how society is progressing eg. will that opportunity even be in demand in 3 years time? (3) understanding what skills and knowledge you need to achieve that goal (4) take action today.

See, fear surrounding change is born from the perception that you will be worse off with change. This perception is created because we generally have to react to change, it takes us out of our comfort zone and our status in society drops. However rather than react to change be proactive and take advantage that you can change. Learn to develop and control the changes that you make based on your values and interests. For those in financial services look to the future and ask yourself what you are doing to ensure you will survive and succeed in 5 years from now and whether your fate is being controlled by yourself or your organization.