KARLA PORTER

You can lis­ten to the pod­cast at Recruiter Earth on The Cat­a­lyst.

I once had a boss who said “Per­cep­tion is Real­ity” with such fre­quency one would think it to be her mantra for med­i­ta­tion. She long ago moved on to her “next life” (another term that grates on me), but appar­ently she repeated the phrase so often it still per­me­ated the halls for years after she left.

Per­cep­tion is Real­ity… It is pop culture’s catch all phrase for “I believe it so it has to be,” and license for one to cre­ate his or her own patho­log­i­cal sit­u­a­tion and avoid inves­ti­ga­tion into empir­i­cal real­i­ties. It can seri­ously taint the mind. It can ruin per­sonal and pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships. Unhealthy per­cep­tion is a warm cozy part­ner to schizophrenia.

Per­cep­tion: The process of orga­niz­ing, inter­pret­ing, and selec­tively extract­ing sen­sory information.

Your error is to seek to reduce the world to your size, whereas the greater your under­stand­ing of things, the bet­ter your under­stand­ing of your­self. ~ Monet

Per­cep­tion is often fraught with trans­fer­ence of feel­ings about some­one or some­thing from one’s past and melded with cur­rent events to cre­ate a mis­con­cep­tion. Per­cep­tion can be fan­tasy. The real­ity of a sit­u­a­tion can have noth­ing to do with what one is expe­ri­enc­ing uncon­sciously. The inter­pre­ta­tion of events is reliant on one’s ana­lytic frame.

Our mem­ory is stretched and warped like a rub­ber band to con­form to our per­cep­tion of real­ity. This affects wit­nesses, allows for magi­cians to make a liv­ing, causes UFOs and white lights at the end of tun­nels (unless you believe they exist!). There is a cer­tain arro­gance to assume that one’s own per­cep­tions are sim­i­lar to all per­cep­tions, and that a sin­gu­lar per­cep­tion has any bear­ing on some­thing as infi­nitely com­plex as reality.

Trans­fer­ence is the expe­ri­enc­ing of feel­ings, dri­ves, atti­tudes, fan­tasies, and defenses toward a per­son in the present which do not befit that per­son, but are rep­e­ti­tion of reac­tions orig­i­nat­ing in regard to sig­nif­i­cant per­sons of early child­hood, uncon­sciously dis­placed onto fig­ures in the present. ~ Green­son, 1971/1990

The adult mind selects and rejects data, whether con­sciously or habit­u­ally, accord­ing to the mind-set and/or the envi­ron­men­tal set­ting. It’s easy to under­stand Per­cep­tual Rel­a­tivism and Wertheimer’s Gestalt psy­chol­ogy with the anal­ogy of “chang­ing the radio sta­tion until you hear a song you like”.

In regard to per­sonal and pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships, it’s impor­tant to crit­i­cally chal­lenge one’s own per­cep­tions and per­haps do a lit­tle fact check­ing before allow­ing them to become real­ity. You just might find your per­cep­tions were fan­tasy after all.

This is a repost from Octo­ber 28, 2007 from the Myspace page I started in 2006. I started to exper­i­ment with it as a recruit­ment tool when I was tasked with reduc­ing cost per hire. It resulted in a 40% reduc­tion in the first year.  Unfor­tu­nately, when I left the com­pany and turned the pass­word over it was never kept up.