How to Keep Your Perceptions In Check

Your perception does not shape your reality. It simply colors reality to suit your desires, goals, and feelings.

Okay, I can tell you think I’m nuts…again. So, here’s some proof:

Have you ever felt you were correct but discovered you weren’t?
Have you ever discovered you have misjudged someone?
Have you ever tried to cut your own hair?

In those cases your perception abruptly met uncolored reality. It’s how we learn about the world around us. We’re governed by physical and spiritual laws that act as guardrails to our perception. This helps to keep our spirits and our bodies healthy.

How you choose to respond to these quick perception adjustments reveal the strongest or weakest parts of your character.

It’s up to you to explore where your perceptions color your world. Everything in your life can be viewed through these two lenses of perception and reality. Getting comfortable with justifying one with the other can be a source of great clarity.

My encouragement is to get intentional about examining your perceptions. Justify them with the spiritual and physical laws of reality. Doing so will create much fewer jarring moments of realignment. The more often you perform this realignment, the easier it will become. You’ll also gain a much more even keeled perspective.

The easy reaction to an abrupt perception alignment is often anger. Jolted, we often dig back into our skewed perceptions. This is because it’s often scary to align our perceptions with reality. When we choose to respond by taking a step back, we gain wisdom from seeing the forest, instead of the trees. When we take a mature look at where our perceptions skew, we will gain much needed perspective. That new perspective can help us to gain a new understanding of the people and things in our lives.

Here are some questions to answer for yourself:

What relationships are positively or negatively being colored by my perception?
What must I intentionally do to realign this relationship with reality?
Is my perception positively or negatively affecting how I treat others?
Is my perception positively or negatively affecting how I speak to others?
Is my perception positively or negatively affecting the things I tell myself?
What must I intentionally do to realign my perception with reality in each of these cases?