About Kasey
Perceptions create how you are seen, and how you see others
How does one’s beliefs and perceptions affect how they see you? And how do yours affect how you see them? Even if you don’t believe your perception is creating what you see around you right now, even if you don’t believe the world is manifesting through a magnificent orchestration of energies and vibrations from our beliefs and thoughts, it is true your world view and prejudgments allow you to see only a small fraction of other’s attributes.
How you are seen depends on the observer’s beliefs about you. Two different people can have an interaction with you and end up with a very different impression. You see, certain behaviors, appearances, actions, and words from you are pulled into the forefront by others and how they think about you. The behaviors that aren’t in the observer’s selective perception aren’t seen. This is going on inside each of us, within our ego coloring how we all view others and how they view us. I wrote last month about how we automatically rank each person we interact with—whether they are smarter than us, less attractive, more successful etc. Here are the mechanics of it:
Each of us is using our perception to create what surrounds us every minute, just as if our mind’s beliefs are on a DVD, and what is presented to us triggers what to play on the DVD. Out of this connection to our mind’s software springs a world of sound, color, texture, and physical forms and, of course, other beings. Unless we are really awake, we are each artificially separated, living in this individuated world, seeing everything as either me or other than me.
So, how we view others is completely under our control. Each of us is multifaceted. If you run into someone who thinks highly of you for instance, and sees you as articulate and knowledgeable, that version of you will be easily displayed. You will probably find it easy to express yourself around this person; and, even if you don’t, he will see you that way. If someone sees you as the cool, unfriendly sort, they most likely will not see your warm side, even if you try consciously to show it.
Our beliefs and perceptions are always checking for validation, proof that they are true, and you will always find the proof.
An easy example is politics and religion. There is so much prejudging that, if one sees you in the context of their beliefs about a certain group, their minds are flooded with preconceptions and they will only see you as fitting perfectly into their belief system about that group.
A happy marriage and a happy family life are very dependent on how the spouses view each other. If you have a negative view of another member in your family, and you hold firm to that with stories you tell yourself, they will present that side to you consistently. It can only be this way. If you become aware of this and your beliefs begin to shift a little so that you start to see another side to that person in your thinking, you will notice changes in their behavior. They will show you surprising sides of themselves.
It may not be easy at first. Our beliefs can be so entrenched that it seems absolute that a person is a certain way; but if you can just create some curiosity about this subject, you can see a shifting in behavior. This is why expectations are so powerful. When raising our children, they usually meet our expectations, good or bad.
This also takes some pressure off how we behave with others, because it is their own preferences, beliefs and perceptions that determine how we are viewed by them. So, relax and just totally be yourself.
You can never really know how others see you. Spending time worrying about that is pointless.