Blinders or Glasses?

I heard an interesting statement the other day; the person said that there is no such thing as objectivity. You might think you can make an impartial judgment about something but really you have an opinion or bias about everything. And it’s not just you, we all have that in common, we think we can be objective but always there will be something that influences our judgment.

I’m sure that you have heard the expression “beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and you know that what one person thinks is beautiful another might think is not even a little bit pretty, but do you know why that is? You might think that it’s a matter of taste and that it is something you are born with but really that is not true, it’s a matter of perception and perception is learned.

Perception is why you can never be completely objective and it is why you need to pay close attention to what or who you allow to affect your perceptions. Whether or not you realize it, everything and everyone in your life has an impact on your view of the world. So why is this important? If you want to create a life that you love to look at then you need to know what you are allowing to influence you, not just in obvious ways, but in the more subtle ways. How do you do that? By listening closely and thinking about what you hear.

If you listen to those around you and the things they often say are of a complaining or negative nature, your perception of what kind of a world you live in will change (of course that’s assuming you aren’t already thinking negative things like ‘life is hard’ or ‘people are bad’) and you will find ‘evidence’ everywhere you look. What’s around you doesn’t change but what you see can. I know someone that hunts morel mushrooms every Spring. He says that when he goes out hunting he puts on his ‘mushroom eyes’  so he can find the morels. What he is saying is that when he goes to find morels, his expectation or perception is that he will find what he is looking for as long as he is in the right frame of mind. He also said that when he tells himself he is putting on those mushroom eyes he is deliberately putting himself in the right frame of mind by telling himself that he has an enhanced ability to see the morels. He never comes back from a  hunt with less than one pound but usually several pounds of mushrooms, even during seasons when others are finding few. Of course they are the ones sitting around talking about what a bad year it is for mushrooms, he just chooses not to listen to them.

What you listen to does matter.