Quotes about Perception

We can't go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and vice versa.

We can "pose" and "put on" for a stranger or an associate. We can pretend. And for a while we can get by with it—at least in public. We might even deceive ourselves. Yet I believe that most of us know the truth of what we really are inside; and I think many of those we live with and work with do as well.

When relationships are strained and the air charged with emotion, an attempt to teach is often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection.

We knew that social comparison motives were out of harmony with our deeper values and could lead to conditional love and eventually to our son's lessened sense of self-worth. So we determined to focus our efforts on us—not on our techniques, but on our deepest motives and our perception of him. Instead of trying to change him, we tried to stand apart—to separate us from him—and to sense his identity, individuality, separateness, and worth.

The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings. That person values the differences because those differences add to his knowledge, to his understanding of reality. When we're left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data.

But is it possible that under that apparently disloyal behavior, these employees question whether I really act in their best interest? Do they feel like I'm treating them as mechanical objects? Is there some truth to that?

If you visualize the wrong thing, you'll produce the wrong thing.

Anytime we think the problem is "out there," that thought is the problem.

In order to see our son differently, Sandra and I had to be different. Our new paradigm was created as we invested in the growth and development of our own character. Paradigms are inseparable from character. Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We can't go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and vice versa.

We create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people.

It taught me that we must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as at the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

How many times have you made assumptions similar to the store manager's? It's easy to do, because we all see things in different ways. We all have different paradigms or frames of reference—like eyeglasses through which we see the world. We see the world not as it is, but as we are—or sometimes as we are conditioned to see it.