Each of us humans experience life through our senses.

Our sense of; touch, taste, smell, sight, sound, and thoughts and feelings. It’s through these senses that we experience life in all it’s glory, confusion, celebration, and impermanence.

Yet, it seems that we often forget that this is the truth in how we perceive life to be real.

This is how we make sense of ourselves, our environment, our relationships, and anything that is possible to be experienced as a human being.

While many of us get this intellectually, it seems that there often lies a gap where we don’t see the irony in this statement.

Specifically, when it comes to choices we make pertaining to how we interpret any event.

In any given moment, we can choose a different meaning or experience to something that is occurring, either in our heads, or in the world around us.

We can choose to believe that a chance encounter with a stranger is a threat, neutral, or a blessing in disguise.

Whether that person assumes ill will towards us physically or in any other kind of manner is not the point in this moment. The point is about seeing how we can innocently attach, and do attach, meaning to people, places, feelings at light speed. Often, we are not even aware that we do this.

I look at my bank account one day, and it spells certain doom. I look at the same bank account the next day, and I feel neutral or content.

I’ve experienced this personally, based on my moment to moment perception of what I was seeing and then deciding to create and believe a specific meaning about it.

You may be reading this and think, “oh you are talking about positive thinking and avoiding the reality.”

Nope.

There are facts, and then there are stories.

A fact may be that if I want to pay my bills, I will want to make x amount of dollars by y date. That’s a fact. Simple. Straightforward.

What I’m talking about here is the story we attach to that fact, because the story we tell ourselves is what is critical to determining what we do with this new information.

If I choose to see the fact that I must make x dollars to keep a roof over my head, I can perceive that as my world is falling a part and spin into a cycle of doubt, fear and shame.

Yet, even though it is important to keep a roof over our heads, it doesn’t serve us to choose this path of perception.

Alternatively, what if we chose to see it from the place of creativity. Choosing to take ownership in the moment and say, “okay, what do I want to do to change this?”

Same facts. Different choices.

Perception and our use of it is so nuanced and subtle, that it’s important to note that as I write this, this is my perception of how we operate as human beings, through multiple senses and the perceptions we draw.

Think of a time where someone really made you angry. A person that, often at the sight of them, you tense up, your guard comes up, and you are ready to defend.

Then one day, after maybe a critical conversation, a decision you made, or a change in circumstance, you are now able to see that person completely neutral. With indifference even.

What changed?

Many times, the person hasn’t. It’s our perception of that person.

They may still do all the things that previously drove us nuts, like nails on a chalkboard, but seemingly just like that it’s as if the mute button was hit on the person’s ability to rile us up.

This ability that each one of us have to change our perception of any thought, feeling, or event, is empowering.

This does not mean accept dangerous behavior from another, or to ignore harmful situations, like abuse or potentially losing your home, or career.

Rather, this offers us a new way to relate to ourselves, and how we experience the life we are creating each day through our choices, responses, and decisions.

We can not control life, nor can we control other people. Notably, the attempt to do so comes from a fear that if we don’t control people and everything around us, all will go to hell.

Maybe.

Or maybe, we are experiencing hell right now because we are trying so hard to make everything look a certain way.

And maybe, our attempt to try and control every person, outcome and event is why we have less of what we truly want, and more of what we don’t.

In my corporate career, I was paid for my ability to look out into the future at where the business was heading, and ensure that our team’s performance meet or exceeded that intention.

However, in my own naivety early on, my belief was that it required highly rigid, 100% span of control to get there.

What I can assure you is the lack of trust I felt in my stomach at times had nothing to do with me having the wrong team, boss, goals, or customers.

I was creating it.

My perceived need to control everything came from being anxious that this was the only way to accomplish anything, control it.

As you can imagine, that didn’t make for the most enjoyable felt experience, and at times, I was so caught up in my story of believing this was the way things worked, I missed opportunities to connect with my team, which at the end of the day, they were the ones carrying out and executing the plans.

It was only when I was able to sit back, relax a bit, that I began to see that the rigidity and need for control caused me to be distracted, distraught, and disconnected.

If I hadn’t learned this, I don’t believe my subsequent promotions would have occurred, because I was a ball of nerves needing to get everything right. When in fact, I was moving in the wrong direction.

It’s kind of cool when you think about it. It’s like when you tell a fish it lives in water and it says, “what water?”.

Well, once the fish knows it lives in water, it never forgets again.

Or maybe it does from time to time until you remind it again.

Our natural ability to alter our perception is a gift, especially when we learn to intentionally use it.

Give it a try. Think about one experience in your life right now that if you perceived it a bit differently, it would change how you feel about it, and in doing so, open things up a bit for you to determine if something specific would benefit from changing.

Change your perception, and you open yourself up to change your life.