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Perception
Defined
How we generate information about the world is perceiving.
When new information is compatible with your knowledge
structures it is accepted, when it does not mesh with your pre-conceived
ideas or past experience it receives little consideration, is distorted or
ignored.2
Zen
Proverbs, Sayings, and Quotes
Everything the same; everything distinct...
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Happiness – It's All in Our Own Hands
Here is a pair of mantras that we can
use to strengthen our endurance. One method is to better handle
how your senses – not only your eyes and ears but also your tongue,
body and
mind –
perceive and react to things around you.. For, more often than not,
we suffer because our troublesome mind orders our eyes and ears to
pick up the kind of things that annoy us....
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Business Is All About Perceptions
Business –
leadership, teamwork,
motivation,
value innovation,
differentiation,
marketing, etc. – is all about perceptions. The essence of
leading, managing, marketing and selling is coming to grips with people's
perceptions.
"Perception
is all there is..." writes Tom Peters.5 "There is only one
perceived reality, the way each of us chooses to perceive a communication,
the value of a service, the value of a particular product feature, the
quality of a product."
Selective Perceptions
Most of your judgments result from decisional shortcuts you
use to generate
solutions that are good enough most of the time. When you
perceive a situation that looks familiar to you, doesn't your past
experience cause you to see the event in terms of what you expect? Doesn't
your limited span of attention lead you to categorize things by aspects that
appear similar to what you already know?
"We are constantly bombarded with so much sensory information
that it is impossible for us to pay attention to everything. Our
subconscious mind scans our environment and selects what it deems may be
important for us to notice. Even then, people not only see things the way
they are, they also tend to see what they expect to see, as well as what
they want to see."3 "Much of human perception is based not
on information flowing into the brain from the outside world but what the
brain, based on previous experience, expects to happen next,” says Sandra
Blakeslee, an award-winning science writer for the New York Times.
Connecting with Senses
People have three basic methods of perceiving the world
around them:
Individuals have
different preferred ways of thinking and communicating their experiences
- some express themselves in pictures, others talk about how things sound to
them, and others speak about how things feel. If you want to connect with
your target customers, you have to
figure out which sense they favor...
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Case in Point
Young Women or
Old Woman?
This example is often used by educators when they talk about
selective perceptions. Take a look at the
Figure 1 of a woman. How would you describe her? Is she young or old?
Pretty or unattractive? Rich or poor? You must have classified her as young,
pretty, and wealthy. Now look at the
Figure 2. Have you change your mind? Unlikely. You still see a young,
pretty, and wealthy woman. And what if I tell you that she is old,
unattractive and poor? You won't believe me.
However, people who are initially shown the woman in
Figure 3 and then are asked to describe the woman in
Figure 2 almost always say she is old, unattractive, and poor, i.e. they
see the opposite of what others see in the very same picture. "When shown
either the relatively unambiguous picture of the young or old woman first
(Figure 1 and 3) and than the composite picture (Figure 2), selective
perception has been triggered. Exposure to either picture draws our
attention to seek out thinking processes willingly oblige by conforming that
the second picture lives up to our expectations."3

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