Kristina/person journaling
By Brendan P. Keegan
Chief Executive Officer, Merchants Fleet
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No matter what responsibilities you might have on the job, being intentional about your perception can keep negativity at bay.
You've probably seen some popular perception images online or in books — there's the vase versus two faces, the duck versus rabbit, and the old woman versus young lady. But perception goes beyond just the visual. We can have differences in perception of our situations, too. That includes what's going on with our work.
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Being aware of differences in perception is powerful. In many circumstances, it allows you to interact with more empathy to resolve conflicts on the job. But the biggest superpower of perception is its ability to influence how you react to stressors.
Fearless Through the Fire
What would you do if your house caught on fire? If you're like many people, as smoke and flames surrounded you, your fear would make you freeze. You probably wouldn't be able to think very straight or process very much.
Now imagine you're a trained firefighter with years of experience running into burning buildings. You know disaster could happen. But because fire isn't new to you, you're able to understand where the worst danger is. You don't freeze.
What's going on here? In both cases, there's real danger. But the training of a firefighter influences how they perceive the burning building compared to an average Joe.
The same kind of thing goes on every day in offices. Suppose you're brand new to the field or your team and a meeting starts to go south. You're likely going to see that situation very differently than a seasoned executive might. And it's incredibly common for people in the exact same roles to see their work differently based on their upbringing, personality, and other factors.
Perception and Your Brain
As the firefighter example shows, your perception isn't necessarily static. You can change it through training — that is, exposing yourself to specific elements. But experience ties to your biology and brain function.
The rubber hand experiment shows this well: Each participant was asked to put their hands on either side of a divider. The divider kept each participant from seeing their left hand, but a rubber hand was set up on the right side of the divider. This setup gave each participant the visual cue that both their hands were on the right side of the divider. Then, the researchers stroked the participant's left hand and the rubber hand with brushes at the same time. The result? Each participant perceived they were feeling the brush strokes on the rubber hand. Their brain essentially substituted their real hand for the fake one.
This experiment shows how quickly your brain can adapt and change how it interprets things. But over time, you can build up longer-term pathways in the brain that help stabilize the way you take in information and think.
This phenomenon means it can be tough to see things differently. You can become mentally fixed and jump to the same kinds of thoughts or conclusions quickly and easily. What's more, we all have a natural negativity bias. Our brain keeps a lookout for bad stuff as a proactive way of keeping us safe. So if your boss criticizes you a couple of times, you might start noticing every little negative thing they say and start to develop an unhealthy relationship with them. It's common for people to recoil during mergers, acquisitions, or other big changes, too, because they're so used to the way things have been done that shifts seem too scary to accept.
Shifting Your Perception on Purpose
Even though we might be prone to look for the negative and get into a rut with our perception, thankfully, the brain has awesome neuroplasticity. If you want to change your perception, you can, although natural neurodiversity can mean that some people have higher hurdles to overcome than others do. It just takes consistent practice with new thoughts or perception activities to build up the new neural pathways.
For most people, asking themselves a few questions puts them on a solid journey toward a new, healthier view:
• What are my expectations, and where did they come from?
• How do other people who do well with workplace stressors seem to think or act?
• Without denying what stinks (known as toxic positivity), what alternate interpretations could there be for what I'm seeing or experiencing?
• What would I need to believe and act differently?
• How might adopting a new, alternative way of doing or thinking change my life?
• What clear internal and external evidence do I have that my view is the right one?
The World Is What You Choose to See, So Build a Positive View
Every job has specific tasks you're going to have to do, and even the most skillfully crafted positions likely will have some not-so-great parts. But whether those tasks are stressful is based largely on your interpretation of them. That's why a person can love a job picking up litter and someone else can hate being the CEO in charge, or why two coworkers on the same team in the same exact position can have vastly different attitudes. And the good news is, you don't have to stay stuck seeing everything as bleak. You can choose to learn to see things differently so it's possible to keep stress at a more tolerable level.
So claim your power of perception. The only thing you have to lose is added stress, and the gains can be limitless.
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