The Perception of Reality

When I was just starting out in the working world, I had a boss who said to me “Beth, perception is reality.” Being young, green and self-righteous, I didn’t really understand what he was trying to say until much later on. Once the light bulb came on, it changed the way I communicated and helped me as I navigated through the big bad world.

per•cep•tion: /[per-sep-shuh n] noun, the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding.

re•al•i•ty: /[ree-al-i-tee] noun, the state or quality of being real.

I get now that my boss was trying to make me understand that people base their realities on a combination of what is presented to them sensually (seeing, hearing, etc…) and what they already know (how they were raised, the current situation, etc…). No two realities are the same, since no two people have the exact same sensory and cognitive backgrounds.

I’ll stop myself here, before I become too highly involved in philosophy and theoretic. This mind spinning circles around Archimedes is just not a pretty thing. I’d prefer use my brain power to recall mnemonic devices from elementary school and spit out useless statistics about Longhorn football.

What my boss meant was this: If the client (or in my case, tenant) perceives that things are happening a certain way, that is their reality. No matter how misguided or wrong you may think they are, or no matter how skewed their perception seems, it is indeed, their reality. Once you understand that, fixing and/or negotiating issues becomes much easier.

That being said: Please don’t get all bent out of shape about something you read on Adventures of a Football Girl. It’s a blog. That I write in my spare time. I’m just some girl that really likes Texas football and is prone to falling down and/or injury. I write about things I’ve seen, heard, felt, tasted and sometimes smelled. I write about my perception of these things, based on my life experiences thus far, and those perceptions are real to me because I just don’t have the cognizance know any differently.

Whilst browsing my blog, you’ll note that I have opinions on the ‘Horns that aren’t always favorable. You’ll also note that I do a lot of research. I don’t make facts up or insert fake quotes, all that stuff is real and generally comes from University web-archives or credible sports news outlets. I understand you may not like the results of my research or my stats. But! Before getting all riled up about it, it’s important to understand that 99%* of statistics are used to make a point. Clearly, you, me and everyone else will only use the ones that work for the point their trying to make. Think of it this way: There’s a statistic that 1/3 of women who start taking the birth control pill gain weight. What you never hear is that 1/3 of women lose weight, and 1/3 of women do not experience a change in weight. You also generally don’t hear that just over 1/3 of women who begin taking the pill do so their first year of college. And I’m pretty sure it’s no secret that the ‘freshman 15’ is not just a myth. So, while it’s true that a third of women gain weight when they get on the pill, when coupled with the rest of the stats on the subject, it seems less ominous.

Another point of note. I understand that I do not understand the intricacies of football. When I write a commentary on a game, it’s just me, a random girl, writing about a football game I just watched. Just my opinions. No reason to become upset if you disagree with my own personal feelings and thoughts.  I don't need you to go full out Hulk on me.  We're all good here.  

So please just take all of it in with a grain of salt (or with the salted rim of your tequila shot). It’s just for fun.
There's no need to send me angry anonymous emails.  I will just end up sending them to PassiveAggressiveNotes.com.

If you find my reality is so skewed that it angers you, please, just stop reading it. I’m okay with that. Or, you could get really mad about it and forward it along with a scathing hate note about me to all of your buddies. I’m okay with that too – you know why? Because then your buddies read my blog and forward your email to their buddies who will read my blog! The email will live on forever!  That’s how people get discovered.

Just ask Jim Tressel.

*Okay, maybe I did make up a statistic! But it was just a little one, just for a second. Just to see how it felt.