Perception and Reality

 

I have a white board in my office - actually two of them and they are filled with "stuff".  There are daily quotas that my team fills out.  There are illustrations of concepts that are used during group meetings and sometimes erased but sometimes, they stay for months.  There are quotes that are daily reminders of something.  There are short lists of things I need reminding of.  There are scheduled meeting times and just stuff. Sometimes, like yesterday my boards are so full I cringe when something needs to be erased. But it has to happen, so they can be put to use for what I think they are there for and that's to illustrate fluid thought through words and drawings.

 

I love my boards. They create a big visual for me and for others.  You might try one or two and see if you get benefit from such an active and visual space in your office.  But I digress.  I bring up my white boards today because of one of the quotes I have on it is "Stress is a reaction to the environment.  It is either positive or negative. It's your personal choice."

 

We are in the process of rolling out our newly built CRM product - SyncUp.  As with all our products, they are like our children.  We conceive, birth, nurture and grow them before they are ready to go forth in the world independently.  And since we do things that way, our company and our employees are the first ones to use any product we have, so they go through the pain of learning a new way to do something.  It's this process that we are embarking on this week and their varied reactions to the initial process that makes me focus this week on stress or attitudes about change.

 

Everyone will have a slightly different reaction to the new software roll-out and therefore it's a time to be keenly aware that just because we see something a particular way, does not make it so.  We all see things through our filters - our perception.  We can be so insistent or persuasive sometimes that our way of seeing something is more right than someone else's way.  Or vise versa. When something changes in our life, we have a choice about how to respond to it. While we all know that the change we like and go through the best is self created, we don't always have that luxury.  My wonderful employees don't have a choice but to help us move through this phase of developing the new CRM, just like you may not have a choice when process and tools change in your company.  So it's when change happens that we don't control, our perception and reaction is the control we do have.

 

I wonder how many of you have made it through Ayn Rand's epic novel Atlas Shrugged?  I read it years and years ago and when I see it on my bookshelf I often think to pick it up and reread it, but it's daunting at 1,067 pages and so I haven't.  But considering that here we are more than 50 years later finding that it is still influencing business and society,  I think I need to keep thinking about that reread. To give you a little background as to why I relate that book to how people react to and move through change, I can summarize that the novel centers on the fact that many of the nation's most brilliant and innovative entrepreneurs and business leaders have disappeared, leaving the nation in chaos.  They have all departed to "Galt's Gulch," a secret and parallel society formed to show an increasingly government-dominated America how much it needs pure capitalism and the men and women who drive it.  If that sounds like something you've heard lately, it could be because vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan referenced it during the election applauding the book's celebration of rugged individualism and no-holds-barred capitalism and critics dismiss it as heartless, simplistic and elitist.  I bring it up because it's a great example of perception being the creator of one's reality.

 

It's important to recognize that how we choose to perceive things is how they come across to us, particularly in the workplace. I like to say that there is no such thing as reality.  I like to remind myself and those that I work with that there is only a version of reality which is essentially one's perception. And that what we believe to be true is only as true as our experiences shape that truth. That's why I say that everything begins with a choice.  I sure hope our office moves though this new product roll-out choosing to "see" it's a valuable process!

 

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