I remember working in corporate life about 20 years ago when I first heard the expression "perception is reality".  I thought is was quite a strange expression at the time.  What does it really mean?  I worked in a customer service environment at the time and of course much of the leading edge customer service initiatives came from our American counterparts at the other side of the Atlantic.  The interpretation became clear in the working environment, if your customers perceived that you were not providing them with a good service, for whatever reason, that became the reality of your service offering.  Even though you might have been knocking yourself out and going the 'extra mile' to provide great customer service, if somebody else in the customer engagement team did not deliver to meet client expectations, then perception shifted for the client.  You were as good as your lowest common denominator.

I really want you to think about your own perception of self and your world here and now.  You see how you perceive yourself and your environment will directly effect what you get in life and how you experience it.  Let me give you an example - if you think that you will always need to work that little bit harder than everybody else to prove that you have done  great job (because that is the way you have always done things) then your reality will be matched by your expectations.  Remember the old adage, 'do what you have always done, get what you have always got'.  If you enter a competition or play the lottery  and a there is a part of you that says, "I could win, but I realistically I won't because it is always somebody else.  I don' t have that kind of luck."  You can be pretty sure of the outcome you are likely to get.

Check your own perception of your environment.  How do you interpret your reality?  What kind of rule book do you reference to tell you if something is: right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, probable or improbable?   How do you know what is really going on?  You might want to check somebody else s's interpretation, or, you might want to think about other possible outcomes.  How could this picture look, other than the way that you see it right now?  If you don't like the results that you are getting or notice some familiar and frustrating trends, check your perception.  How do you know it is really this way or that?  How do you really want it to be?  What could you change today that would shift your perception and the perception of those around you?