What’s the difference between perception and perspective? Why does this matter? It may be a subtle distinction but understanding this difference can really help us to improve or change something.
Perception is how we translate the world around us (often through sensory inputs). It is how make sense of something, and what enables us to interpret a situation and apply meaning to things.
Perspective is our point of view, the assessment we make of a situation, the positions, and opinions that we form. We say that it’s important to ‘keep things in perspective’ because we’re trying to view things in relation to everything else.
Perceptions may be developed through the lens of our values and beliefs since we use our beliefs to apply meaning to a situation. In turn, how we perceive things informs how we form our points of view. It is the perception of our reality that controls our perspective.
This matters from a personal perspective since understanding how perspectives are derived from perceptions and ultimately beliefs helps us to truly understand how we form the point of view that we have about the world. The example given here is someone that holds a belief (like many do) that success comes from perfection. This results in the perception that anything that is less than perfect is a failure, and the perspective that there are two kinds of people – perfect and imperfect, winners and failures. Changing this means challenging or evolving our fundamental beliefs: ‘…if we break our old beliefs, we can condition our minds to perceive differently. Once we do that, we can create a brand new perspective’.
Beliefs are the assumptions we make about the world, derived from repetition, learned experience, emotional impact, and the environments and contexts that we have faced in the past. Our perceptions, drawn from these beliefs, are unique to us but it’s easy to become trapped in them. If we want to change other people’s perspectives we need to observe the world from outside of ourselves – we need to use empathy to shift out of our perception and into their perspective, and understand how they think.
Beliefs and assumptions can also become embedded in companies, which can then inform how the leaders and/or staff perceive situations and in turn their perspective on how they need to respond. These beliefs may have grown over time and resulted in an assumption that the causal relationships of the past are still relevant today. Yet in fast-changing environments we can easily find that these assumptions no longer hold true. That’s why to challenge or change these assumptions we need to change the learned experience.
Photo by Bradley Pisney on Unsplash
Leave a Reply