My perception is you won't read this.
Reality is you might.
Is the dress white and gold, or blue and black? You probably encountered the question elsewhere, even if you weren't online for the viral dress debate. The dress debate was recently attributed to "The Last Good Day on the Internet" by Vox's Today Explained podcast team. Vox gives a well-examined explanation for the reasons we might see white and gold or black and blue. However, no matter your perception, you're likely to have still an entrenched opinion on what color the dress is. Even this past school year, my student-athletes peppered me with a response to the almost decade-old debate.
Regardless of the perspective of the colors we see, our perception likely shapes our reality. It happens in all sorts of scenarios. You were convinced the massive pile of bedsheets and pillows was your partner still sleeping. The mound of dirt in your flower bed burrowed by a ground hornet is not a freshly bloomed flower. The person frenetically waving at you is not waving at you. They're waving at the person behind you.
So many of these perceptions are embarrassing when confronted with reality. Sadly, if you're like me, we feed into these perceptions when we allow our self-perceptions to drive our lives' realities. As a coach, I deal with this daily, trying to convince athletes that they're capable of achieving more than the limitations of their self-perceptions. Most of the time, the key to unlocking the unique greatness an athlete has within is trying to help them see the reality of opportunities before them rather than accepting the lies of their perceptions.
But like I said, I'm no better. Take this article for example. I've been stalling writing, reading, and publishing because I believed I had no valuable words to offer (perhaps in another Substack, I'll explore where I've been). I've convinced myself that you, the reader, will be unforgiving in my absence and will not even click the link to read my words. Instead, I've hit publish because it's an actionable step to remind myself that my perception is not reality. And if you're still reading to this point, you're proof I have skewed perceptions, too.
Ill-perceived situations about ourselves can also work in the wrong direction, though. Sometimes, we can have such an inflated view of our ideals, beliefs, and self that we're unaware of our negative impact on reality. Ill-perceived situations occur daily in comment sections, political scenes, educational and business boards, and religious communities lacking empathy for our neighbors.
I mostly encounter this with our male athletes who struggle to take an outside view of themselves and the valid limitations of their skills. The limitations are not because they're unskilled or lack potential but because they fail to see what can be corrected and improved in their technique. These misperceptions likely occur for the same reason self-doubtful individuals squander their opportunities: they run with the stories of their perceptions rather than accepting the truths of our shared realities.
Many films and books have explored the quest of perceptions versus reality. Inception, The Truman Show, and The Matrix trilogy are a few movies that come to mind. But if perception versus reality is an honest debate, where does that leave our dreams? Can we still dream if all we see is reality—like the reality that the dress is white and gold and not blue and black? I guess this is a question to explore in my next post, assuming you'd come back. But that's just my perception.