How many times have you seen someone listen to a recording of their own voice and then insist the voice on the recording sounds nothing like them? Why is this? It is because we are the ONLY person in the world who experiences things from our point of view. The voice we are hearing does not sound like that to us when we speak, so how could it possibly sound like that when we hear it played back? It is because we all hear and see and experience things from our own unique perspective so we cannot possibly expect others to have the same experiences we do – even given completely identical stimuli.
Look at this picture. What do you see, an old woman with a big nose, or a beautiful young maiden? Look again – look long and hard; do you still see the same thing? What do you see? Beauty? Ugliness? Young? Old?Perception is how you see the world around you. Every time you look at something, or someone, you are forming opinions. You are observing, processing, and deducing information to form an opinion. The opinions you arrive at may be accurate, or they may be far from the truth. Since we cannot be “inside” someone else’s mind and heart we can’t possibly know what the reality is in a given situation. Truth is, sometimes we do not even know or understand our own motives. And if our motives and perceptions are unknown even to us on the "inside" of life as we experience it, how can those "outside" us have a chance to understand what the reality is in a given situation? We are constantly unconsciously running everything we experience through a set of filters we were born with, or educated into, or we picked up from our generation or from a previous generation.
Why am I talking about this? I am writing about perceptions because of today’s worship service at my church. Depending upon who you ask at our church and certain factors I have yet to completely sort out, today’s service was either, “exactly what a ‘win’ looks like at NewSong,” or else it was “one of the worst services we have had in a long time.”
I know. No one ever said leadership was easy. This evening I perceive it to be very difficult. I am not even sure what step to take next. As usual it brings me back to the old leadership arts of listening, measuring, clarifying and communicating. Perhaps it is even time to retool a few things. But whose perceptions to we retool towards? What do people actually perceive? And what is the correlation between what they perceive and the underlying reality? Is what people were either deliriously happy about or totally disgusted with today even the issue on the table now?
How do we deal with perceptions and whose perceptions matter most (besides God’s, of course). What do you think?
Wow, thats really strong. There is no way to make all people feel the same on any given Sunday, but I know in my heart that I will always take something home that will stay with me. I still remember services from my "Dr. Walker" days that I would have guessed he read my mind. Now I have that same feeling with Newsong. You will not reach everyone, every week. But I feel as a whole that our church is so on the right track.
ReplyDeleteIn his love,
Janet Woelk