Welcome to the Change Leader’s Book Club.
In this series of posts, I introduce and share insights from some of my favourite books. Each post and video explores a topic that will help you create healthy, sustainable change.
I’m kicking off with “Perception How our Bodies Shape our Minds” by Dennis Proffitt.
Watch the video here:
I had so many Aha! moments about enabling change when I read this book.
If you have ever had a conversation with someone about an event and wondered whether you attended the same event, you’ve experienced the power of perception.
We really are all living in our own little worlds.
Perception is complex and subjective, and our perceptions of the world don’t accurately reflect the world as it is, nor are they designed to do so.
We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.
Our physical body, language and our emotions all play a role in our perception of a task or event.
The Illusion of the Hills
Have you ever been to, or seen, the hills of San Francisco? They look incredibly steep and rolling. About 10 years ago, my husband and I took a trip to San Francisco, and the steepness of the streets was incredibly intimidating. In one case, we avoided walking on the street and took the trolley when the hill looked too steep. However, on another occasion, we decided to go for it. I was surprised that walking what appeared to be a hill with an almost 50% incline wasn’t as hard as I expected.
That’s because it wasn’t a 50% incline.
Even though the hills look steep, most are no more than a 20-degree incline. I thought it was an optical illusion, but it turns out our conscious perception miscalculates the incline.
That’s the discovery Dr. Denis Proffitt made in his research. He found that people consistently overestimated the hill’s slant during verbal and visual matching tasks that assessed conscious perception. And the overestimation was big—a typical participant looking at a 5-degree hill would judge the incline to be about 20 degrees.
Yet the same participants were accurate when asked (without looking) to use a hands-to-waist level tilt board and make it parallel to the hill’s incline.
What accounted for the difference? It was the participants’ beliefs about the route’s walkability and their ability to ascend the hill that directly influenced their perception of the hill’s incline. Their bodies were influencing their perception. Participants were not seeing the hill as it was. They were seeing it as they were.
This kind of perception has a big impact on your change efforts. If your team or employees perceive a change as physically or mentally beyond their capabilities, they will see it as larger and more difficult, which can affect their decision to move forward with the new activity. In the same way, my husband and I initially avoided some hills on our trip.
Language Influences Perception
Our words enable us to perceive our environment. perceive our environment and situation. Our language and vocabulary shape how we think about a concept. This is called linguistic relativity.
For example, the authors note that in almost every culture, up is considered good and down is interpreted as bad.
However, language works in step with our bodies.
In a fascinating study, participants moved marbles up or down idly while telling stories about themselves. Participants who moved the marbles up tended to tell positive stories, while those who moved the marbles down tended to tell stories about bad luck and missed connections. Without even realizing it, the upward or downward movement influenced the emotional tone of their stories.
In another study, researchers demonstrated the influence of right- or left-handed dominance on language, which in turn drives perception. Right is almost always associated with good, while left is viewed as negative. For example, two left feet or a left-handed compliment.
Participants were given a page with an image of one alien creature on the left and another on the right, and asked to assign attributes to the creatures. Consistently, participants assigned positive attributes to the creatures on the right and negative attributes to those on the left.
However, it’s not just language, because left-handed people tend to assign more positive attributes to images on the left.
Researchers discovered that when they took their experiments into the real world, our dominant hand, without our conscious awareness, is subtly guiding our behaviour.
The impact of language on perception and action is one reason I ask our clients who are beginning to work with the Readiness Mindset® to replace the phrase “they are resistant to change” with “they are not ready yet.”
In almost every situation, when leaders adopt this strategy, they report people complaining less, offering to help, and others who initially appeared resistant to “getting on board.”
Our Perception is not Accurate
The realization that our perception isn’t accurate was a light-bulb moment for me when reading the book. And that it’s not designed to give you an accurate read of the environment. The purpose of human perception is to help us think pragmatically.
What does this mean? There are limits to how accurately we perceive the world, or how others see the situation or event.
Perception is about energy preservation – how to do the most with the least energy expenditure. And it is inherently biased toward each person’s view of the world.
It’s not “I will believe it when I see it,” it’s, “I will see it when I believe it.”
That’s why it’s so essential when enabling change, you make the time, space and help for people to connect with the need and intended outcome story.
That’s why it’s important to question and challenge your perceptions consistently. Create an environment that explores diverse perceptions and makes decisions informed by multiple perspectives.
When you understand how you form perceptions and how they influence your thinking and actions, you can consciously align your decisions, reduce unconscious biases, and mitigate potential conflicts as you move toward something new and different.
Curious how a shift in your perception could help you eliminate and prevent resistance to change? Let’s Chat
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