JumpStart Clean Your Desk Day (1/13/25)

QUOTE:  " It's not what you look at that matters.  It's what you see."

MESSAGE:  Your perception of the world around you is everything.

Last week, I was working with a staff around student motivation, and the idea that a student’s perception of relevancy, autonomy, and competence is more important than their circumstance.

It’s like this.

The other day, my wife and I attended a neighborhood get-together.  We are the newbies, so we’re still trying to figure out where we fit in.  While we did occasionally split up into the respective gender-specific groups, we did spend most of our time together, so our circumstances were very similar.  However, our perceptions were remarkably different.

Martha picked up on all the relationship nuances - many of them unspoken - while I remember the house and the food and the stories people told. Martha has that uncanny ability to figure out unspoken truths by asking questions and reading nonverbals (super hard to keep secrets from her!). I’ve done a lot of home DIY and I’m an artist, so I notice those types of things.

How we perceive our days is 99% subjective, especially if your self-awareness is low. Someone says something, and it offends one person, delights another, and doesn’t even register with a third.  The things that happen in our days are just events that in and of themselves have no emotion attached to them. We are the ones who put emotional weight on our circumstances.

THIS WEEK, TRY THIS: The next time something upsets you, take a step back and replay it as if there were no sound, or if you couldn’t understand the language, or as if it happened to plants instead of humans. How does your perception change? Where did your strong emotions come from?

DAD JOKE:  How Dad are you?  Which of these do you say?

1. "No, your other right." (when someone mistakes left for right)
2. "What's the damage?" (before looking at the bill)
3. "Can you do mine next?" (when seeing your neighbor washing their car)
4. "I was just resting my eyes." (after falling asleep on the couch)
5. "Guess they'll let anyone in here." (when seeing a friend in public)