There Is No Reality
How your 'realistic' thinking is killing your leadership.
Happy Tuesday.
Oh, and there is no such thing as reality.
...
Pause. Engage some caffeinated Morning MetacognitionTM.
Before you dismiss this as philosophy, stick with me. This idea dramatically changed how I lead, and I wish the same for you.
What emotions, feelings, or thoughts arose in you in response to that statement? Do you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with it? Let’s unpack it further because there’s so much more to discuss.
I just returned from Atlanta, Georgia for training and business planning, and I’m actively engaging with this idea of reality in both positive and painful ways. I’ve told myself that I want my business plan and strategies to be grounded in reality to build a large, sustainable coaching practice that supports my current and future life. I’m a realist and have always been so; facts and figures provide powerful substantiation; track records become trajectories.
But I’m learning that the longer I try to anchor into this grounding, the more it dissolves.
Here’s why:
There is no such thing as reality. There is only our perception of reality.
Arguing With Reality
As I’ve written about before, The Work of Byron Katie teaches that all stress, discomfort, and frustration is caused by arguing with reality. This thought exercise has had a profound effect on me since I now investigate every feeling of frustration to understand what’s driving it and whether it’s helping or hurting me. There is power in conducting thought experiments like this with a great coach who can help you notice these patterns in your own thoughts.
But let’s reduce reality to only a set of facts — a dataset. There is no inherent meaning in a dataset until your perception — your synthesized biases, past experiences, preferences, and current or future desires — is formed and applied to the facts, creating a narrative about how the dataset is meaningful to you. Your brain is so skilled at quickly creating this narrative that you rarely stop to consider whether it’s true or how it’s helpful to you. It just feels right. Because as soon as it’s created, the perception has already fulfilled its purpose of supplying you with meaning and you often will not develop or investigate your perception further.
Therefore, an updated thought exercise is that:
All1 stress, discomfort, and frustration is caused by arguing with your perception of reality.
This idea is supported by research from Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan that resulted in their book The Three Laws of Performance. The first law of performance states: How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
This specific language — how situations occur to them — is what I mean with the statement that there is no such thing as reality; only your perception of reality. As they discuss in their research, the effects of this law are always present whether or not the law is acknowledged. Just like gravity.
Let’s consider a situation that you might experience every day in Omaha: you’re in traffic and someone cuts in front of you. The facts might be that your car is in the turning lane; there is a non-zero distance between you and the car in front of you; a car is beside you; the person in the car visually observes a gap in front of your; the person maneuvers their car into the gap. Dataset complete.
My perception might be: this person selfishly cut in front of me. I won’t make it through the light in time and will spend more time than I wanted to pick up dinner rolls from the bakery. This person is rude and I’m annoyed.
Their potential perception: Oh look! There’s a large-enough gap to squeeze into. The other driver hasn’t closed the gap, therefore they must be intending to allow me in. They are so nice and considerate to let me in this far into the turning lane, and I’m grateful to them for letting me merge so I can make it to the hospital on time for our appointment.
What’s reality?
The dataset here doesn’t matter. What’s important to notice is that my perception created negative energy for me, and their perception created positive energy for them. They will never know my negativity and I will not know their gratefulness. In this situation, I have simply allowed the negative perception to persist and cloud my errand even though I’m still able to accomplish my vision of obtaining fresh rolls for dinner with little to no meaningful impact.
Once I’ve allowed my Negative Perception EngineTM to run, it gets easier and easier to replicate similar energy in response to other situations. And thus, one can find themselves arguing with reality on autopilot.
When you realize the power of what perception does for you, it now feels silly to devote any time, attention, energy, or emotion to a frustrated perception of a grocery errand. Imagine if none of your errands created negative energy; or imagine if all your errands created positive energy. All of that is in your control. You can just choose to not argue with your perception of reality.
Arguing With Vision
But let’s increase the stakes. I’m going to assume that, like me, you have business and personal visions because you’re smart and want to make a difference in the world. (If you’re smart but don’t have a noble vision clearly defined yet, let’s talk about that later.) Those visions don’t exist right now because, well, vision = a powerful desired future state.
But just like how reality doesn’t exist, vision doesn’t exist either. As there is only our perception of reality, there is also only our perception of vision. Our perception of reality creates positive or negative experiences for us. Our perception of vision — our beliefs about its possibility, impossibility, ease, or difficulty — also triggers corresponding actions.
Somehow, I find that incredibly freeing in contrast to my past realist grounding. Because in the same way that arguing with our perception of reality creates frustration, arguing with our perception of vision creates inaction.
For example, you may have an Icelandic vacation on your personal vision bucket list to accomplish in 10 years, or five, or by the end of this year. If you perceive your vacation to be far away, you aren’t driven to start packing yet. But if your vision is to take this vacation by the end of this year, your perception changes and the actions you choose to do today will certainly need to be different.
Professionally, you cascade targets and metrics across your organization designed to contribute toward your 1-, 3-, or 10-year visions. You strategize and execute based on what you think is possible. If your vision is perceived to be accomplishable, you will act accordingly. Conversely, if your vision is perceived as impossible or improbable, you will also act accordingly, most likely by not taking sufficient action.
This has a profound effect on teams as well. Performance measured across teams will directly reflect the perceptions in play and whether or not those perceptions are creating powerful alignment and engagement.
This is where your leadership matters. It’s important for you, both personally and professionally, to notice how your perceptions cause frustration or inaction in your own life. If positive and helpful perceptions of reality contribute toward an engaging experience of life, and if appropriate action depends a positive perception of vision, then it’s important to notice and manage your perceptions in order to create the energy needed to accomplish your vision. If you can’t do this for yourself, you won’t be able to facilitate this for those you lead.
In your leadership, this doesn’t mean that you live in the world of perception management to get results. In fact, you can’t change someone’s perception directly. You can, however, employ future-based, generative language in ways that allow people to upgrade or create their own powerful perceptions, enabling stronger buy-in and alignment toward the vision and driving their necessary actions. When someone possesses a powerful perception, there’s hardly anything they can’t do. We could read thousands of articles together of all the things that were impossible until they weren’t, but we’ll save that for another time.
What Reality Will You Create?
You will make choices about what to do today and how to show up to that work based on your perception of the vision. You will choose to generate leads, make sales, lead projects, research opportunities, or develop people to the level that you think the vision is possible.
You will show up with emotions that influence how you feel, how you behave, and how you interact with people, all based on your perception of reality.
Others will have perceptions of you. You’ll have perceptions of yourself and others. Each one of those perceptions will be either empowering or disempowering, just like the traffic example earlier. How you respond to those perceptions is what I want you to consider this week.
How will you choose to perceive vision and reality this week?
How will you choose to act based on your perceptions?
Regardless of what happens, you either kill or create agency and opportunity through your perceptions. Imagine what would happen if you applied positive perceptions to the supercharged visions that you have?
There is no such thing as reality.
There is no such thing as possible or impossible visions.
There are only perceptions that drive actions.
What reality will you create this week?
As a coach, I get to have powerful conversations about perceptions. If your perceptions need an upgrade, schedule a vision call. It’s free. No pitch. I really believe in the power of vision and perception to create impact in the world.
Schedule here: https://calendly.com/aaronott/complimentary-coaching-call
Aaron Ott is an executive coach who helps leaders promoted for expertise become the leader the role actually requires. He spent 19 years navigating the expert-to-leader transition in the non-profit and for-profit spaces. His coaching practice is built on one belief: you’re capable of so much more than you could ever dream. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his wife, Sarah, who is a non-profit operations leader, author, and writing coach. This article is 100% human created. AI-created content variants may help publicize this piece. All Terrible TrademarksTM are inspired by Zarna Garg.
I want to acknowledge that real suffering does exist, like death, terminal diagnoses, etc. I do not intend to diminish anyone’s true suffering. That said, I also believe Romans 8:28 and have read many stories about all kinds of unexpected silver linings or new possibilities that were only possible through suffering.