We love opinions.
We live in a society where everyone has a platform on which to share their opinions; social media is rampant with them. We ask for the opinions of our friends when considering options for ourselves on everything from a coffee maker to our primary care physician. If a trusted friend tells me that they had a horrible experience with a certain model of Keurig machine, you can bet I'm not going to waste my money on it!
Those opinions are built entirely on experiences and shaped by perceptions. Consider the following example:
Experience: At a new restaurant in town, my waiter forgets to refill my drink, gets my order wrong, and takes too long to get back to my table with our check.
Perception: This is a bad waiter.
Opinion: That restaurant has terrible service.
I worked in the restaurant business for several years, and something that my bosses told me over and over again was this: "perception is reality." Basically, however the customer perceived you was their reality, and there was little you could do to explain or argue your way out of it. You simply had to prove them wrong with your service.
I have adopted this phrase in my life as well. Especially when it comes to conflict resolution, I think it's important to remember that perception is reality. Whenever someone comes to you with hurt feelings over something, you have to know that the way they are saying that they perceived your actions or words is reality to them.
But something that is equally important that perhaps I have not done a great job of explaining in the past is that perception is simultaneously not reality. The operative part of the phrase "perception is reality" is "to the one perceiving." Just because my perceptions are my reality, it doesn't make them correct. And I think that knowing this as the perceiver is just as important as my offender knowing that my perception is my reality.
In Language Arts classes, we learn in Elementary School how to distinguish facts from opinions. Exercises include looking at statements like these--
"Coca-Cola is the most popular brand of soda in the United States"
"Coca-Cola is the best soda"
--and asking students, "which of these is a fact, and which is an opinion?" I explain to my students all the time the necessity of examining our own opinions for validity, and making sure to constantly support our opinions with indisputable evidence. If we do not support our opinions with evidence, they are considered weak and faulty.
But what if we are building our opinions on faulty perceptions?
What if I told you that the waiter in my first example was covering more than just his section of the restaurant because another waiter didn't show up for his shift, and the manager, instead of helping this waiter, was sitting back in his office checking his Facebook? Would that change your perception of the waiter? And your opinion of the restaurant?
But we would never know that. How can we know if our perceptions are faulty?
Great question! Thanks for asking.
Whenever we have perceived an offense of any kind, what should we do first? Matthew 18:15 tells us to "go and tell [our] brother his fault," meaning we need to approach the person who has offended us, and let them know.
VERY IMPORTANT: This absolutely does not give us license to chew this person out, call them names, make them feel bad, etc. The purpose of "telling your brother his fault" is to fact-find. And that is extremely important to remember. The purpose is not to vent and tell off someone else. If that's your reason for wanting to express your hurt feelings, you need to examine yourself and question whether your motives are godly or selfish.
Remember that this is conflict resolution, not conflict heightening.
"Telling your brother his fault" is a fact-finding mission because we know that while perception is reality, it is simultaneously not reality. The objective of this conversation with your offender is to find the truth of the matter, not to accuse.
In my Bible class last year, I had to mediate a conversation between some of the girls because so many of them had been offended by so many others of them. I told them, before anyone started talking, to speak cautiously. They were not allowed to make statements that made unfounded assumptions about anyone else. They were only allowed to say how they felt.
I said this coming from a place of experience. Not too long before this incident, a friend who was dear to me had approached me with an offense of her own. However, when she was telling me how some of my actions had made her feel, she simultaneously made assumptions about me. She assumed that I did not care about her or value her enough, and therefore formed the opinion that I was a bad friend. This was ultimately extremely hurtful to me. The reason it was so hurtful was because her perceptions of the experiences she was referencing were so wrong and so skewed, but because of the way she told me my fault, through "I feel [_____________] because you don't care" statements, I was never given the opportunity to correct those misperceptions. When she approached me, it was not a fact-finding mission. She had already formed her opinion, and there was little to nothing I could do to fix it or mend the relationship. This completely broke my heart: knowing that this person had been hurt so badly by my actions, knowing that there was so much I could have said to mend those hurt feelings and correct wrong perceptions, but knowing that at this point there was not a whole lot I could say to do so, since the opinion was already formed.
So, while her perceptions were her reality, they were simultaneously not reality. This is why conflict resolution is a fact-finding mission. Whenever I approach someone with an offense, especially since that experience, I usually state my feelings, and then make some sort of clarifying statement. I will ask why someone did something that I perceived as hurtful, or ask them to help me understand the situation better. Because I believe that that person is better than the way I am perceiving them. And I want to be sure to give them ample opportunity to shed some light on the experience I am perceiving so negatively before I form the opinion that this person is not a friend, or out to get me, etc.
The offender also has responsibilities of their own. While it is always great to have the chance to correct a misperception, we have to also figure out how that misperception came to be in the first place. Sometimes it is because the offended was having a bad day, or otherwise incapable of viewing things correctly. But sometimes the offender really was careless in their actions or words. Either way, the way we come to resolving conflict is to decide which of these is the case, and how it can be avoided in the future.
Basically, the offender needs to know that perception is reality, but the offended need to know that perception is simultaneously not reality.
So, don't always give so much credence to your perceptions. Understand the difference between opinions and facts. Go on fact-finding missions. Seek the truth. Believe the best in others. Don't give perceptions--those sly little devils--so much power.
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