Passion Struck with John R. Miles - 5 Steps to Change Your Perception and Better Your Reality w/John R. Miles EP 193

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

If you desire a winning mentality that takes your mindset to where it needs to be, you need to change your perception of your reality. So much of our lives are predicated on the lens through which we view life. Our perception impacts how we view, comprehend, analyze, reflect, and interact with the world around us. So many people see everything in life in a negative light. I'm really hoping that this podcast is the podcast that inspires you to implement the five steps I laid out in the episode and put them to use to change your perspective, create a winner's mindset, and better your reality. ► Get the full show notes for all resources from today's episode: https://passionstruck.com/does-the-concept-of-free-will-really-exist/  -► Want the transcript: https://johnrmiles.com/5-steps-to-change-your-perception/  --► Prefer to watch this episode: https://youtu.be/_sLYC8B68k4  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles --► Subscribe to the Passion Struck Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/passion-struck-with-john-r-miles/id1553279283  Thank you, Dry Farm Wines and Policygenius, For Your Support Dry Farm Wines have No Chemical Additives for Aroma, Color, Flavor, or Texture Enhancement. Dry Farm Wines - The Only Natural Wine Club That Goes Above and Beyond Industry Standards. For Passion Struck listeners: Dry Farm Wines offers an extra bottle in your first box for a penny (because it’s alcohol, it can’t be free). See all the details and collect your wine at https://www.dryfarmwines.com/passionstruck/. Policygenius provides free quotes tailored to your needs with support from licensed agents, helping you get insurance coverage fast so you can get on with life. Save 50% or more on life insurance at https://www.policygenius.com/. Passion Struck Podcast Starter Packs New to the show? These Starter Packs are collections of our most popular episodes grouped by topic, and we now have them also on Spotify. To find your old favorites, you can also browse starter packs for existing listeners. Every week, John interviews everyday heroes from all walks of life. Learn how to subscribe to the show and never miss a new episode and topic. Show Links Purchase Dr. Marisa Franco's Book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make--and Keep Friends: https://amzn.to/3f5NoHP (Amazon Link) Purchase Dr. Jay Van Bavel's book The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony: https://amzn.to/3R1Vfn3 (Amazon Link) My interview with Rachel Hollis: https://passionstruck.com/rachel-hollis-becoming-your-best-self/  My interview with Scott Barry Kaufman and Jordyn Feingold: https://passionstruck.com/jordyn-feingold-scott-barry-kaufman-chose-growth/ My solo episode about how your environment influences who you become: https://passionstruck.com/how-your-environment-influences-who-you-become/ My solo episode on why your brain dictates your reality: https://passionstruck.com/why-your-brain-dictates-your-reality/ My interview with Ayelet Fishbach, a professor at the Booth School of Business University of Chicago, on how to get it done, the science of motivation: https://passionstruck.com/ayelet-fishbach-get-it-done-find-the-fun-path/ My interview with Katy Milkman, Ph.D. on how to create lasting behavior change: https://passionstruck.com/katy-milkman-behavior-change-for-good/ My solo episode on why micro choices matter: https://passionstruck.com/why-your-micro-choices-determine-your-life/ Follow John on the Socials: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m * Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles ​* Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesjohn/ * Blog: https://johnrmiles.com * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast/ * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_struck/ -- John R. Miles is the CEO, and Founder of PASSION STRUCK®, the first of its kind company, focused on impacting real change by teaching people how to live Intentionally. He is on a mission to help people live a no-regrets life that exalts their victories and lets them know they matter in the world. For over two decades, he built his own career applying his research of passion-struck leadership, first becoming a Fortune 50 CIO and then a multi-industry CEO. John is also a prolific public speaker, venture capitalist, and author. Passion Struck is a full-service media company that helps people live intentionally by creating best-in-class educational and entertainment content.     

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast, how you perceive others in the situations you encounter has everything to do with your upbringing, past experiences, your learn values and morals, and the way in which you see them demonstrated in your life. That's why your perception, my perception, and their perception can all be distinct in the exact situation, and yet all be right.

Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.

If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become Passion Struck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Momentum Friday, an episode 193 of Passion Struck. Thank you to all of you who come back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world.

If you're new to the show and you haven't yet checked out our YouTube channel, it is at John Armyles and we have now over 400 different videos, long form content like today's episode, as well as videos that are two to five minutes in length that we call mindset moments and our exclusive content only on YouTube. In case you missed our episodes from earlier in the week, they featured number one, New York Times best selling author, podcaster and motivational speaker, Rachel

Hollis. And we explore how do you overcome hardship to lead your best life. And I also had on Douglas Rushkopf, who's a professor at the City University of New York, an author of the new book, Survival of the Richest, an episode that you absolutely want to catch. And in case you missed my solo episode from last week, I explored an age old question. Does free will exist or not? Please check them all out.

I also wanted to acknowledge our fan of the week, Dr. Jordan Feingold, who was a guest on the podcast a week ago, and she writes in her review, practical, informative. I love listening to this podcast, including John Solo episodes and his longer form guest interviews. He is so prepared and asks such insightful questions that get right to the heart of the interviewer's work. He is informed and pulls from knowledge and outside sources, such as science and ancient

wisdom, and provides fresh, hopeful perspectives on modern living. Jordan, thank you so much for that incredible review, and thank you to all of you who gives us a rating or review. They go such a long way in helping promote the popularity of this podcast and its ratings on both Spotify and Apple. Now, let's talk about today's episode. There is a simple and insightful psychological test where a glass is partially filled with water and people are asked to describe the state of the glass. Some will describe it as half full, while others describe it as half empty. This experiment aims to show how we can all see the exact same thing and interpret it differently, a phenomenon known as perception. Perception serves as the lens, through which we view life experiences. It influences how we see process, understand, remember, and act on reality.

Scientifically, it's how we experience the world around us, through our senses of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell. Still, this episode focuses on the mental aspect of perception, which is all about how do we interpret those experiences to create meaning for ourselves? Our perceptions are the ideas and thoughts that we maintain about a given situation or a person. And this constitutes a prediction of the reality we all will eventually have. However we view our experiences can either motivate us to act in ways that will positively

define our realities with intentionality or demoralize us and make us succumb to the default unpleasant realities. In this episode, I will be enlightening you on the power of perception and how it influences and shapes your personal reality. I will further show you five steps that you can take to improve your perception and in turn, your reality for the better. I will begin with a short story about two brothers who had the same exact experience, but completely different perceptions, which ended up leading to two completely different realities. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

Now, let that journey begin. In the small town of Anna Sicily, two twin brothers lived with their parents. The two brothers grew up in abject poverty and had no outside help to better their situation. Their father and their mother were both chronic alcoholics, and they constantly fought and often transferred their aggression onto the boys, beating them and leaving them hungry at times. On a faithful day, both boys now now 15 years old, went into a distant bush to gather fruits to eat, but by the time that they returned home, they found a house

that they lived in on fire. Unfortunately, their parents were inside when the fire broke out and they perished. Seeing that they no longer had a house to live in, or parents to stay with, they decided to go their separate ways and fend for themselves, as they were leaving the town, they encountered an elderly man, and seeing how troubled they were, the old man asked them what the issue was with them. They went on to narrate their predicament, and after listening, the elderly man said that he had no material things that he could give them, but that he could give them words of advice that could help them achieve anything in life.

He advised them that you can draw strength and lessons from your traumatic past to create a better future. It's all in how you see it and what you do with it. The man then advised them to always remember what he said and wish them well on their journey ahead. Several years then passed and each of the brothers lived completely separate lives without knowing where the other one lived.

Then one day the man who had given him that advice so many years ago took it upon himself to locate the two boys. After weeks of searching, he found the first brother, who was now a wealthy doctor married with two lovely kids. He asked the young man, how did your life turn out the way it is? The first brother replied, I simply took your advice and saw my past as a reason to strive for a better future. Build man then proceeded to locate the other twin.

After a few more days of searching, he found him in a ramshackle cabin, drunk homeless and dejected. He asked the same question to him, how did your life turn out like this? And his response was, what did you expect with a past like mine? There's no way anything positive could come from that mess. Whereas the first brother saw his childhood trauma, his motivation to work hard and avoid the same pattern from happening to him and his children. The second one saw it as an excuse for failures in his life.

This goes to show us just how powerful perception is, as well as our interpretation of the situation we find ourselves in. After listening to everything that I've said thus far, you might then wonder if perception shapes reality, what then shapes perception. We'll be right back to the Passion Struck Podcast. I'm often asked why get life insurance? We pay hundreds of dollars per year to protect our homes, our cars, and even our phones. But too many of us aren't taking steps to protect our families' finances.

Things like mortgage payments, private student loans, and other types of debts that don't just disappear if something happens to you. A life insurance policy can provide your loved ones with financial cushion they can use to cover those costs and it can provide you with peace of mind that even in a worst-case scenario they'll be protected. And policy genius is an insurance marketplace that makes it easy to compare quotes from top companies like AIG and Prudential in one place to find your lowest price on life insurance. You could say 50% or more on life insurance by comparing quotes with policy genius. Options start at just $17 per month for $500,000 of coverage.

Just click the link in the description or head to policygenius.com to get personalized quotes in minutes and find the right policy for your needs. Head to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much money that you could save. Now, back to the Passion Cirque podcast. As I said at the beginning of this episode, perception is your sensory awareness of the world through sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

Perception is the lens through which you view reality. It is through that lens that you acquire information about the environment around you and how you view your experiences and situations in life. It is shaped by your beliefs, interest, knowledge and personality. It is your natural tendency to assume that your perception of reality is an accurate depiction of what your true reality is. Your perceptions impact how you process, analyze, reflect, synthesize, comprehend, and ultimately act on the world around you.

Therefore, how you perceive others and the situations that you encounter has everything to do with your upbringing, your past experiences, your learned values and morals, and the way in which you saw them demonstrated in your life. Your past experiences and situations cause you to form perceptions of others and their actions. That's exactly why your perception, my perception, and their perception can all be distinct in an identical situation and all be right. So now that I've talked about what influences perception, let's discuss how perception is impacted by self identity. Of the factors that influence

perception, one particular one stands out, it is that of identity. In his co-authored book with Dominic J. Packer, The Power of Us, associate professor of neuroscience and psychology at NYU, J. Van Bavall writes about the power of identity and how it shapes our perception. He explains, when you adopt an identity, it is as if you put on a pair of glasses that filter your view of the world. Identity helps you grapple with the vast amount of information continually bombarding your senses.

It tells you what is important, where to look, when to listen, and perhaps even what to taste. This quote does a great job in explaining how what we see is dependent on who we are. We all have different moments in our life or different seasons that are defining for us. How we perceive the experience, the transition points that lead up to those crucial moments, and the decisions that we make in them go on to directly influence the next phase of our lives.

In a recent interview that I did at the beginning of this week with author, podcaster, and motivational speaker Rachel Hollis, we spoke about a recent defining season in her life. And I asked her what her takeaways were from it. She replied by telling me, however the past two and a half years, she had experienced a lot of loss and grief, which she would never want to go through again, but she did not stop there. She went on to talk about how her difficult experiences have made her a wholly different and better person. She acknowledges that every great

thing in her life came on the other side of hardship. Rachel could only speak like this because she chose to perceive her situations and experiences as growth instead of failure. She saw every difficult season and hard lesson as an opportunity to learn and recognize that the trying seasons in life cannot be traded and that they actually made her a better mother, a better author, a better podcaster, and a better partner. Your perceptions of people that you encounter and the things that shape your life are influenced by your prior experiences and how you process those experiences. This can lead to one person receiving the same exact situation differently than someone else.

If you want to improve your perception skills, there are steps that you can take that I have tried in my own life. Here are five actions that worked for me that you can employ that may help you perceive the world around you in a different way or at least focus on the things that are important. They include, first, discover your true identity.

Aristotle said that knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Knowing who you truly are is not about trying to fix your identity to a particular stereotype. Instead, it's about having a clear understanding of how your identity is constantly shaped by the world you are inextricably part of. It also demonstrates how you play a role in shaping the identity of those around you. Earlier today, I interviewed Dr. Marissa G. Franco about her new New York Times best-selling book,

Platonic, How the Science of Attachment can help you make and keep friends. She explains throughout the book why connection affects who we are and who we are affects how we connect. In essence, understanding your true self is knowing the role that other people play in your life and the role that you play in their lives. This advice will help you to better understand your role in the world and enable you and help you to perceive all life situations from that knowledge so that all that happens can be used for growth, eventual advantage, and fulfilling your purpose. One of the most remarkable authors of the 20th century, Anaiis Ninh said, we don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. This quote is about the need to be intentional, about finding your own meaning in life's experiences. Only by doing this, will you be able to know yourself

and how you impact the world around you? Second, focus on seeing the lessons. Every life experience provides opportunities to learn something new, which can then be applied to create a better future. You need to realize that life is about peaks and valleys. Everyone will face their own trials and tribulations during different seasons of their

lives. So if all you're paying attention to is a rosy, convenient life, you might not be able to dry out the important lessons that are necessary for your growth and transformation. Like the case of the twin brothers I mentioned earlier in the story, one learned that all the things that he had been through could serve as motivation to live better. However, the other who experienced the same trauma used it as an excuse to live carelessly because he chose not to take lessons from the hardship and grow from them, so ensure that you look intentionally for the good in the bad so that you will never lose out on both ends. Life will always offer its lemons. It's up to you to perceive that offer rightly and make lemonade with them. Third, maximize the power of choice. In a previous episode

I talked about the power of choice. I mentioned that it's unlocking the power of choice in life's most crucial moments that truly can make the difference between success and failure, passion or indifference and optimism or pessimism. How you perceive life's experiences is a choice that no one can make for you. You have to decide what you will see in the actions that you will take based on what you have interpreted by yourself. Know that you can always choose what you will allow your experiences to do to you. I ask, are you going to allow them to make or marue you? Fourth, have self-compassion and love for other people.

In a previous episode, I talked about the importance of having empathy in your life. Empathy allows you to cut yourself some slack and ultimately gain strength to heal from difficult situations and be your best self. I admit that some of life's difficulties can be very difficult and choosing to perceive the good can be extremely hard. It's okay to feel sad and weak sometimes we all do. It's just essential that we don't allow ourselves to remain in those stages, but instead get stronger from them. One other thing that using empathy will help you do is seeing people in a non-judgmental way.

As I stated earlier, discovering your true identity is not only about how others affect you, but also how you affect them. Having empathy towards others will help you to understand them better and have a positive influence on them. This in turn will allow you to see the world around you in a better light of love and compassion. Fifth, seek counsel. If you pause now and reflect on your life, you will remember points when you misperceived a situation and

someone who had more insight helped you see it in an alternative way. Though your perceptions may form unconsciously, they still shape your reality. Therefore what you encounter in your day to day life can help mirror those unconscious beliefs and use them for your examination. We must look at the outside world to discover our internal perceptions. The simple truth is that no one knows it all, and that there is only so much that you can see by yourself, by seeking advice and wise counsel from other well-meaning people, you will be able to gain insight that you cannot acquire from yourself alone.

Isaac Newton, one of the most influential scientists of all time, said, If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. Anyone who has achieved anything worthwhile will admit that they got a better understanding and insight from other people at different points along their journey. So I've discussed a lot today and given you a ton of information, so let me synthesize it for you.

Former US Senator Daniel Patrick Monahan said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. But this statement was followed up by American TV host Stephen Colbert who said it used to be everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. The point Colbert was trying to make was that it doesn't matter what really happened. Your perception of situations is what actually constitutes your reality. Life is simply what it is. Things happen beyond your control, but how you respond to life's experiences and what you choose to do with them depends entirely on the personal interpretations that you give to these experiences. Realize that you get to shape your reality and will continue to see life through whatever perceptions that you have created

unless you decide to change it, which we all can. It will not come without learning and hardship, but once you own this reality, you cannot passively sit anymore. Only believing that life happened to you and expect things to be different. Instead, you alter your perceptions to create positive change in your day-to-day life. When you change your core perceptions, the physical world that you see will reflect what you want to see in your life, created through intention, rather than what are unconscious perceptions created in reality by default. I hope you enjoyed today's show,

and I wanted to thank everyone who wrote in this week, and especially those who listened to this episode. A link to the transcript will be in the show notes which you can find on passionstruck.com. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, where you'd like to introduce this to a friend or family member, we now have episode starter packs, both on the PassionStruck website and on Spotify. These are collections of our favorite episodes that we organize and to convene your topics.

To give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show, just go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. I'm at John Armiles, both on Instagram and Twitter, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. Advertiser deals and discount codes are all in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show and make it free for you, our listeners. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast interview I did with Harvard Professor Max Bezerman and UC Berkeley Professor Don Moore, two of the foremost experts in the world on behavioral economics, and we discuss their new book, Decision Leadership. We talk about organizations as decision factories, and as more of the effortful labor gets delegated

to automated systems, the decisions of the humans in the loop becomes more and more important. In an organization that's a decision factory where it's outcomes, it successes, the welfare of the people inside and the people affected by the organization's operations, all of those depend on the effectiveness of the decisions of the people inside. Remember, we rise by lifting others, so share this show with those that you love. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with somebody else who can use this advice that I gave here today.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life, passion struck. rock.