We all have blind spots. Literally. There’s one in each eye, where the optic nerve connects to the retina.

We don’t perceive this hole in our vision because the brain automatically fills in the gaps. It predicts what should be there based on context, memory, and what you expect.

The brain receives approximately 11 million bits of sensory information each second, but the conscious mind can only process 50. 

That means we’re perceiving less than five ten-thousandths of one percent (0.0005%) of the sensory information around us.

The seamless picture of reality you think you’re seeing is actually constructed by your brain.

The Filters

What you notice isn’t just a function of what’s present. It’s also a function of what you’re prepared, conditioned, or compelled to notice.

You filter each moment, evaluating the world based on your beliefs, past experience, survival instinct, and your self-concept.

Your beliefs have the biggest impact on what you perceive. Not just intellectual opinions, but your hidden assumptions about yourself, others, and the world around you.

What you believe doesn’t just affect how you interpret the world, it actually filters the world you experience.

If you believe people can’t be trusted, you’ll notice certain cues and miss others. If you believe you’re not good enough, you’ll register disapproval faster than acceptance.

Your past experience is used to recognize patterns and predict outcomes, and it favors the familiar. If you’ve been disappointed in someone before, you expect it to happen again.

Our survival instinct constantly scans the environment for threats. Your attention prioritizes what may be risky, dangerous or painful.

Identity matters too: Does this confirm who I think I am? Does this threaten my self-concept? Does this support the role I’m attached to?

Together, these filters shape what we notice, what we miss, and how strongly we react. We’re not perceiving reality. We’re curating it.

It’s how two people can stand in the same room, hear the same sentence, and quite literally inhabit different realities.

Because each person is selecting, amplifying, and internalizing different aspects of experience.

This has specific consequences for founders. Every conflict with your team, every missed opportunity, every pattern that keeps repeating has more to do with perception than reality. 

For example, in my analytics business when a project was late, over budget, or required re-work, I didn’t see it as a neutral event.

Remembering similar problems in the past, experiencing the situation as a threat to my survival, believing it reduced my worthiness and challenged my identity, I became hypervigilant, tense and anxious.

In search of the “root cause” I’d ask, “Why did this happen?” which I thought was logical and responsible.

My team’s own memories and beliefs about their value and role would be triggered and instead of my actual words, what they heard was, “What’s wrong with you?” which they perceived as judgmental and dangerous.

The reasons they gave about not enough time, too many conflicting priorities, or confusing requirements sounded like excuses to my already stressed brain. My frustration would increase.

What became evident to me years later is that my perception of the situation was not reality. It was an interpretation.

I literally could not see my team’s reality. And the same was true for them.

What Else Is True?

It turns out that the way I had structured the company was responsible in large part for the number of issues we experienced. 

We did complex, custom work, which required expert technical and project management skills. I had those skills but didn’t have a consistent way to transfer my knowledge to other people. 

So we had very few standard processes and no reliable onboarding system, which of course led to projects that were late, over budget, or required re-work. Unless I stayed directly involved.

The point is that I thought the problem with my business was my people. Or my clients. Or my solutions. Or myself.

But it really turned out to be a matter of perception. I was attached to the identity of being a tech CEO who did complicated work. The idea of simplifying my business sounded like a cop-out.

It never occurred to me that the way I was interpreting my role and structuring my business was creating the problems I experienced. 

We don’t perceive reality as it is. We perceive it as we are.

So how do we ever see anything as it is?

What helps me is the practice of being present enough to recognize the difference between what’s happening and what I’m making it mean. The way I feel is the best barometer.

Whenever I’m feeling bad, I know I’m perceiving a threat.

Sometimes I forget. And then I just come back to the present. I ask myself questions. Especially:

Is that a fact? 

What else could be true?

What am I missing?

Why am I choosing to think that?

Is there another way to see it?

How do I feel when I see it this way?

These questions create space between the circumstance and the meaning I make of it.

Dimensional Perception 

Reality is not one flat thing. There are dimensions of perception:

There’s the outer event and the inner meaning we make of it.

There’s the identity through which we interpret it and there’s the deeper awareness that observes it all.

Most of my life I never questioned the pictures my mind constructed. But now I have a different perspective. 

What if the version of reality you’ve been living in is more like a projection than a window?