Andy (Timothy Robbins) walks into Shawshank prison, an environment most of us would see as a hopeless place to survive, much less have a life of any quality.  He enters the mess hall and the yard, surveys his new neighbors, and joins the most sane group with the most balanced leader (Morgan Freeman).  He works in the library, teaches inmates to read, and every single night he scoops one teaspoon of sand out of the tunnel he’s digging for his escape.         

     Andy chooses to be in charge of himself rather than allow his surroundings determine what goes on inside him and how he conducts himself and he has a goal.        

     What are you perceiving if you’re the one walking into Shawshank?     

     You do not simply SEE the environment.  Your perception is an act of creation.  You will perceive in accord with the “AS IF” world you’ve made up.  You will PERCEIVE in accord to the WORLD YOU ARE RESPONDING TO, not the world as it IS.         

     How to talk someone else into thinking you’re fat:  A newly wed couple is enjoying a meal when the husband looks into his wife’s eyes and tells her how perfect she is.  The wife twirls a string of spaghetti, a shadow crossing her expression.  She says, “I know you think so, but I don’t.  Ever since I was twelve, I’ve always felt like my hips were huge.  I felt like a fat giant in junior high.  I can’t stand to think what’s going to happen as I get older.”  The husband says something sweet, but when the wife gets up to retrieve something across the kitchen, where do his eyes go?  How often and how many more times, in the years to come, will his eyes drift to the source of his wife’s junior high school misery?    

     It depends on how insistent is she that she SHOULD change the size of her derriere, and how insistent she is that IT IS AWFUL, TERRIBLE, AND UNBEARABLE to be a woman with a large (if it even is) posterior.   

     But now we’ve moved from PERCEIVING to INTERPRETING.  Oh, baby now our EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM can really take off!

     

   HOW YOU PERCEIVE OTHERS and the WORLD determines, to a large degree, how much fun your are going to have in this life.  Whether you are FREE or in YOUR OWN PRISON.

     Sometimes when I talk about working toward a Self Defined Life, people mistakenly assume being SELF DEFINED is the same as being Self-ish.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Isn’t it more selfish to run your life on some kind of “auto-pilot” expecting others to change for you?  Could there be a more unselfish gift to a spouse, a friend, or relative than to say, “I’ve complained a lot about how you treat me as though it was your responsibity to see that I am happy, and that I never, ever doubt myself.  That wasn’t fair, and anyway, as dedicated as I’ve been to telling you how to change so that I stay calm–YOU KEEP BEING       YOURSELF.  I’ve realized, ‘Babe,’ since I’m making up the world as I go along, you’ll never be able to catch up with my needs.  Why don’t I work on my PERCEPTIONS instead of trying to change you?  Particularly, because, according to your limited view, you’re not doing the thoughtless things I accuse you of, anyway.”

     “I’m going to try something new.  I’m going to take more responsibility for my feelings.”  Now that’s un-self-centered.

     Operating in a self-defined way means working toward having your actions more determined by your BEST THINKING and less determined by EMOTIONAL PRESSURE from others, or EMOTIONAL PRESSURE from within yourself–that is, your own anxieties and       fears.  Freedom is both having charge of what goes on inside your chest cavity, and having the capacity to manage your anxiety so that your interactions with others and the world are in line with BEST THINKING rather than automatic, anxiety-driven, predictable responses.

     We’re going to look at four steps that go into our response to a situation.  The first step is PERCEPTION.             

     Let’s go back to Andy (Tim Robbins) walking into Shawshank Prison on a life sentence for a double murder he did not commit.  (Picture yourself at your job, class, party, dinner with family, involved in a disagreement with someone important.  For my writer buddies out there, imagine yourself sitting down to pitch an agent, facing a blank page, or adding another page to your rejection collection).  

     What and WHO DO YOU SEE?  Do they want to FIGHT?    What DO THEY WANT from you?   What do they think of you?  How is this meeting going to go?  “Which is more important?  The world you can touch, or the world you’re responding to?”

     This question of perception is particularly important as you approach your “Shawshank.”  You don’t walk into the same prison (party, bus, job, relationship, hospital, class) as any other person, though you are entering at the same moment at the same place.  Your emotions, your fears and anxieties, take a role in creating your situation.  In actually CREATING THE PEOPLE.        

    Thus, YOU have a lot to say about how the encounters in your life turn out.  (Big encounters, like marriage.  Little encounters, like the one with the stranger next to you on the plane. 

   But, oh, I’m getting ahead.  And, what kind of “woo-woo” idiot psychologist am I, to suggest that other people aren’t EXACTLY as I perceive them?  I’m supposed to even be right about what others are THINKING.  Since I can see inside people’s heads, I know WHY they do and say the things I PERCEIVE.  I know I see reality because it FEELS like what I see is reality.

     Tomorrow we return to poor Andy walking into Shawshank Prison.  What will the places you’re in until then be like?