Perception...

This morning as I came to office with a colleague of mine as I left my vehicle in office last evening. As we approached our parking lot I just saw my vehicle was parked haphazardly and it was blocking the way to small parking area. At that time when I parked there were so many vehicles, so I just had to park like that. This morning for anyone looking at it, it looked like the person who parked was an idiot and lacked any sense at all.

I noticed it, got down from my friends vehicle and moved my vehicle a little so it was no more a disturbance to others. There was another person who was trying to park and he saw me doing this and said "Thank you", as he thought that it was someone else's vehicle and I am trying to help him. I accepted the thanks and just thought about the whole incident.

Now in the mind of the person who was trying to park the vehicle, I would like a good socially aware person, but at the sametime my colleague would have felt how badly I had parked my vehicle, as he knows it was my vehicle. The same way, many times we build perception about another person with one incident and we carry the same impression about that person, in this incident it was fine that this person had a positive opinion about me, but there may be many situations in our life where we could have misjudged some people based on an incident and built our perception about the individual based on that incident and would have taken lot of decisions based on that, which would have been wrong.

Typically in our industry, which involves a lot of team work and relationship being the most important factor for the success of the team, these kind of perception building will lead to lot of trouble and ultimately lead to the failure of our project. So lets give a thought before we create any perception about any individual around us, Many times what we see and what we hear may mislead us.