Do You See What You Believe, or Believe What You See?

I often think that a great many people are guilty of seeing what they believe rather than believing what they see. In other words, if somebody goes to a football game and there is a player on their team that they don’t care for, they are far more likely to notice his flaws and mistakes rather than anything beneficial he may contribute. The reverse is true; if a favorite were having a bad game the watcher would be more infinitely more inclined to spot the one or two good things than anything detrimental. I smugly prefer to believe that I am not like that because I am a trained Life Coach, I understand about human behavior to a greater or lesser to degree, I possess critical thinking abilities and I know about perceptual positions (an NLP Term that allows people to look at a situation from 3 different angles) and all that other good stuff. 

Recently I have changed my company logo, I liked my original one but was having difficulty scaling it for other purposes and also I hadn’t got the original EPS file from the UK that the printers needed to re-print. So I bit the bullet and got it re-designed. I am delighted by the results and hope that this will serve me for a number of years. Over the last 2 weeks I have been changing the logos on all my forms and of course the website and also ordered new business cards. I went for an unusual design in so much as the front was portrait and the reverse was landscape. Also, the reverse was purple (I think it’s purple but I am colorblind so who knows maybe it’s lilac or mauve or some other variation on a theme) and the front white, which was done to make them stand out more. I went to collect the cards last week and was absolutely delighted with them, so much so that I managed to give out a dozen or so within the first hour. 

My sister and brother-in-law have been over from the UK for the last 2 weeks and we were all admiring my cards over dinner when suddenly my wife asks what my phone number is. I tell her and she replies that, that isn’t the number on the cards. I immediately grab the card off her and stare in disbelief. She was right. The last 2 digits were reversed and I hadn’t noticed. Not only had I not noticed when I collected the cards, I hadn’t noticed on the original proof or the final proof or even when I was giving them out.  I was crushed. I knew what my phone number was and I was expecting to see it there on those cards. Therefore, I did see it. In my mind the number was correct, I was seeing what I believed not believing what I saw.   

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