I think what I may have been mistaken about is this idea that folks do alter their reality through thinking and that when a few people get together to think thoughts it can impact reality. What I mean by this is that if you have a perception that a person you work with is lazy. You will not recognize difficult work or hard effort on their part; you will minimize any performance so that you can maintain your thoughts about the person being lazy.
So let us say that you dislike someone intensely and you attribute to them faulty behavior. You will give the most benign activity a nefarious description. “Look at how she turns her head that way, she is a stuck up bitch!” But then let us say that you never quite have a conversation with this person, so the person does not know about your thoughts and feelings, nor does this person know that you are often conversing in a negative way with others about this person.
So then, others talk to this person from your conversation and now this person is confused. “Well everyone thinks you’re stuck up.” Whenever we speak with someone, we are speaking to them from our own thoughts, beliefs and feelings, indeed, we speak FROM the conversations that are inside and outside our head. So, if this person that you do not like, or perhaps feel negatively about, has no idea of your internal conversation, you may be surprising them. In fact, you could be unwittingly ambushing them. This is a sorry state of affairs and is much more difficult to deal with then honest and forthright communication. The person you dislike, does not know that their behavior is affecting you and therefore has a disadvantage, not only in communication, but in action. How can you respond and defend yourself, if you do not know that the ‘crime’ is? How can you respond to well meaning friends who ‘ambush’ you with their own rendition of reality – people who have no intention of having a conversation – people who simply want to tell you – how to be?
I think it is a shame that people will go to great lengths to NOT say what they are thinking and feeling, but the thinking and feeling is pervasively experienced by all. Bystanders will buy into one of these versions of reality and that is when “perception is reality”. And then, You really are a bitch…