Page 23 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

The Conscious Mind in Perception
Lecture 5

To understand why we talk the way we do and in order to talk more
effectively, we need to analyze three interrelated processes at work in
the conscious mind: how we see things, how we think about things,

and how we feel about things. The ¿rst of these refers to the process of
perception: selecting, organizing, and interpreting incoming data. This
lecture explores how these processes work to organize our images of
the world around us, ourselves and our behavior, and other people and
how they behave.

hen something gets our conscious attention, the conscious mind
uses a three-step process. It selects what to see, it organizes that
Wdata into patterns, and it interprets the pattern (gives it meaning
by a quick compare-contrast with the patterns we have already learned). In
most of the moments in our daily lives, we tend to be low-effort decision
makers, using schemas for perceptual processing. When we are perceiving
the world around us, consistency is key. We consciously work to achieve
consistency between our perceptions of self, our own behavior, and feedback
from the world around us.

Remember that the selective attention process chooses what to look at
based on intensity and novelty and then organizes what it has selected into
patterns. If the world doesn’t respond to us or our behavior in ways that we
¿nd consistent with our perceptions of ourselves, and if we can’t change the

incoming data, we tend to ignore or distort it—this is an automatic response.
So, for example, if you believe you are a capable, kindly, and attentive
spouse, and your mate criticizes you for being incompetent, cruel, and
dismissive, you might either attribute the message to your mate having had a
bad day at work or to his or her playing a strange joke on you.

This process is supported by the unconscious operations of the mind as well;
it’s hard to change a mind. But there is a way to change your perceptions of
yourself and your behavior. We can change our perceptions if we choose to

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