A construct that often has me perplexed when on-boarding new clients into the coaching sphere is personal perception. My years of work as a performance enhancement specialist, a sport and performance psychology consultant, and an elite competitive athlete trainer prepared me of course both academically and life experientially for discerning and negotiating perception discrepancies. Those variations in human differentiation's born of multiple influencers and connectivity through constructive practices and individual exposure. Proximity is a psychological element of Gestalt methodology or belief (perspective which is not to be confused with perception). Proximity of course had long been an influencer of environments and individual behaviors prior to acknowledgment or postulations of the pioneers for Gestalt or whole integrated systems thinking ideology. Why will one person see or view any phenomena in such drastically different ways than another person? Their perception, is it a result of their proximity to paradigms espoused, personal result of triumphant or failed attempts, modeled behavior, rote memory, exposure to academic resources, or their support systems competence if one assesses that level with utmost candor?
Sensory perceptions are biologically and neurologically processed in two ways; bottom-up or top-down. The former being where an individual simply accepts the input and usually with emotional response, or feeling, interprets the stimulus and creates the association or schema lens. Example, you see a person spit and you think that act is gross, so the person must be gross. Subsequently, you immediately turn away from them and form a negative opinion of who they are without any further thought (bottom-up perception practices).
Deeper evaluation or top-down processing may have helped you to see the person was choking and needed to spit out the article that was causing the choking to take place. The person that you emotionally associated with a despicable act, was the Doctor that just saved a person’s leg in surgery and does not even fart in public, generally! You see, human associations through perceptions are what generate future influences on bottom-up shallow understandings or create stronger cognitive development by top-down processing trained mental skills enhancement. The irony for a coach is seeing the bottom-up client that feels they are a top-down master. They think they know all they need to know and seek you out simply to reinforce what they think that they already know!
Proximity to greatness is a foundational practice for Madzook Wellness Coaching. The position that finding a proximity to greatness increases one’s top-down processing capacity. Imagine if you were to talk with Tesla about energy or spent time with Beethoven while he composed a symphony. What if you served under George Washington or Benedict Arnold? How does the proximity in your life generate opportunity for your growth and personal development?
If you read and learn about the masters of various fields and industry of historical relativity, then you will certainly gain a better proximity to their perspectives and possibly understand how their perceptions influenced their choices. What laws or ethical concerns influenced Washington, did Malcom X master resiliency? What was Van Gough thinking that made him cut off his own ear? Social psychology suggests that proximity principle allows interaction with groups and individuals that form their beliefs (their perceptions by another name) – proximity influences perception. Therefore, proximity influences behaviors based on those associations formed by personal perception.
Seeking a proximity to greatness develops a top-down process and contributes to the associations between feelings and thoughts that determine self-direction in contrast to conformity, generalization, victimization, and sufficiency masked as tolerance for differences within people. In fact, the proximity of mutual acceptance also creates the associations that like-minded people cling too for reinforcement. Unless of course, they learn individually how determining to seek important proximity to greatness of environments, knowledge, and experience, creates stronger depth and breadth influences for forming those mutually associated perceptions trough individually evaluated merit, complexity, and personal relevance of importance. Proximity to greatness is when a person seeks to be near or around, or influenced by, great minds, great concepts, great truths, great food, great love, great thinkers, great artisans, master craftsmen, and the individual is determined to control their own powerful development and skill enhancement. Madzook opines that seeking greatness and finding a proximity to powerful skilled leaders, empowering environments, and expanded knowledge is how to improve anyone’s limits of perception. The limits that those seeking greatness by proximity are capable of seeing as expanded pathways while those that hold a perception that they are just fine where they are, do not. Choose wisely, greatness is out there, will you look for it and evaluate how it became, or will you admire it from afar?
MadzookJoe, 2018