Chapter 3's title is Perception: What You See is What You Get. The basic ideas of this chapter are simple, yet complex at the same time. The concept that came to my mind was how we should not judge other people regarding a situation that they are going through.
When we think about someone's situation we typically compare their experience with our own experiences and decide how we would go about making a decision. The problem with that is that we all have had entirely unique situations and experiences. It is for that reason that we will rarely come to the same conclusion about how something should be handled, so how can we judge someone based entirely on irrelevant experiences (our own)? If that all is too complicated to understand, let me include an example that helps describe the basic principle of perception.
The great story is told of 6 men who all stood around a large animal. These men were asked to describe the animal in a few words. The problem here is that these men were actually blind. As it would turn out, each man found himself standing at a different part of the animal's massive body. One reached out and felt his large tusks with his hands, one grabbed his tail and still another took hold of his large feet. As you can guess, each man described the animal in a different light. The reason? Perception based on experiences. Each man had experienced different things in his life, and compared what he felt on the animal, with something that he had already seen or heard about. This is why we need to be careful about how we judge others' reactions to ideas and feelings.
Chapter 4's title is Emotions: Feeling, Thinking, and Communicating. The majority of this chapter dealt with our emotions and the communication of these emotions, or lack thereof. Some people choose to show their emotions non-verbally, some verbally, and sometimes they choose to hide their emotions for whatever reason. Overall I enjoyed these chapters because they put these concepts into a new light for me to understand and think about.
