I ran into Walgreen’s to drop of a package for FedEx. As I was standing in the store, trying to figure out where the drop-off was, a guy came up to me and asked where he could find the batteries. Admittedly, I was taken aback. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and here was this guy asking me to help him find what he was looking for. 
When I confessed that I didn’t work there, he blushed and said that he saw my shirt and thought I was an employee. The shirt I was wearing had my logo with the geode and “Your Inner Magnificence” embroidered on it.
It was Henry David Thoreau who is credited with saying, “It isn’t what you look at that matters; It’s what you see.” When the guy in Walgreens looked at me, he looked at a guy wearing an embroidered shirt, and he saw an employee of the store.
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Studio and former President of Disney Animations said that only 40% of what we “see” comes through our eyes. The rest, he says, is made up of memory and patterns from our past.
In other words, less than half of what our brain tells us we are “seeing” comes from our eyesight. The rest is made up by our life experiences. Let me say that again, more than half of what our brain tells us we are looking at our brain fabricates.
So, a guy in Walgreens has a history of being ins stores and seeing guys in embroidered shirts with logos as employees. His looks at a guy with a logo shirt and instead of seeing that this logo has nothing to do with Walgreens, his brain tells him that he must be seeing an employee.
Let me give you another example that I may have shared before: I am driving on the interstate and a guy cuts me off. I yell “Assh*le!” and my wife sweetly says, “Child of God!” I’m looking at somebody who is in a hurry, and I’m making a judgment about his character.
How about you? How often do you look at one thing, but see something else?
We do it all the time. When we look at life, do we see the good that is present, or do we see the bad? The truth is we tend to see what we’re looking for. The guy in Walgreen’s was looking for an employee, and that’s what he saw … except he was wrong.
Here’s an invitation to Move into Your Magnificence and allow yourself to see the good that is present. At the very least, allow yourself to see what is there without imposing your preconceptions.
There is often much more to what we are looking at than what we are allowing ourselves to see. Be curious about what you are looking at instead of jumping to conclusions. Develop the spiritual practice of looking for – and seeing – the good.
The extent to which you accept my invitation is the extent to which you’ll be able to say, “I feel good about being me!” … and that’s a promise!
