Apologies to the Burt Hummel of Glee's Theatricality Episode

Remember the last time you met someone new. Did you form immediate impressions of him/her? Did you try to associate him/her with a character such as a nerd, jock, ditz or geek? If not, most probably you have done so in the past right?

If you’ve said yes at even one of those three questions then you’ve just exhibited immediate categorization of other people. Hold your thought of it being an evil thing. I guess it’s something common to us since who wants uncertainty anyway? We’d always want to simplify the world and make it more understandable for us so we’d know how to act around individuals. Governed by our perceptions of others, we know who we’d most probably click with, who we’ll never going to be friends with and who we can fall in love with.

But sometimes, these supposedly pre-programmed commands hinder and hurt us from really knowing the individuals that we meet. Since we think of them as a certain kind of character, we expect them just to be like that character and not who they really are. Thus, even though they exhibit something beyond our perceived character for them, we always lead them back to our perception and reason out such action as still an expression of the character or deem it as an exceptional case.

Think of a teacher whose first impression of you in his/her class is that you’re mediocre given your first few scores. Even if you perfect the remaining tests and exams, it’ll already be difficult to change his/her perception of you as being mediocre. It’s probably doubly difficult for you to impress him compared with doing quite well early in the class. He or she will just find easy excuses for the excellence you demonstrated.

Of course, this works the other way around. Think of a parent whose son or daughter has been very obedient and loving as a child. If ever, he or she rebels in the future, the parent shall have a difficult time understanding such situation because of his/her perception of his/her child when he or she was young. Thus, no matter how grave the wrongdoing is, the parent shall either blame it on people or things other than his or her child or just shrug it off as an exception.

You might be thinking how could we possibly avoid such case when we already have cemented perceptions of other people. I say openness and understanding. Being open to others, seeing them as they are not being limited to our cookie-cutter impression of them and understanding where they are coming from shall hopefully help us know them act appropriately towards them.

Before I close, I’d like to share a line I remember (credits to IMDB for helping me on this one) from one of Glee’s most intense scenes where Burt Hummel scolds Finn for inappropriate language: “Yeah, that's because you're 16 and you still assume the best in people. You live a few years, you start seeing the hate in people's hearts. Even the best people.”

Most of the time, we commit this crime of judging and perceiving people based on our cookie-cutter impressions. Add in our oft perception of the world as an evil place and we get a pessimistic and sometimes exaggerated view of others. We become handicapped by our own views and see them as the label we have for them and not the human being that they are.

Thus, and sorry Burt Hummel for this, but I’d like to say that we should always assume the best in people. See them as people capable of doing the good and doing the best and hopefully it shall become a self-fulfilling prophecy of them becoming what you expect them to be.

It might be difficult given what we’re used to but believing in the best of people is a start to a change that shall hopefully influence more to assume the best in others.

I know you can, I believe in you!