Change Your Perception, Change Your Reality | @caroline-cavanagh | Anxiety Specialist

7 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief presentation, anxiety specialist Caroline Cavanagh describes a simple classroom activity she uses during school assemblies to demonstrate the power of selective attention. She asks students to count how many blue objects they can see in the room, prompting them to scan for that color. After a few seconds she then asks them to count green objects, and a child protests that they were only told to look for blue. The exercise reveals that the students' perception was limited by the instruction they received—once the focus shifts, they notice the previously ignored green items. Cavanagh uses this illustration to convey the broader idea that what we choose to attend to becomes our reality, a concept relevant to managing anxiety and mental framing.

Chapters

A game that I play with children in schools. I love— I used to go into assemblies a lot and I'd say to them, okay, I'm going to count to 5, look around the room, how many blue things can you see? Count to 5 and they're all looking around and there'd all be this bright spot. 7, Miss! Others would start shouting out. I'd say, okay, we're all in the same room, who can see more blue things? And then, how many green things did you see? And one kid always going, oh, Miss, you told us to look for blue things, not green things. And then you can see the light bulb come on. The green things are there too. Whatever you choose to look at becomes your reality.