As a life coach, giving insight in how people see the world and how they think is one of my main goals while working with clients. By asking the right questions the client is forced to think and feel, sometimes for the first time, how he sees himself and the world around him. Where he, until recently, was unknown of what drives him, he can now see the bigger picture. This seemingly simply process is a very powerful tool as knowing oneself is the first step towards lasting change and true conscious living. I believe that true change comes from within and will not work if people tell us how to change. We need to experience it for ourselves to make change last.
Most articles I write on this blog are about the way how we look at the things, people and events in our life. Through my writing I’m inviting, sometimes challenging, you to broaden your perspective and maybe change your views on how you see the world around you. One of the conditions for successful change in our lives is that we need to have the right perspective, or at least know what our perspective is. We need to know what is really going on inside ourselves and around us.
So what is the right perspective?
Well, to make it a bit more difficult I think there is no right perspective. There’s also no wrong perspective; only different, often limited, perspectives exist. I always compare my own perspective to what I can see, what I can observe. If I’m in a valley my sight is limited to the things that are happening on the ground. But someone who is high on top of a mountain may observe something quite different; he has a different perspective. That’s what happening in real life as well.
When we see things only from our perspective we miss a lot of detail. We may only see 50 or 30 percent, maybe less, of what is going on. But most of us think and act like we know it for the full 100 percent. The truth is that we only know it for 50 percent and the rest of it we make up in our minds; we fill in the blanks with assumptions. That’s a real issue and the cause of many misunderstandings and conflicts. Most wars have started this way. We think we are right and others are wrong. We are good, they are bad. You are either with us or against us.
If we only took the effort to look further, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we may see something quite different. We may see we’re not so different after all.
Things are never black or white. How terrible a situation may look from our perspective; that same situation may be the source of joy and happiness if we only knew the full picture. When one company goes bankrupt another one will seize the opportunity. When someone looses a friend, someone else will gain one. That colleague you dislike may be a terrific father to his children or giving large sums of money to charity.
Things are not always what they seem. What may seem unpleasant at first may be a blessing in the long run. Unless you have the full perspective it is difficult to judge any situation. That’s one of the reasons way it is so important to pass judgement with curiosity and compassion. Once we realize the limitations of our own perspective, we can start changing it. Changing the perspective on the people around us and on our self. Once we change our perspective, change the way we look at things, we will you change our lives, forever.
In life we just have to be optimistic in all the things we do. Having a perspective gives us the idea how we will deal each and everyday of our lives. Thank you for sharing this post.