Dalai Lama has said that “Look at life from all angles, and you will become more open.”
Changing Perspective To Broaden Your Horizons
Do You agree that changing Your perspective on something can change everything?
Our perspective, our way of seeing things, is based on our real life experience, core values and personality. It is our sort of an automatic filter or pair of glasses through which we see everything around us. Only that in order to experience our life to the fullest, we do need to learn to let go of these glasses every once in a while and broaden our horizons.
Changing your perspective on somebody (including yourself) or something can open up for you new possibilities and opportunities. It can fill you with new ideas, new solutions and new dreams. It can provide you with a completely different understanding of any situation you face.
Building Resilience Through Changing Perspective
Whenever you are stuck in a situation, lacking ideas and inspiration to move on, changing your perspective can work wonders. Why is that?
When you get stuck in your head, dwelling on all the negatives, you tend to be blocking the access to your natural inner wisdom and resourcefulness. Changing consciously the perspective of your thoughts — imagining things from different angles — improves your connection with your resourcefulness.
Imagine yourself in your living room, when you change your location, you will see different angles of things and different things. The same is with your life and circumstances. Distancing yourself a bit and looking at something (or everything) from a different angle most certainly will show you “things” you might not have noticed otherwise.
7 Simple Exercises to Change Your Perspective
Whenever facing a challenging situation in your life or feeling the internal need for changing your life, changing your perspective can be the starting point or that extra boost you need. Depending on the situation in hand, trying out one or many of these simple exercises can trigger a ripple effect in your life. You can do them in your mind, or you can write down the answers. Just remember, that written word holds a real power as you can refer back to it later in life for encouragement, inspiration and confirmation.
1. Increasing your knowledge about the topic in hand is a great start. Whatever is the situation in hand, seeking further information about the topic (books, podcasts, stories, experiences of others) will most definitely help you to start seeing the situation from different perspectives. Knowledge has power. Sometimes all we need is to increase that power.
2. Looking at the situation in hand as one aspect of your life. Your life has multiple aspects or elements that all work as a system. Different elements create different synergies. For better understanding of the situation in relation to the whole just draw your Life Wheel (filling in the sectors with important parts of your life). What do you see? How does the situation in hand relate to other aspects of your life? What is the impact? Could changing something elsewhere change the situation? Why and how does this situation matter in the context of the whole?
3. You can imagine the current situation as part of a longer timeline — what do you want to see when looking back from the future? What is the relevance of current situation when taking into consideration your past experiences and future aspirations?
4. When it comes to a situation related to somebody else, you can imagine yourself in the shoes of the other person. What could be the motivation of the other person in that situation? If relevant, imagine how the other person feels about your action?
5. You can imagine yourself looking at your life like an outsider (for example from above as if you were taking a helicopter ride). Imagine as if you are looking at the situation as a bystander. What do you see? What pops up to your mind? What suggestions could you give?
6. You can imagine an older version of yourself (e.g. you 10 years older, you when retiring etc.) or a better version of yourself (in case you have created an ideal version of yourself in your mind). What advice can you give to yourself when looking back to the years passed? What is the wisdom you hold in these older/better versions of yourself?
7. You can imagine a conversation with/or a letter from somebody you truly admire (mentor, family member, book character, celebrity etc.). What kind of advice or feedback they would give you? Imagine yourself being that person giving advice to yourself. What would they say?
Our thinking and acting patterns are largely on autopilot, we tend to do, think and feel things in a comfortable known way. Changing perspective helps us to tap into the plasticity of our brain. It enables us to create new ways of thinking and new ways of handling different situations. And once we start consciously practicing these new ways, they become our new normal, our new autopilot. Thus, changing one´s perspective can change one´s life! If you do not want to do these exercises alone, then Life Coaching can be of great help.
What would become possible for you today if you tried to look at (parts of) your life from a different angle?
With love, C.