Change Your Perspective To Solve Your Problems
There’s been a few of these about recently.
Remember the black and blue/white and gold dress? Or this handbag?
Depending on what kind of person you are, apparently, can determine how you see the colour of the objects. Or it could also be influenced by what you saw directly before seeing the image. Or maybe you just like to cause an argument (pink and grey dress anyone?).
I find this interesting for a few reasons. The first is that it shows that all reality is in fact an illusion created by your mind(if colour can be interpreted then anything is possible); and secondly by changing how you look at things actually makes problems disappear.
Why always me?
One way of looking at this idea of perspective is about how you consider events to be happening — do you think they are happening to you or not?
If you believe that everything is happening to you, then you’re going to struggle to dissociate with the negative things and be constantly craving sources of validation to feel positive about yourself.
This is a bad place to be.
If every time something goes wrong — maybe the train is late and you miss a meeting at work — and your first reaction is:
“This always happens to me! I’m so unlucky!”
Then you’re suffering from a case of mistaken perspective.
You have to ask yourself:
Does it really always happen to you? Are you telling me you’ve never been on a train that arrived on time? Are you the only person on that train?
When we start describing things in absolutes, we tend to forget about the times that it wasn’t true, and if you dwell on that, it doesn’t feel good.
In these moments, just remind yourself that these things don’t happen all the time — you will have at least one exception to every scenario you think ‘always’ happens to you — and actually, they’re not just happening to you, they’re happening to everybody else stuck on the train too so you don’t need to take it personally.
That minor shift in perspective will make all the difference in how you feel about unexpected events, particularly bad ones.
Devil’s Advocate
An argument is just two different accounts of the same event told from opposite points of view, right?
The fact that arguing is even a thing already shows that events can be interpreted in different ways.
Imagine being sat at a bar and seemingly out of nowhere, you get covered in a generic brand of lager. It’s all over your shirt and trousers. You turn around to see somebody laughing. What’s your first reaction?
This guy must have done it.
You confront the guy and he says he was joking with his friend and he just turned around and happened to catch your eye. You don’t believe him and you’re just about to throw a punch when an embarrassed barman taps you on the shoulder to hand you a towel. He knocked it when he was walking past and only realised when his manager shouted him.
Three perspectives, one event.
How do you stop this escalating if it happens to you?
Well firstly, you remember to tell yourself it isn’t happening to you. You’re not the only person to ever get spilt on.
Then , you try and imagine the event again from different angles. Imagine being the guy who’s laughing. You’ve just shared a joke with your friend and you’re about to go to the bar when you’re confronted by some idiot threatening to punch you. If that was you, how would you feel? What would you say?
If you can take a different view on the event, you can remove the emotion from it. You can understand that there are different interpretations and not just one of them is correct. This gives you the power to choose how you feel about something, or anything. Who knows, you might even find it funny yourself now.
Your New Super Power
This is amazing really. Being able to decide how something makes you feel? Impossible, and yet very achievable.
The final piece of the puzzle is about setting yourself up to be open to possibilities. Going back to the dress illusion, what you see immediately before the photo can determine how you view it, and this is the same with your problems.
It’s like putting an undercoat on a wall before painting it. Priming.
When you’re faced with a problem, if you go in to solving it from the wrong perspective, you’re unlikely to find the right outcome.
I think this is what people mean when they talk about ‘being positive’. It’s not so much about floating around on a cloud all day and ignoring the chaos around you, it’s about being able to appreciate that their are alternatives. Always.
You can prime yourself to being open by reminding yourself that you have options. In the heat of the moment that’s not always easy, so going back to check you’ve removed any absolutes, found an exception, and used a different perspective is probably the best option.
For problems that you have time to consider, you could try doing some meditation beforehand. Or go for a walk. Changing your environment can have an amazing effect on the way you solve a problem.
This kind of activity prepares you to start thinking about your issue in the right way, you’ll generate more ideas, and therefore means you’re more likely to come up with a suitable resolution.
How do you know if you’re looking at mountains in the sky or rocks under water?
Well, I mean you’ll know from where you’re standing, but you get the sentiment — it’s all about your perspective.
Remember:
- Think of the exception — it’s not ‘always’ the case.
- Shift position — what would someone else who was seeing this think?
- Prime yourself — remember their are always alternatives. Always.
Like this?
If you found this useful, let me know by leaving a reply or giving the article a clap. How do you deal with problems? Does this work for you? Let me know!