The Pursuit of Perspective
Volume 1, Issue 6: The Pursuit of Perspective
(Originally Published March 3, 2019)
What’s New This Week
Welcome back and thanks for joining us again in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, where each week we explore the human experience through different mediums, gleaning useful and practical insights to aid us in living epic life stories.
This week we have our first community artist feature, so be sure to check it out in the Fireside Spotlight!
Following last week’s digest on Attention and Focus, the theme of this week’s content is The Pursuit of Perspective. Most of us have heard the saying “your perspective is your reality”, and in a sense, that statement rings pretty true. Whether or not the things we perceive accurately match the way things truly are, our frames of mind are the main lenses through which we understand the world around us.
This week’s content takes a look at some interesting perspectives and challenges you to practice seeing the world through the eyes of others. We’re going to learn exactly how we can walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and just how powerful we can become when we learn to do so.
As always, there’s plenty of content here, so feel free to just take what you need.
Listen
In this week’s Listen section, I want to introduce you to Phony Ppl. This group is a powerhouse of musical talent that explores various dimensions of the human experience unlike any other music I’ve heard before.
The song in particular that I want to share with you is called “Why iii Love The Moon.” It’s a warm, soulful, and honest song from a damaged heart that has finally found its solace. The song opens:
Real love’s so hard to find
Just when you think you’ve found it
The illusion’s in your eyes
That’s why I love the moon
Every night it’s there for you
It’s constant
Unlike these human beings
It’s so pensive, earnest, and brilliant in its simplicity. In learning to pursue an enhanced life perspective, place yourself into the song as you listen to it.Feel the emotions that the words are revealing, see the picture that the music is painting, and live the story that the song recounts.
Learn
In this week’s Learn section, I want to share with you a really great podcast I’ve been listening to called “Ear Hustle”. “Ear hustle”, deriving from the prison term for “eavesdropping”, is a podcast all about life behind bars, and is actually recorded from within the San Quentin State Prison.
Content warning: this podcast is filmed within a prison, and as such, you’ll hear some swearing and profanity in the podcast. This episode, “Misguided Loyalty”, follows the first-person account of an inmate whose life story has been characterized by hardship, tragedy, and detrimental life decisions from his youth.
It’s easy (and very common) to write off inmates as “terrible people”, and many people decide to do just that, but this episode gives us reason to believe otherwise. Tommy Shakur Ross eloquently recounts his life’s story from a very profound point of view, giving us a chance to shift our perspective on how we see inmates, “gangsters”, and kids who make poor decisions as a result of experienced events that may have been outside of their control.
His story illuminates the fact that although people may do some pretty terrible things, we are all still human. It shows us how powerfully the experiences we’ve had, as well as our reactions to those experiences, shape us into the people that we are at any given moment. When you listen to the episode, imagine you are Tommy as he tells you the details of his life.Understanding is the basis of empathy, so where many may jump to judgement, seek instead to understand life through his eyes.
Level Up
This week’s Level Up section is all about building empathy and how to use it to refine your perspective. Bestselling author Daniel H. Pink sums up the concept beautifully:
“Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.”
In the same vein, professor Theresa Wiseman breaks down empathy into 4 attributes (slightly different from the methodology of Daniel Goleman, which we saw a few weeks ago):
- The ability to see the world as others see it
- The ability to be non-judgmental
- The ability to understand another person’s feelings
- The ability to communicate the understanding of that person’s feelings
Given these four attributes of empathy, how might we use them to pursue a better life perspective as it pertains to social interactions? Here’s a list of 8 tips I keep in mind to build my empathy skills:
- Make no assumptions
- Make “benefit of the doubt” the default
- Seek to understand before you label, judge, or condemn
- Ask “why” even when you think you know the answer
- Learn the lingo of emotional description
- Replace negative adjectives you use to describe someone with the word “human”
- Be honest with yourself and others
- Remember that a person’s behavior is heavily impacted by events that have happened to them in the past
Check out this article for a closer look at these 8 tips!
Fireside Spotlight
In last week’s Fireside Spotlight, we saw a piece called “671”- a pensive poem that explores a very significant period of hardship in my life. This week’s piece is our first community artist feature 🎉🥳🎊 The poem is written by E. Stanley, and is a piece filled with passion and confusion, as well as questions that may never fully be answered. Use some of the empathetic skills we talked about throughout this week’s digest to work your way through the sentiments described in the poem.
The Pain of a Name
It took 50 plus 6 to say to me… that the dad I thought was not to be.
The secret taken to the Grave was revealed today…. with my feelings twisting and turning I decided to pray.
From anger to sadness to anger again… there was no one to confront about what was done back then.
He walked through that door when I was three….he never came back was it because of me?
I had to protect my two Cubs from what might be a threat…. awaiting the results made me more than sweat.
Now I have family I didn’t have before….. because I let them swab my mouth when I walked through the door.
Now I wonder who knew and kept it all in…. as I travel through town wondering if you are my kin.
Walk It, Talk it
Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this digest to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the digest.
This weekly personal development playbook is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, please share it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world achieve a better human experience :)
Your Greatest Chapter Awaits
Until next time,
Elgin
Have feedback? Content you want to learn more about?
Feel free to drop an email to winterhearthstudios@gmail.com to get in touch with me, I’d love to hear from you!
Hey, I’m Elgin, and I love to create. I’m the creator of Winter Hearth Studios and the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, a space where we explore the depths of the human experience, discovering the keys to crafting a better life and inspiring you to Live An Epic Story.
I’m currently a 4th year student at Harvard University studying computer science and design, and in my free time I love to travel, draw, read, and pursue bold, exciting adventures.
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