If you want to know how to handle challenges in life it’s always useful to see things from a new perspective. Things often become problematic because we get stuck in a narrow point of view on the subject or object. For example we may feel challenged by a new colleague at work and start to focus on one of their particular character traits that gets on our nerves. Commonly what happens is we focus on this aspect of the person and “blow it out of proportion” which causes us distress.
We all know that “stepping back” from a situation can help us gain a beneficial new perspective on things, so why don’t we just go ahead and do that? We can do this easily enough in our mind’s eye while asking ourselves useful questions to shift our focus of attention and learn new perspectives and insights.
|Stepping Back To Get a New Perspective
1. Thing about a situation (e.g. work) that causes you some stress.
2. Now in your mind imagine stepping back from this situation; So you can see yourself and the other people in the situation over there as if watching a movie.
3. From this point of observation ask yourself, “What beneficial learnings can I make from this perspective?” and, “If I could learn something new about this situation or person what would that be?”
If you wish you could imagine stepping into the other people and look at yourself in the situation. What new learnings could you make form this perspective? How does it feel to be observing your own behaviour and communication from the other person’s point of view? Could you change anything in your own communication to improve the relationships?
As we know, often our stuck states are just that because we get locked into a fixed perspective. It can therefore be very useful to do something radical to snap out of our myopia. So go ahead now, think about one of your problems/challenges and then perform the following visualisation exercise on it:
1. Select something you want a radically new perspective on.
2. Now imagine you have zoomed in on the image to the microscopic level.
3. Make new learning’s. Try different levels of magnification.
4. Next zoom back to normal focus and then zoom out, way out into space; Imagine zooming right out into deep space, looking back at our galaxy!
5. Looking at this new perspective, notice any new understandings.
6. Come back to the here and now.
Video: Universe Zoom Out/In