The Matter of Perspective
Remember the telephone game from childhood? In a circle, one person whispers to another person a phrase, and that person then whispers it to the next, and so on until everyone has passed the phrase around. Rarely (if ever) does the original message get through to the last person. There’s typically a variation of the original. This has to do with perspective. How we hear something, which is affected by our filters.
When I work with clients, I often talk about perspective. What we see, hear, think, and feel is filtered through a combination of our past experiences and our beliefs, which color how we see, hear, think, and feel.
Perspective is a powerful thing. When we are able to look at something from another perspective, it allows us to move outside ourselves and our filters and get a different point of view. What may look very clear from one perspective suddenly is not clear or is so different it hardly resembles what we originally thought.
Seeing things from a different perspective allows us to:
- Gain empathy for someone whose life circumstances are different from ours
- Understand others’ opinions as valid, even if different from our own
- See the reasons why someone might do something we wouldn’t do
The old saying “walk a mile in my shoes” speaks to this idea of perspective. If we can get outside ourselves long enough to learn where someone else is coming from, it can go a long way in bridging misunderstandings.
As a pictorial representation of perspective, here are three photos of the same landscape taken in different seasons, courtesy of my dad. What do you notice about this scene in each photo. What is the same? What is different? How would you describe each photo?
I challenge you to take one situation in your life and look at it from someone else’s perspective. Learn what it’s like to look at something and think about it differently. Then take what you learn and choose how to act and how to be. You might be surprised at what happens.
