Reframing your perspective

Posted on February 04, 2011 by Andi Brand, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

What is a perspective? It is a point of view. And here is the secret: it is your perspective that determines your experience of life, your happiness or sadness, not your circumstances.

Imagine looking through a keyhole into a room. You know that the tiny limited image visible through the keyhole is not the whole room. If you open the door and go in, you will learn a lot more about that room than what you saw through the keyhole. The keyhole image does not describe the entire room. We know this, so why do we take a narrow perspective of a situation in our life, and imagine that this is the only truth? Kind of like, “I see it this way, so this is the way it is”.

I love hiking in the mountains of beautiful South Africa. You arrive at the nature reserve, park your car in the parking lot, and begin to hike. The trail leads into the foothills and from here you can look up and see the peaks ahead of you. After an hour or so of climbing you stop and look back and the car park comes into view: you see a few trees and tiny little toy cars glinting in the morning sun. It’s hard to believe your were down there just an hour ago. Nothing has changed about the location. It is the same car park, the same valley, but you have walked up a hill and are now seeing things from a new point of view: looking down from the hilltop instead of standing in the valley. You are amazed at what you can see from this height – hills and mountains stretching out around you into the distance. A whole new world, in fact.

Life is often like this. We tend to have a narrow perspective about the situations that exist in our lives. If we could just take a mental journey out of the parking lot and look at our situations from a different viewpoint we would see things in a new way. We would realise that all is not as it seems. The reality we experience is based on our narrow perspective. This, in turn, affects our thoughts, moods, happiness and sadness. If we are able to look at things in a different way, by reframing, we immediately become more accepting of our situation and begin to see different possibilities.

Try this exercise in reframing your perspective:

1. Think of a situation in your life that you are unhappy about.
2. List all the negative things about this situation as you perceive it
3. Now take a few steps back and look at the situation from a wider perspective – taking into account new realisations, not just how you feel about it.
4. List all the positive aspects of the situation that you can think of. There aren’t any? Look harder. I challenge you to find at least one.
5. Now begin to see the situation in light of your positive observations instead of the negative ones.

This is how you reframe your perspective.

It may seem very simplistic, but it is a very powerful tool. As James Allen said in his book “As A Man Thinketh” way back in 1902, our thoughts create our reality. This doesn’t mean that if we think of an ice cream, an ice cream magically appears in our hand. No. It means that the way we perceive our life is the way we experience our life. So if we think we have a raw deal in life, that is the experience of life we carry with us. If we think we are amazingly fortunate, we will experience being fortunate.

Does it still all sound too simple? That’s the thing about Truth. It is so simple that most of the time we miss it. I challenge you to practice reframing your perspective as a daily discipline, using small things as examples. I’d love to hear about how this is working for you.

Reframing your perspective is one of many tools to be found in the coach’s toolkit. If you’d like to experience professional coaching you can find out more at www.authenticlife.co.za or on my blog http://andibrand.wordpress.com/. The first session is FREE ☺.

“Thought allied fearlessly to purpose becomes creative force: he who knows this is ready to become something higher and stronger than a mere bundle of wavering thoughts and fluctuating sentences. He who does this has become the conscious and intelligent weaver of his mental powers.” James Allen.