Gaining Perspective - May Newsletter

Posted on June 02, 2011 by Alex Saldana, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

All of us throughout our lives have experienced someone doing us “wrong”, someone hurting us in one way or another that makes us feel pain and have a feeling of confusion, anger or hatred. This is inevitable in life, and we can not control others. At the most we can only influence others. What are you doing to control your own thoughts though? Are you sitting with those feelings of anger and hatred? Or are you trying to gain perspective on what has really happened? We can all try and control others which leaves us in a place of destruction, or we can choose to change our thoughts and continually grow and learn.

Here are a few things that you can do, or ask yourself to help you better understand the situation you’re experiencing.

• Is my response appropriate? Maybe you are getting overly emotional over a small issue or maybe you’re not taking something as seriously as you should. Are you being too casual about your boss threatening to cut your department? Are you blowing your top because a friend happened to make an innocent joke about your weight? Consider whether you’re taking the issue personally or letting any feelings and emotions (or lack of them) cloud your judgment. Very often our perspective can be thrown off simply by not having evaluated the situation properly.

• How important will it be in a month’s time? Time really does heal and people really do forget, despite what it might feel like at the time. What is painful now may not be so bad in a few weeks or even days Even just having a good night’s sleep can make all the difference. And if there is anything in the future that you’re worrying about, consider what it will be like once it’s over and done with. If it will be okay in a month’s time, what’s the difference between then and now? Is it really just time? Why not choose to laugh about it right now?

• Remove yourself from how close the problem is. This can be done physically and mentally. Removing yourself physically is easy. Just get out. The powerful part of how we can work our mind is to remove our self mentally. Let me explain how: When we are going through a painful experience we tend to see things in our mind like a movie. It tends to be loud, bright, large, in focus, in color and fast moving. Go ahead and close your eyes and replay that movie in your head. Now, what I want you to do is make the movie quieter. Now make it dimmer. Now make it smaller, put it out of focus, make it black and white and slow it down. Now make this movie a still image. What you should experience is a decrease in the intensity of emotions that are associated with this experience.

• Understanding intention. Understand that other people do not do things to hurt you. They don’t, trust me. People do things to fill their own needs, and yes, sometimes we are in the firing line. Ultimately people do things for themselves and not to spite others. Really imagine this for a moment; the last time you lashed out at someone, was it really to hurt them? Or was it to make yourself feel better about expressing yourself? Just by understanding this, it will help give ourselves perspective about others.

We can never see what the world is like through someone else’s eyes. The best we can do is to understand human needs better and in the process make ourselves better people.

I hope you have found this useful and look forward to hearing any questions you may have.

Alex Saldana
Breakthrough Coaching LLC
(303)552-4804
saldana0@gmail.com
www.breakthroughcoachingllc.com