Adages and Perspective
How to hot wire your brain to arrive at the results you want
As frustrating or silly as they sometimes may seem, the old adages: “fake it ‘til you make it,” and “positive mental outlook” carry some truth to them. (Well, more than “some” actually.) Though you may not feel like your authentic self when you’re faking it, the new perspective is what might just help you get to that other place. It’s like having a GPS system in your head, speaking to you all the time to give you course correction and ensure that you arrive at your destination. The key to all of this is the perspective shift.
When you use an adage, or a mantra, to help you shift your perspective, what you are doing is hijacking your brain a little to force it to create a new neural pathway—one that arrives at the result you want. You can also do this by deliberately choosing your perspective.
What do I mean by that?
Choosing your perspective means that in almost every situation you have to make a focused choice. Take a sunset for example. When lookin at the setting sun, you can choose to focus on:
the variety of bright colors heading to the horizon
the oncoming darkness growing overhead
Think about it for minute, which do you prefer? And why? Or, more importantly, which focus has been conditioned into you over years or decades? (And how do you feel about that?)
The simple act of a setting sun can create many mixed emotions, ranging from fear to romance, sadness to love… and it’s all grounded in our perspective, or the perspective we choose.
How we choose to approach life, from which perspective, will always impact our end results. Just like the adages can help us stay on a path to a specific destination, our perspective can do (and does) the same. Furthermore, our perspective will always be “true”—even if it’s not factually true—and it will always be self-reinforcing. Meaning, if you look for things to validate your perspective, you will find them. This means that a sunset will always be scary for you if you fear the dark, because your focus is on the growing darkness overhead instead of the bright colors on the horizon.
How can you change this? By making a mindful decision to invite yourself to turn your head just a little and see if you can see things from a different angle. Ask yourself: What am I missing? What else is going on? How can I see something different in this situation?
The beautiful thing about doing this is that when you make a mindful decision to see things in a new way, you just might find what you’re looking for, without knowing you were missing it.
Thank you for your continued support of my work. If you want to read my newest series, Understanding, click here.