My son and I can experience the same hike and describe it from completely different vantage points, almost as though we were on two separate trails. Same path. Same mountain. Two very different stories about what just happened.
Haven’t you experienced this from time to time?
One of the greatest gifts instilled in us by our Creator is the ability we have to select and edit the meaning we give to our life experiences. We all possess this ability. Very few of us deliberately train it. That leaves an enormous opportunity for personal growth almost completely untapped.
The potential for transforming your life is in those moments where you render judgment about what’s going on in your world. All sorts of things “happen to us” as we go through life, but we are often in no position to know whether what just happened was ultimately “good” or “bad.”
I have certainly rendered plenty of verdicts long before I had enough evidence to do so. We tend to think our judgments simply happen to us. In reality, we participate in forming them.
We can get dumped, fired, delayed or sick and assume it’s a bad break. We can even play the victim for a while if we are so inclined. With a little bit of time or distance, and surprisingly often, we realize the setback was “the best thing that ever happened.”
We’ve all had moments that felt awesome, at least for a little while, only to come back and betray us a little later. Life can feel really bad and turn out really good. Life can feel really good and turn out really bad.
The contrast can grow even stronger when a few years pass, and we look back and shake our heads, not at others, but at ourselves. Time has a way of changing the filter. Another twenty years of living can make the same event look completely different.
Learning how to train your perspective gives you an enduring advantage in how you think, feel, and respond. As an aspect of your mindset, your perspective refers to your personal interpretation of the conditions of your life.
In other words, your perception of what is happening, at any given moment, is flexible and subjective, not absolute or fixed. Your perspective depends predominantly on how you choose to explain things to yourself.
With a functional perspective, you choose to thoughtfully, and even creatively, explain circumstances so that you stay inspired to act deliberately and sensibly even in the midst of turbulent times.
A functional perspective doesn’t demand denial of difficulties. But it does refuse to let the difficulty dictate the response. Perspective does not change the facts. It changes the position from which you respond to the facts. For years, I’ve encouraged clients to train their perspective to serve them now without sabotaging the future they desire.
We recommend having only two possible buckets when it comes to perspective. Immediate blessing or deferred blessing. Those are the only two categories.
Now you know why I call this a functional perspective. It keeps us in a resourceful, creative state where we have meaningful agency to fix what can be fixed, adapt to what cannot, or otherwise bounce back and keep moving forward. The common tendency, however, is to be shortsighted, reactive and impulsive - and this, predictably, makes things worse, not better.
In 35 years of coaching high performing entrepreneurs and their families, it has become clear that so-called, “negative events” are only part of the problem. I have witnessed clients dealing with horrendous ordeals respond with a functional perspective and experience the peace of God. I’ve also seen many more individuals face relatively minor hardships and essentially self-destruct due to a fearful perspective. One leads to peace and the other to chronic agony.
The story you tell yourself about the event often does far greater damage to your energy, your relationships and your capacity to be resilient than the original issue. The circumstances we experience in our own life are like the raw footage captured at an important public event. But the narrative that develops is almost always created from the edited snippets and corresponding commentary that get played over and over again on our screens.
Likewise, we experience personal events, develop our own story about them and then replay that narrative over and over again in our minds through our inner conversations. It is the narrative from this self-authored story that drives conclusions and the emotional aftereffects. The story you tell yourself shapes what you feel. What you feel drives what you do. And what you do either improves or worsens the situation. When you alter your interpretation or change your internal story, you feel and behave differently.
The key, then, is to take responsibility for the story you keep telling yourself. In fact, God loved us so much that He gave us the freedom to process and explain circumstances from a faithful point of view or a fearful and dysfunctional point of view.
While we may not control the first fearful thought that enters the mind, we can take responsibility for the added color commentary we rehearse, reinforce, and act upon. With this opportunity in mind, our goal becomes to interpret our difficulties in such a way that we stay resourceful enough to learn from them, grow through them and very likely even triumph over them.
In a crisis, a fearful perspective announces and affirms, “This is terrible - I’m devastated - My life is ruined - How will I ever overcome this?”
But, “The Blessing-Or-Blessing-In-Disguise” perspective forces you to widen the frame and lengthen the timeline.
In the same crisis, a functional perspective proclaims, “This is painful, but temporary. God is with me. This isn’t the end of the world. I wonder what blessing will emerge from this? It’s going to be difficult but I will come out stronger. I may not understand this yet. This will only make me better in some way.”
Sometimes elevation changes what we see and perceive. What looked insurmountable at the trailhead can look very different after the first 2000 feet of hiking. And, time changes our perspective as well. For example, that crisis will look much different after fifteen days, and especially fifteen months later, than it does right now. Sometimes the blessing is obvious. And, sometimes faith has to carry us for a while until it becomes visible.
Consider making use of these questions we frequently use with our clients:
What’s still within my control?
What’s the wisest next move?
Where might the blessing be hiding?
What could God be developing in me through this?
How might I see this differently a year from now?
A functional, well-trained perspective doesn’t merely make us feel better; it helps us behave better.
Fortunately, I have found that perspective is a skill, like hitting a golf ball, negotiating, or using a new app. Perspective can be trained. And what can be trained can be improved. While a fearful perspective narrows the frame, a functional perspective widens it.
The ultimate perspective is believing that God is still at work, even when the good is not yet visible.
What about you?
What situation have you already rendered a negative verdict on?
What changes if you move it into the “blessing in disguise” bucket?
What would faithfulness require from you today?
The event may already be written.
Your response is not.