It Is All About Perspective and Focus

I am a firm believer that what our perspective and focus on any situation is what your reality becomes in our life. And this is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or being pollyanna about a situation when it really is a dire problem. It is about what we tell ourselves in our head and by the way, most of it is conjured up. We make it up as we go. We can say that someone doesn’t love you but in reality, they think you are a really cool person and they love you but they just don’t love you the way you want them to. Or we may feel like we are not in really great shape but maybe for us, we are in better shape than a lot of people. But what we may tell ourselves is that we are in such bad shape but why can’t we tell ourselves that we are in better shape than we used to be and we are working on getting better each day.

When I went to the University of Santa Monica in the early 2000’s, one of the biggest tools we learned was to reframe a situation or a thought. We were taught to use reframing in order to change the dynamic of a thought or feeling into a more supportive, positive perspective. And for me, this was a great tool to have as I love to look at things in a more positive light. Reframing may look like this: Let’s say you say to yourself, “I’m so bad at cooking. I just don’t like to do it and therefore, I eat a lot of pizza in a box.” So to reframe this, you could say “I am going to learn how to cook for myself. Anyone can follow a recipe. Maybe I’ll buy a cookbook on cooking for one so I can have healthier meals once in a while”. Which statement feels better. We tend to have “stinking thinking” and we put ourselves down in our heads. We also could call it “analysis paralysis”. Nothing stops this more that interrupting the doom loop. In the book Build the Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey, they state “…your mind can be saying everything is terrible and always will be, even though that is surely wrong. However, if you purposely conjure up happier memories, you can interrupt this doom loop.” We have a choice to change how we look at things.

So if our perspective about “something” is mostly negative and we focus on the “something” most of the time, then our experience will be negative. Can we change our perspective to be maybe more supportive of ourselves or others and make the experience a little bit more positive? As we are coming out of the pandemic but still in political upheaval, it can be hard to stay positive or to change our perspective into a more positive light. However, it is time to breed more love than hate, to look at things differently so we can learn to get along better and move into peace and understanding. Change your perspective and focus into a more supportive and positive light and this can change your relationships, your health and your life. What do you think?