Shifting Perspective
“When you’re in a dark place, you sometimes tend to think you’ve been buried. Perhaps you have been planted. Bloom.”
This quote is a great example of shifting perspective. It really addresses the idea that not all “dark” or negative places in life mean that things are bad. This quote literally suggests that dark times could be amazing opportunities to grow, make changes, or start anew. It challenges your mind to consider that things are not always as they seem, that there might be something bigger outside of your view that you just have not seen yet. It poses the idea that we can change our perspective to change not only how we see the world, but also our interactions with it and perhaps the ultimate outcome of situations.
How Perspectives Differ
The way that we interoperate a situation has a lot to do with our current life experiences, our temperament, our mood, and developmental stage. Studies have shown that even siblings growing up in the exact same household can have completely different perspectives on what the environment was like. They may have a drastically different take on what a specific caretaker was like. Even on shared significant life events, two people will often report completely different perspectives of what took place. Their memory of the event may include biases. This occurs with nearly anything in life. Two people can be exposed to the same situation and only one walks away feeling disturbed by the event whereas the other is not affected and goes on without even giving the situation a second thought.
Making The Perspective Shift
What we are describing here is perspective. We all have different perspectives based on our past experiences, beliefs, values, morals, distress tolerance, psychological flexibility, etc. How we approach a new situation or recall a past situation is very much influenced by these and other factors.
The power in perspective is that if we choose to do so, we can learn how to identify other ways of looking at a situation. This requires open-mindedness, curiosity, and the willingness to think differently, but is a very effective tool to dig one’s self out of a negative state and turn a perceived negative situation into a positive one (or simply an opportunity for growth and change).
On the other hand, a person can just as easily choose to stay “stuck” in their current thinking and not making any changes in their life. And yes, this is a choice. In every situation, there is a different way of looking at things, but a person must be willing to consider alternatives in order to look at a situation differently. Sometimes the most important and difficult shift in perspective a person can make is simply being willing to look at things differently. However, the benefits of this most fundamental perspective shift will yield significantly positive outcomes in your life when you are able to look at situations from a different approach.
