Change Your Perspective!

Every person sees their life and world through a filter.

The optimist and the pessimist will see their situation and the world around them in completely different ways because of each’s particular filter that has developed within them. Optimists can see opportunities where pessimists see only defeat and failure. Although facing the same situation the filter determines the response each makes.

The name for this filter is perspective.

Your perspective is simply the way you think in a given situation. It’s important because the direction your life has taken and where it will lead from hereon has been influenced or controlled by your perspective (dominant way of thinking in a given situation). What’s important is to address your perspective. First, consider those areas that have created and sustained it till now. 

Children are born with a pure perspective. They dream, they imagine. Good things are possible to them. They accept the things we adults struggle with. And, they do so without question. 

The years’ of poor parental influence, peer pressure, a limiting educational system and the opinions of others have not yet influenced them. Its through these examples that our perspective is affected by society and its culture (even totally inadvertently).

An excellent test to see how this may have affected your journey toward your purpose is to ask yourself what you were passionate for and dreamed about as a child.  

Perhaps you are reading this, and you know you ‘can do’. If you could just do the right thing in the right place with no other demand upon you (like the need to earn a certain wage), you know you would succeed. Yet, perhaps you look in the mirror and see a failure, a loser, a defeated person. Why is this?

It’s because of your perspective. Perhaps your parents told you of their disappointments in you. A teacher said you would not amount to much. A partner said you were worthless. The pastor told you that you had a curse upon you. All these influences seemed to carry a theme at the time that you began to take on board and believe. Even conversations you thought were long forgotten, have been dug back up on later occasions as if to emphasise this theme. 

Whatever the true reason, the pure perspective you once held is being spoiled and your treasure is being tarnished. You now need to rediscover your treasure.

So, begin by changing the way you think. Ask yourself whether the people you surround yourself with are just like you. If so, maybe you’ll find they’re sick, broke and disenchanted too! Instead, seek out people who are living a fulfilled and purposeful life or at least heading in the direction you would like to be and spend time with them.