Would you consider your perspective helpful or detrimental to your ability to achieve your goals? Do you feel optimistic in the most difficult of situations or do you tend to be more pessimistic in the best of times? Most people fall somewhere in the middle and feel good when things are good and poorly when things are tough. A person’s ability to change perspectives through challenging situations is one of the best measures of one's potential to be successful. Think of your perspective like your attitude or mindset in life. If you have a negative attitude, you tend to have a negative perspective on life. Whether your perspective is justified by past events or not is not the focus. Similarly, if someone grew up believing they have the Midas touch and everything just seems to "go right" for them is irrelevant. Your goal should be to build a mindset that enables you to succeed in life, regardless of the situation.
1. Keep Your Head Up
Someone with a
fixed mindset believes there are a lucky few who are blessed with the right genes to become successful. Studies show someone with a fixed mindset is ill-equipped to tackle many of life’s challenges. ((Nature:
A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement)) They see failure and difficulty as a sign that they are doing the wrong thing. You may have heard someone explaining why something was not meant for them by talking about how it didn’t come naturally. This perspective cripples the ability of many from reaching their full potential. Someone with a growth mindset has a different perspective on life. They believe everyone can learn and build the skills necessary to achieve their goals. They see failure as a sign that their approach was wrong, not as a sign they were wrong. As a result, they will regularly try new things until they achieve their goal. Inventors are a classic example of a growth mindset. Their perspective about negative situations is that it is nothing more than a problem they have yet to solve. They see each negative event as being one step closer to success.
2. Change Perspective From the Inside-Out
For you to
change perspective about negative events in your life, you first need to change the way you talk to yourself. What you say to yourself regularly will have an impact on the actions you take. Consider someone who unexpectedly had their employment terminated. If their mind is full of negative self-talk, then they are telling themselves how inadequate they are. People who believe they will always be a failure are not going to interpret events the same as people who see themselves as successful. There are instances where negative situations are created, in part, due to the negative statements you tell yourself. In the situation of someone losing their job, what if they constantly told themselves, “my boss doesn’t like me”? Do you think it will help or hurt someone’s interaction with their boss? How would this perspective impact the times their boss is nice to them? Or how do you think they would respond to constructive criticism?
3. Don't Open Yourself Up to More Negativity
As you are probably starting to realize, if you don’t change perspective about the negative events in your life, you are opening yourself up to creating more. If you believe your boss has a negative opinion about you, then you think they are being fake when they are nice to you. You think they are nitpicking or complaining about small things when they offer constructive criticism. By continuing to negatively interpret events due to
negative self-talk, you will continue to produce undesired results. Now imagine if you told yourself your boss has your best interests at heart and is only trying to bring the best out of you. That simple change in your perspective better equips you to deal with the perceived negative events in your life. When your boss offers you constructive criticism, you believe they are investing in your growth. When your boss is nice to you, you welcome the behavior because you see them as your friend and colleague. When you change perspective, the same events that could have led to failure now work to your benefit.
Focus on What Matters
Your brain can only focus on so many things each day.((Harvard Business Review:
Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus)). As a result, your mind will automatically filter out information it believes is unimportant to you. A common example of this is when you purchase a new vehicle and you suddenly notice that vehicle everywhere. It is not that everyone purchased the vehicle the same day you did, it was that your mind was blocking the information. It did not believe that a particular make and model car was important to you until you purchased it. For you to change perspective about negative situations in your life, you must change your daily focus. As was the case when you purchased a new vehicle, you can alter the events your mind recognizes. Instead of focusing on negative events and how bad things are in life, focus on the things you are grateful for.
4. Find the Silver Lining
It is not always easy, but you can train your mind to focus on what you love most about life. One great way to train your mind to focus on what you love in life is to create a
happiness journal. The way it works is every time something good happens, you write it down in your happiness journal. These events could be as simple as you woke up on time or ate a healthy lunch. They could revolve around the effort you put in at work to complete a project. Heck, you could even write about your commitment to stay positive throughout the day. Any event that can be celebrated should be celebrated. Then when a negative situation occurs, you can flip open your journal to change perspective. Remind yourself how blessed and fortunate you are when you feel you have nothing to celebrate in life. Read about your successes when you feel you can't do anything right. Creating a happiness journal will significantly change your perspective about yourself and your life.((CNN:
The science behind positive thinking your way to success))
5. Become a Guardian Angel
The final way to change perspective about negative situations in your life is to help others. An amazing thing will happen when you start to spend more time focusing on the needs of others. First, you will feel better about yourself because of how positively others view you. Next, you will begin to realize that while everything is not perfect in life, it could always be worse. Have you ever heard the phrase, "first world problems"? It is a funny way to help put negative situations into the proper perspective. While all negative events are unpleasant, there is most certainly a difference. If you have an inconsiderate boss, while that can make work unpleasant on many occasions, it is still a blessing to have employment. Others feel that their spouse is irresponsible with money, but at least you have a spouse who loves you. My daughter often talks about the fact that she has an older cellphone, but I have to remind her that she is blessed to have a cell phone at her age.
6. Challenge Yourself
There is rarely going to be a situation where you cannot find someone going through a negative situation. The problem most people face is they are too busy focusing on the negative events in their life to notice the negative events going on in the lives of others. When you change perspective from yourself to others, you begin to realize there are a lot of people going through their own negative events, yet they are maintaining a positive perspective about life. They continue to be grateful for the good things they have. And they understand many of the negative situations they have are tied to blessings - meaning they cannot experience the joy without opening themselves up to the possibility of experiencing pain.
Final Thoughts
To change perspective about negative situations is not about pretending negative things don’t happen, because they do. It is not about always smiling and pretending that everything is wonderful because that isn’t always the case. Changing your perspective is about acknowledging that negative situations occur, but they do not necessarily cause your demise. You can learn from any situation, and you can always find something to
be grateful for. When you train your mind to focus on the things you can control and the things going right in your life, you create an unconquerable resolve to create your dream life. You acknowledge that difficult does not mean impossible, and you are therefore able to prevail where most people accept defeat.
Learn to Change Your Perspective
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