Perspective

How many times have you had a disagreement and got stuck in the right vs wrong argument? If you asked me, I wouldn’t be able to give you a straight answer because it is something I have experienced soooo many times!

We often get caught up in that when we argue with someone – but if you think about it – who is right and who is wrong doesn’t really matter, does it? It is all relative to the starting point of the people in question. If we were able to change our perspective more often and see things differently, I think we would be more able to accept that people experience things differently from us – and therefore they might come to a different conclusion. Neither of us is right or wrong, we are just different.

A helpful way to become more used to changing perspective is to introduce little changes every day – walking a different way to work for example or trying a dish that we have never tried before or doing something that we wouldn’t ordinarily do… just simple actions that make our awareness more alert because it is just not same old, same old.

Another technique I have come across before – especially when revisiting in my head a heated discussion or an argument – is the one of the three chairs: think about what happened from your perspective, then sit on a different chair and think about how the other person might have lived the same situation (from their perspective) and then move to another chair and think about how an external observer might have seen it. This is a simple way of changing our perspective that often makes us realise that actually the other person might have a point, too.

How about you? Do you know any other ways of changing perspective? What works for you and why does it matter to you?