Change your Perspective and Change your Life.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. – Dr. Wayne Dyer

Once upon a time, a group of villagers instructed their young shepherd, “When you see a wolf, cry wolf, and we’ll come with guns and pitchforks. The next day, the boy was tending his sheep when he saw a lion in the distance. He cried out, “Lion, lion!” But no one came. The lion killed several sheep. The shepherd boy was distraught. “Why didn’t you come when I called?” he asked the villagers. There are no lions in this part of the country,” the older men replied. “The wolves are what you have to look out for. The young shepherd learned a valuable lesson: People respond to what they are prepared to believe. And what prepares them for what they believe is their experience. ¹

We don’t choose all of our life experiences; that was especially true when we were children. But we do choose many of the ones we have now. We choose who we marry. We choose our jobs. We choose where to take a vacation, whether to exercise, and what we learn. And people who have a particularly difficult background decide whether to pursue experiences that will improve how they live and think. We can’t undo our past experiences, but we can reprogram ourselves using new ones.

The story above illustrates how we mostly look at things based on our programming. The young shepherds were on the lookout for wolves, but they were confronted by lions. In life, things would not go as we planned, the key to navigating the inevitable challenges of life is to adapt and change perspective when we are confronted with new situations. As Dr. Wayne Dyer famously said, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” One of our greatest advantages as humans is the ability to choose our perspective toward any set of circumstances, be it challenges, triumph or suffering.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

There’s a story about Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to summit Mount Everest. When he came back down to base camp, he was met by reporters who asked him what the view was like at the top of the world. He said it was incredible, because while he was up there he saw another mountain in the Himalayan range that he hadn’t climbed yet, and he was already thinking about the route he would take to summit that peak next. When you reach the mountaintop, it gives you a brand new perspective on the rest of the world, on the rest of your life. You see new challenges that were out of sight before, and you see old challenges in new ways. With this huge victory now under your belt, they all become conquerable. ²

Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth. – Violas Davis, Finding Me

We weren’t broken by a breakup; we were broken by wanting love that wasn’t right for us. We weren’t devastated by a loss; we were devastated because we wanted, so badly, for that person or thing to remain in our lives. We mentally become trapped in these places from which we still crave an experience. What we don’t realize is that we have to sort of free ourselves from it so that we can go forth and create it in real-time. Instead of accepting the ways we think life did not work out, we have to be able to see what was at the core of our desire and figure out a way to still give ourselves that experience now. If you truly want to let go of a past experience, you have to reenter it through your memory. ³

Though you cannot change what happened in the past, by shifting your perspective of it, you can change how you are right now. You can change the story, and you can change your life.

You can stop holding onto the old life in which you were required to be someone you inherently are not. The truth is that when we are unhealthily attached to something in the past, our perspective of it is often distorted. We aren’t seeing reality for what it was, and we need to assist ourselves in being able to broaden our mindset and open up to the truth. Instead of longing for what we didn’t get then, we have to release ourselves from the past and start putting our energy into building that experience right now.

“It’s important to keep things in perspective. When they get out of perspective, it affects your ability to prepare and perform. It harms your peace of mind.”

Balance means keeping things in proper perspective, not permitting either excessive exuberance or dejection to interfere with preparation, performance, or subsequent individual or team behavior. Balance is important in many aspects of basketball. Besides physical, emotional, and mental balance, we need squad balance, rebounding balance, offensive balance, defensive balance, size balance. Balance. Balance. Balance.

The same thing is true in life. We must have physical, emotional, and mental balance; balance between making a living and making a home. We must keep things in perspective, both the good and the bad. And we must listen to achieve that balance. Listen and observe at home and work. Balance the work against the play. Achieving balance in life (or basketball) requires great, great effort, desire, and alertness. Life is complicated, and it’s easy to get things totally out of balance. That’s when you have a problem. ⁴

We must keep things in perspective, both the good and the bad. And we must listen to achieve that balance.

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Self-Compassion

Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love. – Rainer Maria Rilke.

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Begin Now

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now. – W.H.Murray
When you take a deliberate step forward, the universe will have your back. Too often, we let our dreams stay as they are, Dreams. We let our so-called rational mind enumerate the way we might feel, so we hesitate but once you take committed action, you encounter the unexpected, the providential, you see things that you wouldn’t have seen, meet people you wouldn’t have met, you get exposed to opportunities simply because you started.
Carl Jung called it “Synchronicity”, and Goethe called it “Magic”, whatever you call it, the power exists; you just have to take the leap.

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life. – Muhammad Ali

Daily Trip with Jeff Warren – The Delicate Art of Noticing
For every mental action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. You push, and life pushes back: Newton’s third law of motion.

Podcast