You’ve heard the adage “same song, different day”, right? I think this often describes my life. I go for the same walk every morning. I leave my back door and walk the same direction I always walk, the same distance and the same exact path. My days often have that recurring theme throughout. I eat the same breakfast, drink the same tea, eat the same lunch, and so on it goes. I bet your life has similar patterns. We wake up and we go about our business doing what is familiar. One of the lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur is that you have to learn to think differently. I’ve found that you can’t go through life with the same thinking patterns you had when you were working a 9-5; you can’t create a different life unless you change the way you think.
One of the best ways to start thinking differently is to change your perspective and look at things from a different point of view. Listed below are my top three tips for changing your perspective so that you can see the most growth in your mind and allow space for new things and start to allow new habits in.
1. Change your routine. Take that morning walk the opposite way you normally do. Head out the back door and go left instead of right. Or better yet, go out the front door and take the street instead of the alley. As you take a different route, you are going to see different things; and you will see the same things from a different perspective, a different angle. When that happens, you see more dimensions and begin to understand on a deeper level what something actually is.
The rest of your life is going to benefit from making a small change like this. Making these types of changes brings awareness to your perspective that there is more to the story than simply the picture you have developed. Once you have that awareness, you can begin to look for the rest of the story; the rest of the pieces. Those pieces may be just what you need to solve a problem, change a thought pattern, or simply just learn something new.
2. Take back your power. Let’s face it. It is easy to get in a rut of thinking where we point the blame to someone else or some situation outside of ourselves. For example, it is easy for me to think that someone else has a more charismatic personality than me, so I can never have the success that they have. But if I change my perspective and look at things from a positive view point, I can see that I have a clear path of improvement in front of me. I may never have the SAME charisma as that other person, but I can develop my own charisma by interacting in my own way. Even if that feels foreign and uncomfortable at first, I have a chance to live in my power and create my own success based on my current skills and at the same time acknowledge that I have the power to develop better skills.
How can you take back your power? Is there something in your life that you need to own and look for another perspective? If you take that thing and focus on what is in your power to change, you will find that you feel better about yourself and that your perspective begins to change.
3. Visualize. Practice visualizing the problem from different perspectives. This allows you to create space in the mind for a NEW reality. For example, if you climb to the top of the mountain and look out at the view in front of you, what do you see? The sky, the horizon, the valley below (as vague, tiny figures with no clarity) and you also see your immediate surroundings of trees, rocks, shrubs, whatever is around you. Now place yourself in the valley. Look around you now. What do you see? The tall mountain in front of you with its peak so far away you can’t see the individual rocks and trees. You see the sky from a further distance and maybe the clouds look smaller and less fluffy. Now your immediate surroundings; they are no longer tiny, indistinct things. They are full of detail and life. You see things you couldn’t possibly see from the top of the mountain.
If you look at life’s problems in this same way, by visualizing yourself up close as well as far away from the problem, you can begin to see new things. You can see the details in a new way. You may find that things aren’t as they seem right now. Or you may find just the exact detail you need for your next step. You begin to open the mind to new details and new paths and perspectives.
I encourage you to take one or two of these and test them out. See if your perspective doesn’t start to shift. See if you don’t find your mind more open to new things and yourself more willing to entertain new ideas. Comment below and let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear from you and cheer you on!
Sherry Parks is a Rediscovery Coach who helps women rediscover themselves and reconnect to the core of who they are.
To contact Sherry for more information about coaching join her women only Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/1412224992154642/.