"Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world." – Wayne Dyer
We're all living in the same world, but we all have unique perspectives. Our perspectives don't reveal the ultimate truth about reality, but they reveal our truth about reality, which influences every experience we have.
We can't control everything that happens to us, but we can control how we perceive it.
Perspective is shaped by two things:
1. Your individual life experiences
2. Your interpretations of those experiences
But do you know what one of the hardest things in the world to do is? Take control of your perspective.
It's extremely difficult because most of what we experience in life is outside of our control, like how and where we're born. Then as we grow up, we get hurt. We get backstabbed. We get sabotaged. We experience pain in all domains of our life.
So it's really easy to become products of our environment, which is what happens to most people, but it doesn't have to happen to you.
The first step toward empowering your perspective is accepting life as it is, rather than how you think it should be. Accepting life as it is doesn't mean just letting whatever happens happen. It means not allowing things outside of your control upset you. It means taking life one moment and day at a time. It means talking through your pain with someone you trust, but it also means knowing that sometimes the pain doesn't go away.
One of Buddha's Four Noble Truths is that life involves suffering. We can dwell in our pains and misfortunes, letting life drag us to our fate in misery, or we can choose to see things through a more beneficial lens. A lens that trusts life and all the things that come our way, both good and bad. Give it a try.
Another quick way to shift your perspective is through gratitude. It's easy to forget about all the people and experiences we love when we're busy dwelling in the wrongs that have been done to us, but it's essential to our happiness.
Think about and start writing down things you are thankful for. Begin with one or two and you'll find that as you think about what you're grateful for, the list will grow, and so will your happiness. This quick and easy action will also strengthen your perspective, which again influences the way you experience everything.
Life is hard. Don't make it harder by allowing external factors to control your life, and don't just take it from me. Take it from Oprah, Jim Carrey, Charlize Theron, and the countless others who flipped the script on suffering to create a life they love.
The one thing you do have control of is your perspective.
What will yours be?
