Everything is never as it seems…

I think a lot about perspective.  I talk a lot about perspective.  When I coach someone, that’s really the focus of the calls….”how can you find a perspective that feels better to you”?  Although sometimes it may not seem that important to look for and find a different perspective, perspective is everything; it’s the difference between feeling good and feeling bad.  Perspective makes you trust, or perspective makes you doubt.  Perspective makes you expect good things to unfold for you, or perspective makes you expect things to go wrong.  Perspective makes you feel like a failure, or perspective makes you feel good and worthy and perfect just the way you are.  Perspective can re-write your past into one that was just as it should have been and perfect in the way it unfolded and create your future into one that is full of joy, meaning, and richness in every sense of the word.  So when I say “everything is never as it seems”, I mean that your perspective in the moment determines your interpretation.  The same situation or condition can be interpreted as one that benefits you or one that is to your detriment, but the condition or situation is the same; it’s your interpretation of it that determines the meaning and the outcome.  One hundred people could be reading this blog, and each one of you will have a different interpretation because we all perceive through the lenses that we’ve created.  When you drive through a town going one way you see things from that perspective.  When you turn around and come back through the same town but in the opposite direction, doesn’t it look different somehow, even though it’s the same town?  The same buildings are there, in the same location, but somehow, it looks different.  There’s nothing wrong with the perspective that you’re taking in any moment, the question is, “does this perspective that I’m choosing feel good”?  I assist people in finding ways of feeling good, or at least as good as they can, no matter what the condition(s) are.  To find ways of reaching for perspectives that allow you to feel good without needing anything to change in your experience, because when you need something to change in your experience before you can feel good, you’re holding yourself hostage to the conditions, rather than feeling the power that you were born with.  So, technically, nothing has changed but you feel good and when you feel good, you’re not so attached to the outcomes and that thing that you “needed” to change, you really only wanted it to change because you thought you’d feel better if it did, right?  So why not reach for, and find a way of looking at it that brings you some relief and feels good?  If you can, you’re just really taking a short-cut to what you really thought you wanted as a result of that condition changing….only you didn’t have to wait for it to change to feel good.  You felt good first, then the condition changed.  That’s how you begin to see your creative power.  You decide to feel good anyway, not needing or demanding people or conditions to change….not needing to have your bank account reflect more money, not needing your children to cut their hair, not needing your spouse to behave differently, not needing your mother/father/brother/friend to be any different, not needing to change jobs, or needing your environment to change before you can feel better.  Instead, you find a perspective that feels better, and then find another perspective that feels a little better than that, and another and another until you make peace with where you are, with what’s unfolding, and in doing that not only do you enjoy the journey more, but you’re having a happy journey to more and more happy journeys.  There really is no destination; there are only journeys and every step along the way is the beginning to more and more journeys and if you’re holding out until you get to the destination before you get happy, you’re going to have a really crappy-feeling journey to a very mediocre destination.  Everything that you want is because you think it will make you feel a certain way once you “get” it.  You’re using that thing as your reason to imagine that having it will make you feel fulfilled, happy, playful, complete, on purpose, rich, abundant, satisfied, interested.  So if you can shift your perspective in any given situation, find a way to feel better now, rather than wait for some condition/person to change or improve, you’ll get the benefit now of feeling better, and soon after the manifestation will shift to reflect your new-found better-feeling perspective.