Change Your Perspective, Change Your Life

I’m going to share something with you today that can change your life as soon as you start to apply it. It might seem ridiculous at first, but here it is: I tell my clients, "You don’t ever need to do anything you don’t want to do.” If you’re thinking, “What!?” do your best to keep an open mind because it’ll be worth it.

When my clients first hear what I’m saying, they think I’m either crazy or selfish. Sometimes they think I’m both. They tell me they have to do a lot of things they don’t want to do. “After all,” they say, “even if you love your job, you have to do some things you don’t want to.” Then I tell them that’s not true. Now they think I’m lying to them, but I’m not.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Whatever you do—even if it’s something you tell yourself you don’t want to do—you must see some benefit in doing it on some level or you wouldn’t do it. What if you stopped and asked yourself, “What are some ways I would benefit from doing this?” What if you went through your entire day with this question?

How would that change how you feel about everything you did? For instance, if you believe you have to go to a meeting you’ve been dreading, you’ll only make it worse by telling yourself, “I hate meetings. I don’t want to go to this meeting.” What if you worked to find the positive benefits in attending that meeting?”

I challenge my clients to dig deeper and ask themselves why they go to meetings they say they don’t want to go to. They start off by saying, “Because it’s part of my job and I’m expected to be there.” When I ask them to go on, they say, “I like my job. It’s how I help take care of my family, it pays for our vacations and it’s going to send my kids to college—so in the bigger scheme of things, I go to a meeting because it helps me do all the other things I want to do.”

Can you begin to see the difference of continuing to do things while telling yourself, “I don’t want to do this,” versus doing things after finding better reasons for doing so? Thinking, “I have to go to this meeting” will make you frustrated at best and miserable at worst. Thinking, “I want to go to this meeting, when I consider how it helps me in the long term,” will help you not only feel better, but will also empower you to be the professional you are.

It’s not that discovering the deeper and better reasons we do something turns it into one of our favorite things to do—it doesn’t. Finding the deeper reasons we have for doing what we know we’re going to do anyway changes our perspective. Wayne Dyer, Ph.D said it best:  “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” That’s why we sometimes say, “Perspective is everything.”

- Alan Allard, Executive Coach