» Need to Change your Perspective?

One of the things that can hold you back from achieving what you want in life is your attitude, the way you think about things, the perspective you have on the world and yourself within it.

To succeed and achieve you need a positive attitude … to be able to take the disappointments and setbacks in your stride … to pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again. To be happy you need the right perspective on life.

It’s more normal, and perhaps easier, to think negative thoughts rather than positive ones, especially if the people around you tend to be negative. The media spends far more time reporting, and dissecting, bad news stories far more than in promoting good news. In fact although reporters do analyze their story from several different perspectives, they still struggle to find a positive angle in many cases. They encourage people to live in the negative – it sells papers better.

Given this environment, it’s not surprising to hear people claiming that they can’t change their attitude, they can’t get a different (better) perspective on their life.

‘It’s how I am’ you might hear. Or ‘Everyone else is saying that’, or ‘Things never change round here, it’s always been like this and it always will’. All signs of a negative attitude, a perception that does nothing to support the possibility of progress.

How difficult is it to change your perspective?

Come with me on a journey:

I live in a small town that climbs up several hundred feet from the sea to a hill top, then spreads out along it. There’s one road that snakes its way back and forth down the hillside, plus lots of alleys and stairways that form a much more direct, if steeper route from bottom to top.

Just a few steps and a few minutes changes this point of view...

Join me at the bottom of a stairway. Behind we can just see the sea through the crowded buildings. Let’s start up the stairs. Climb for just a minute then we’ll look back. Now we’re in among the rows of houses lining the hillside. We can see some rooftops, and hints of green – trees and shrubs where there seemed to be just houses before.

Let’s go further – just another minute or so. We cross the road where the houses are less close together, and start up a fairly steep, curving alleyway. Looking back we can now see the sea over the rooftops, and across to the opposite shore. There’s the dome of a small church that wasn’t visible before, and the houses are proving to be varied in design and size.

And up again. We’re more than half way to the top already, and another minute puts us in sight of the hill top itself. Now when we turn back we can see the harbor wall stretching out into the sea, and several small fishing and rowing boats bobbing around in the swell. Orange trees and brightly colored bougainvillea grow in small gardens and even smaller courtyards. And in among the buildings we see the signs of time passing –an abandoned house here, a new structure partly built there.

...into this

Finally we reach the top. Rows and rows of tiled rooftops spread out below us, and we can see from the castle at one end of town to the main road at the other. And then we turn around. The hill slopes down again towards the sea on the other side of the headland. It’s less crowded here, with houses dotted among the olive and grape fields. The waves are crashing on the shore far below.

Just climbing a few feet and looking back gave us a different perspective. Each time we had the opportunity to see something different, something new, that added to our knowledge and understanding of the scene.

It wasn’t difficult. All we had to do was take a few steps forward each time, and open our eyes.

And that’s what you need to do to change your perspective, to get the positive attitude you need for happiness, success and achievement. Take a single small step: find the positive in something, or replace a discouraging thought with an encouraging one.

Then do it again…

and again…

and again…

And whenever you encounter a negative thought or attitude, in yourself or someone else. Turn around and move away from it.