Welcome to another Wednesday Wisdom. Every week, I share with you what I’m thinking about life, work, and leadership. This week we’re talking about perspective.
Some days it feels like the world is conspiring against us. You know those days, where it seems like everyone got up with the express purpose of f**king up your day? Slow walkers, unhelpful customer service staff, annoying emails and people cutting you off in traffic abound. What’s everyone’s problem?!
On the days when you’re really in the hole, it seems like there’s a new problem waiting around every corner, and that gets exhausting. If you’re not careful, too many days like this can lead us into total burnout.
The answer to this is simple: we need better perspective. Perspective is something we’re pretty good at when we look backwards. In hindsight, we’re often grateful for our biggest challenges, because we can see how they changed us and what we learned. We’re also pretty good at doing that to look forwards, when we set goals and think about the steps to get there. What we’re not so great at is cultivating perspective in the present.
That’s not our fault – it’s how our brains work. The closer you are to something, the more important it seems. Our brains are wired to put immediate threats first, which makes sense from an evolutionary biology standpoint. We need to react to the threats in front of us, to stay alive. This is great when we’re staring down a woolly mammoth, but not so useful when we turn into reactive drama queens, panicking at every new email and catastrophising every relationship, project or meeting that doesn’t go to plan.
Given we’re so good at putting things into perspective in retrospect, it can be helpful to play Future You when everything seems unmanageable.
Try thinking about your life as a book, and about this disaster or phase as an event or a chapter. You can do things like…
• Create a monthly breakdown, mapping key events from each month
• Draw a timeline of your year on a wall or whiteboard, to see how it all fits together.
No matter how you do it, the trick is to zoom out and see how your problem, day or challenge fits into the big picture. Very little is as important as it seems at the time.
For more on this, check out last year’s most popular article:
4 Steps to Playing the Long Game.
You might also like to download this neat little workbook, packed full of exercises and templates to get you thinking. Enjoy!
Til next week,
A