How Changing Your Perspective Can Change Everything

Life is What You Make it

Today I’m going to make a lemon meringue pie. I’ve never made one before and I don’t have a recipe. But we’re gonna give it a go.

Ok, bear with me… it occurred to me that this is a great metaphor for how we live our lives. We’re all trying to bake the best thing we can with the ingredients we have, largely without a recipe. Some people might get lucky and nail it first time. Some of us make a right fucking mess. Over and over again. With practice and a lot of trial and error we might begin to make progress and start getting more palatable results. Some people turn to teachers or coaches so that they can learn from their recipes.

But the people that really nail it and serve up something we’ve never seen before do a combination of these things. They learn all they can from the best recipes they can find, and they experiment, they try shit out. They build on their mistakes and try again. And while there are certain key features that most people agree make a good one, there’s still no “right” way to do it. You can cook up whatever the fuck you want.

Now, our perspective on life is basically our recipe. The things we focus on, the things we pay attention to, are the things that will determine what we can make. Out of all the possibilities there are in the world, the things we choose to look at become the raw ingredients that will make up our entire life experience.

So how can we make a better life? By choosing the best, most wholesome, tastiest ingredients we can. Focusing on everything we love. Gratitude for everything that makes us happy. Everything we would wolf down every day if we could. If something tastes like shit, why do we keep putting it in the cake?

I’m gonna keep flogging a dead metaphor for a while longer. Because the other thing about perspective is, if we choose to look at things a different way, we can get a more enjoyable outcome without changing anything else. Our ingredients are the situations and events of our reality, and the recipe we choose to make from those events is the meaning we create. We can always combine the same ingredients into a completely different, tastier dish. If life keeps giving you lemons…

Religion vs. Spirituality

…What?

David Bowie was quoted as saying:

“Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for those who have been there.”

This is what spirituality is about. It’s about taking the moments of suffering we’ve experienced and trying to find a perspective that gives them meaning in a way that has the most positive benefit. Our times of suffering are our greatest teachers. It’s really irrelevant whether or not you believe it was the will of the divine, or the universe or whatever. Although I think there are a lot of other psychological benefits if you do. At its simplest, it’s a way for us to make peace with our past and keep moving forward without descending into bitterness and resentment.

When me and my ex split up during the pandemic, I was already depressed and lonely, and in that heart break I spent a lot longer than I’d like to admit blaming her for not being able to be more supportive and hating myself for not being stronger. I also spent a long time hating the world for Covid, for losing my job, for being isolated, for all of these things that were out of my control, that I believed contributed to us breaking up.

But now, two years on, I can look back at the situation and be grateful for the moments that became the catalyst to the greatest period of growth in my life. In those previous 9 months, I’d gone from possibly the happiest I’d ever been to hitting rock bottom, and it scared the shit out of me. It brought up every weakness and insecurity, and forced me to confront all of the ways I was not living in alignment with my values, or showing up as the man I wish to be. The intensity and urgency of those feelings drove me to action. The events themselves haven’t changed, but my perspective on them and the meaning I derive from them has shifted completely.

When I was in the depths of my depression and struggling to straighten myself out, I was actively trying to catch my thoughts and redirect them to more useful perspectives. Sometimes I’d have to do it hundreds of times a day. And I would get so angry and frustrated at myself – hating myself for feeling like a victim.

When we get stuck in that place of feeling like a victim it’s because our life is not where we want it to be, and we don’t know how to go about starting to put it back together. I hear a lot of advice that centres around telling people not to play the victim. But I don’t actually think that’s particularly helpful when you’re in the middle of things. Sometimes life kicks out your legs or breaks your eggs and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to feel sorry for yourself when everything you had planned falls apart. And actually I’d argue that it’s necessary to motivate you to take action and do something about it, to prove to yourself what you’re capable of.

Giving other people, or even our selves, a hard time for behaving like a victim will only ever compound the shame and keep us stuck. The only way through is compassion and acceptance for what we’ve been through and where we are. I truly believe that everyone is doing the best they can with the circumstances they have been dealt. It is a monumental task to face our demons and change ourselves.

There’s no shame in feeling hurt and angry at things that were out of your control or when you didn’t know better. You have every fucking right to grieve for that loss. But you still have to take action to move on from it and find a way to bounce back stronger. And that doesn’t have to be done independently of feeling like a victim of whatever your circumstances are.

Thoughts vs. Feelings

I learned another thing about perspective. And this really blew my mind when I started to notice it. Even a year, 18 months on from that break up, there were times when I woke up feeling a bit depressed, maybe I partied a bit too hard at the weekend, but in that depressed state, my thoughts still reverted to ruminating on blaming my ex or the pandemic or whatever.

After we broke up, the UK went straight back into lockdown, so I had plenty of time sitting alone thinking about it for those neural pathways to become deeply embedded.

But, what I realised was happening in these moments, was that, when I was feeling depressed, my mind started looking around for a reason to justify it. Something to explain the feelings that I was experiencing.

After that breakup I was in a dark place, and it became a well trodden thought loop in my head, so my brain would default to playing that back to me when I felt down. But when I was feeling good it didn’t cross my mind.

What’s happening here, is that we feel a certain feeling and our brains scan our environment looking for what could be causing it. Our mind weighs up the most likely causes and we make a decision on what is causing us to feel this way. We actually make decisions based on our feelings and emotions, and then rationalise a reason that seems to make the most sense from the information we have available in that moment.

So, we are feeling a feeling and then looking for the cause. But rationally, we experience it as this situation externally is making us have this feeling.

I’d love for you to spend some deliberate time trying to get your head around this, because I truly believe that it could save so many relationships if couples can find a way to talk about it.

We are so often unaware of the real cause of our feelings and, sadly, our partners often get the blame because they just happen to be nearest in the firing line. We get home frustrated after a tough day at work and snap at our partner for not doing the dishes. We feel lonely while our partner happens to be working hard on a project and we have a go at them for not spending more time with us. Or as I said, I woke up feeling hungover and depressed after a big night out and my brain blamed my ex!

Communication

A good way to think about it is, if I felt happy, secure and loved in this moment, would I still give a shit about the situation? Our feelings are not our partner’s responsibility but, in a healthy relationship, we need to find ways to communicate what’s going on inside us and sharing our needs without projecting and blaming.

You know, in the midst of the pandemic, the whole world was stuck at home, stressed about money, isolated, so much uncertainty, and I believe so many relationships fell apart at that time because people weren’t able to articulate and understand their feelings, and instead unconsciously projected them onto their partners.

After 9 months of uncertainty I was depressed and lonely, I didn’t know what I was going to do for work, I didn’t know whether to stay in London or move to be closer to my girlfriend. I felt ashamed at not being stronger because we were all in a similar situation. It crept up on me slowly and I wasn’t fully aware of it or able to explain it to anyone. And yet my brain still wanted to blame my girlfriend for not being supportive, when I didn’t even understand what was going on myself, let alone her.

How to Change Your Perspective 

Let’s break this down into something more useable. Since the situation with that breakup, I’ve cycled through countless perspectives on what happened, and each one has changed the meaning I derived from that experience, and as a result, it changed my reality.

Looking at the three examples I mentioned earlier, the first perspective was blaming my ex for not being there for me when I needed her. What I made that mean was that, no matter how hard I tried, I was rejected and abandoned when I needed support the most. That I wasn’t good enough or worthy of love. So that’s what I took into my reality. I felt worthless and hated myself.

The second perspective was that, if the pandemic hadn’t happened, if I hadn’t lost my job and been isolated, then I would never had got depressed and we wouldn’t have ended up in this situation. I made that mean that the world was unfair and that I was a victim, helpless and at the mercy of life. So that’s the way I saw the world. I hated everything and felt like giving up.

But the third perspective was seeing the situation as insight into the places where I wasn’t living by my values, wasn’t being honest with myself or my girlfriend, like a magnifying glass pointed at my insecurities and fears.

The meaning I choose to derive from that is that everything in life is a lesson that’s showing us where we still need to grow. I can be grateful for the opportunity to look at my weaknesses and begin taking action to address them. Now none of these perspectives are objectively true, but each has been my reality for a time and they all influenced my behaviour accordingly.

Understanding that I can take any number of contrasting meanings from the same situation proves to me that we largely see what we ‘choose’ to see. None of them are real, but we believe them to be true and act as if they are.

All we can actually learn from our perspective of a situation is insight into our own personal biases in the way we see the world. That means there are clues to any lingering traumas, insecurities or fears right in front of us all the time, and making the effort to look for alternative perspectives is a great way to start letting go of those old patterns that no longer serve us.

Now this doesn’t mean lying to ourselves or living in fantasy. As well as our personal, subjective ‘truths’ in a situation, there are still objective facts that are undeniable and we must remain in alignment with these. And that’s not to mention trying to navigate the subjective realities of all the people around us. People say communication is key but, actually, it’s understanding that is key. Your partner, family, friends, don’t see the world the way you do so the real work is in taking the time to unpack their perspective, and reduce the distance between theirs and yours.

In a recent newsletter, James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, said:

“Without altering the facts of the situation I am facing and without ignoring the reality of what must be done, what is the most useful and empowering story I can tell myself about what is happening and what I need to do next?”

So you see, choosing other perspectives is about empowering ourselves to make the best possible dish with the ingredients we have in front of us. Searching for meaning that helps us learn and grow, to move towards a life that makes us happier instead of allowing situations to leave us bitter and resentful. We can make it mean anything we want, so we may as well make it good.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your perspective and if there’s anything else you’d like me to talk about then let me know in the comments too.