While talking about this year with many people, I’ve found everyone feels the same. We are tired. Here and there we all have this ‘when this is over…’ mindset, waiting to get back to ‘the old normal’.
We are waiting to be back there to travel, meet friends, find a new job or a new partner. It is like a kind of promising future in a land out of opportunities.
At the beginning of this year, this called us offside. We tried to survive between life and work, not very aware of everything we were not allowed to do. But after some time like this, we began to desire. We irremediably missed our lives before.
Desire is part of our human nature.
It brings along illusion and purpose. And also, it can make us lose perspective. What happens when we want something and only that?
There’s nothing more, substitutes and alternatives are not enough. We can become the child wanting a lollipop and only a lollipop in a candy shop full of sweets, no lollipops.
Don’t get me wrong. We are not in a candy shop full of sweets. We are living a time full of challenges. And yet, full of opportunities.
There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2)
Let me use this quote from Hamlet to go into my topic today: how we can use reframing to find opportunities instead of looking at barriers.
So I am here struggling with the present, feeling annoyed and sad because I cannot meet my loved ones at Christmas, getting tired of these long on-line hours of work, thinking of how disengaged I am now from my co-workers and just waiting to go back to normal (vaccines through).
And in the meantime? Is there nothing more we can desire? It should be something that wake us up.
As Rory Sutherland states here, perspective is everything.
How can we change our perspective? Let’s try this on:
1.- What are you feeling now? Label it as accurate as you can. If your first thought is ‘bad’, think of what ‘bad’ exactly means. Maybe it is annoyed, anxious, depressed or sad.
2.- Why are you feeling that? What is the exact situation triggering the feeling? Again, the more accurate, the better. Describe it.
3.- Imagine you can lay that situation on the floor (just like if it was an object) and you take two steps backwards from it. What can you see from there? What if you go walk around it? And if you turn it upside down? Note the details.
4.- What have you found? What is different?
5.- With this new information, what are your new choices? What is possible now?
Many times, just backing off from the current situation and getting detached is enough to change our perspective. We can choose how to look at things, from where we make our judgements.
What you see depends on not only what you look at, but also, on where you look from.
How was it? You tell me.