Let’s start with a slightly different question – what does it mean to be a conscious being? We are all conscious beings reading this article, so why is this a remarkably difficult question to answer? A lot of the challenge hinges on the difficulty we seem to have with the word ‘conscious’. Lots of scientists, therapists, gurus and others can share their opinions on this, but the best definition that I have come across is that
Consciousness is simply awareness with a choice.
Thomas Campbell, physicist and consciousness researcher
Only conscious beings can hold a perspective on anything. A perspective is a point of view, a belief, a position – a particular attitude towards or way of regarding something. As a conscious being, when we think about perspective as an aspect of our consciousness, we can begin to peel back some of the layers to better understand where we have control, and where we don’t.
Another way of thinking about ourselves as people is that we are ‘meaning-making machines’. As we go through life, we are aware of our outer and inner environments – the people, places and objects in our lives, and our internal thoughts, feelings and responses. When we experience something, we tend to create a sense of meaning around that experience. We do not simply experience the event itself – we build a story, a narrative to help us understand that experience, to help us to make sense of it in the context of our life. We create meaning out of events and experiences all the time.
But how is any of this relevant to our original question, regarding powerful perspectives? As we go about our days, particularly early in our lives, we create meaning out of all of our experiences. We build our personal system of assumptions and beliefs about how the world works, and how we work within it. We form our own personal ‘truth’ if you like, and we start to see the world from that new perspective.
It’s as though our experiences are building blocks, with each new experience first being interpreted in the context of our existing beliefs and expectations, and then adding or taking away from our system of beliefs and assumptions. We become slightly different, and new experiences will then be viewed from this new perspective.
We’re generally consciously unaware of this process as it happens. Our mind simply creates meanings and associations automatically for us, and it lays down our new perspective without skipping a beat. The phrase ‘viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses’ is an example of this – it describes a person who is optimistic about the world, so every new experience looks rosy and positive, even if it holds the normal fair degree of uncertainty.
So how can we use these ideas to help us understand how to hold more powerful perspectives, and what benefits can we expect to gain from doing so?
Limiting our Experience
We can try to become more conscious of the impact of our experiences on forming our perspective on life. We can also invest some time in trying to understand how our current perspectives may be limiting our experience, filtering our view of the available opportunities based on our current expectations.
Upgrading our Perspectives
We can also more actively work on upgrading our perspectives, seeking to change and adjust our underlying beliefs, expectations and assumptions which can have a major impact on how we perceive the world. By doing so, it can be surprising how long-standing issues and challenges can simply dissolve and fade away when we can truly think and feel about them from new perspectives.
Making change can be difficult. Traditional approaches tend to revolve on repetition as a means to form new habits, replacing old habits of thinking and feeling. Psychological approaches often follow this strategy, and long periods of talk therapy are often required to effectively change our thinking and feeling responses. This is generally because our subconscious mind can require repetition in order to render the new ways of thinking and feeling as more important than our current strategy.
It can be a successful means of achieving changes by focusing on our subconscious mind – often resulting in change happening much more quickly, and often more effectively. Our critical conscious mind can relax a little and the suggestions provided can more effectively influence the subconscious mind. An experienced therapist can use this mechanism to help us to replace unhelpful assumptions and beliefs with new, more helpful and more powerful perspectives.
At Powerful Perspectives, we have personal experience in the benefits of changing our perspective on life’s challenges and problems. If you are currently dealing with anxiety or depression, coping with grief or trauma, managing fears or phobias, struggling with dependencies on alcohol or medications, or one of a wide range of issues, we can work with you to develop your own new, more powerful perspectives.