Shifting Your Perspective

In the process of your personal growth, you are constantly having to reinterpret experiences in your life. In other words, you have to take your experiences into your mental world and process them again to gain a more objective view - one that is free of the emotions in play at the time it occurred.

For the creative entrepreneur this is extremely important. You're constantly encountering new information and stepping into unknown arenas. It's only natural that some of these experiences would appear to be confusing or ambiguous.

Remember those figures you've seen that look like a beautiful woman one moment and an ugly hag the next? Well, using such figures, studies have shown that after a person was asked to view the image only in their memory, they were better able to view the other figure. The same is true for you.

The best results come when you take your experience into your mental world and consciously review and re-interpret them. When you do, you're able to gain a new perspective of your business and your place in it.

Your experiences increase your knowledge, and your reviews of them will increase your understanding. The bottom line is that the color or the character of your Universe shifts as your vantage point of life changes.

The process of becoming an enduring, successful entrepreneur requires the process of personal growth. If you deliberately engage in this process of review and re-interpretation of your experiences, you will never react quite the same way again to situations related to your work. Plus, it influences your behavior in all areas of your life. The change may not come in large increments, but it will come.

You Can Never Go Back

Once you start this process, you can never go back. I don't just mean that you can't stop reviewing and re-interpreting your life. I mean that you can never go back to your previous level of understanding.

Have you ever gone back to a physical place - your home town, your old high school - and found it didn't resonate with you the same way you remembered? What about friends from another time? Getting back together with them is often uncomfortable because you find that you don't view each other or the world today the way you did before. You have to make adjustments and establish a new reference point with them.

The same is true of your experiences when you engage in this process we're talking about today. The next time you have an angry customer or you're in unfamiliar territory, you won't be able to respond in the same way you did before because your current understanding provides a different vantage point for you.

All the best on your quest,
Dannye