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Using Borrowed Spectacles

Written by: Andrew Campbell-Watt

Article Overview: You are your own expert. No one knows you like you do.To truly see your problems or concerns and to examine your life you must look through your own eyes, your own spectacles, using your own experiences, your honesty and your values. Not someone else’s. In other words do not use borrowed spectacles. If you have ever tried this you will be aware of the distortion, almost a pain, that is experienced when looking through the lenses. Your vision is distorted and does not allow you to see the true picture or vision of what life has presented to you.

Using Borrowed Spectacles

Always remember that you are the expert on your own life. No one knows you like you do. So if you think you have a problem or concerns of any kind, you are the one to solve it or to allay the concerns. How else could it be? Nonsense, you might say. However, look at it this way. If you hurt yourself and need some stitches and you go to your local hospital to have it attended to, the doctor will suture the wound, to stop the bleeding, but it is your own body with its inbuilt resources that actually does the healing. The doctor is the facilitator. So it is with a business coach or mentor. All he or she does is to point you in the right direction and tell you to keep on walking.


To truly see your problems or concerns and to examine your life you must look through your own eyes, your own spectacles, using your own experiences, your honesty and your values. Not someone else’s.

In other words do not use borrowed spectacles. If you have ever tried this you will be aware of the distortion, almost a pain, that is experienced when looking through the lenses. Your vision is distorted and does not allow you to see the true picture or vision of what life has presented to you.


Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we used when we created them”. There is no need to read from a script written by someone else (parents, peers or authority figures). It is most desirable to write your own. Unless you do so it will be like trying to read using someone else’s spectacles, rather than your own. It will be difficult to see clearly what you are reading, what is meant. It all looks blurred.

To put it another way, if you are emotionally hurt, ask yourself, “What does this hurt want my life to look like?” If you are angry ask, “What does anger want my life to look like?” Simple questions, but with deep answers. You must look at “hurt” or “anger” through your eyes, your lenses, your spectacles – not someone else’s. Other people may offer advice, they will certainly have their opinions. But they do not know your problems, they do not know the troubles you have seen.


Borrowing strengths builds weakness – you must grow strong yourself. This means experiencing Life in all its wonder and glory. It means making mistakes; it means failing sometimes; it means falling down; it means getting up and trying again. Remember, we are all wayfarers on the journey along the Road of Life. And we all stumble on the Road. Those who stumble a lot we tend to call bad; those who stumble less we call good. But we all stumble.

This also means that we MUST accept responsibility for our own actions. To do otherwise is a) not honest and b) trying to see ourselves as others see us, or more to the point, as we THINK others see us - the image we think other have of us, which we feel we must live up to, to keep our place in the world.


In most cases we have chosen to accept someone else’s decisions. Someone who came before and who, presumably, must know better. Otherwise why accept their decision? Very few of the judgements we make on a daily basis, about what is “right” or “wrong” are made by us, based on our true understanding of the situation as presented. It often seems that the more important the decision, the less likely we are to use our own thoughts and ideas, based on our own experiences.


When all is said and done we are all Human Beings not just Human Doers. Just doing (particularly what others tell us to do) has not got us very far – in fact it has got us into a great deal of trouble! If only we could learn to be what we would choose to be, and then strive to become that.


Is it that we have our priorities wrong? It must never be forgotten that Mankind is the “end”, and must never be the “means”; that commercial enterprise and material production is for Man, not Man for commercial enterprise or material production.


The most deadly criticism that can levelled at the modern commercial and industrialised world – apart from the man made crises and catastrophes, is that it is not humanly interesting. Such a world can produce only a shadow man; incapable of choosing for himself; incapable of spontaneous, self directed activities; at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree, but increasingly irresponsible as his ability to exercise reason is diminished; finally he becomes a creature governed mainly by his conditioned reflexes. Such a person becomes almost the ‘ideal’ employee; one who does only what he is told; one who earns the highest praise from his employer, that “He does not make trouble”. This form of existence is an affront to the human spirit. It offends. This is deeply felt by many and the inevitable reaction to it is rebellion in some form or another, to individual suicide, or hopefully, but unfortunately very seldom, to a total renewal, a renaissance of the human spirit. Such a person, who renews himself, has had the courage, the strength of character to actually look at what they are doing through their own eyes, to see what is actually there. Not the view that they have been conditioned to see (by those deemed to be authority figures, or what the political or corporate ‘spin doctors’ want them to see), through borrowed spectacles.


The human being who has resigned himself to a life devoid of thinking, who has been constrained in his ambitions, pride and personal achievements, has resigned himself to the constriction, even the slow death of the attributes which are the distinctive elements of human life. Filling a space in an office chair or on a factory floor with your physical body, making motions designed by the minds of others, applying physical strength, or intellectual energies at the behest of others to fulfill their ideals, does nothing except reduce Man to a commodity, reducing his scope for happiness and increasing the likelihood of stress and lack of harmony in his life. It reduces the ability, so needed today, as George Bernard Shaw said, to dream of things that never were and ask, “Why not?”

To do this we need clear vision and an understanding of our true humanity, our true potential. No one can tell us who we are or what to see. We are our own experts, with our own eyes and our own lenses. We do not need borrowed spectacles.

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Article Tags: borrowed spectacles, experiences, honesty, human spirit, important decisions, judgements, own eyes, priorities, someone elses, spectacles, thoughts



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