Change your perspective Change your life

We all know that life is full of challenging situations. The question is, how do we respond to them? With fear or with full, confident, attention?

Danny Cox, famous author and professional keynote speaker, who was a supersonic all-weather fighters in the United States Air Force, gives an interesting pilot analogy on “perspective”.

“On the supersonic fighters, I flew, we had a big yellow “master caution light” at the top of the instrument panel, where you could see it easily. When that thing came on, it meant that you needed to look down at the “idiot panel” and see which “idiot light” was lit up – indicating which major system had gone wrong.  The point was to pay real close attention to what the lights were telling you and react in a specific way.

We need to have a similar “master caution light” for ourselves – a pin-off of being highly motivated, and that motivation in turn comes about as a result of seeing what you want really good in your mind and committing your strength totally to achieving your goal. Once you do that, intuition kicks in and goes to work on figuring out what new problems you’re going to run into. It also helps you prepare for those problems.”

We need the light of our own intuition to go off and remind us to check over all the little details that may be going wrong unnoticed – details that will eventually reach up and bite us if we’re not careful. Checking the master caution light is one of the things you need to be sensitive to when you check how you feel at the end of the day. It’s essentially the same thing as asking yourself, “Have I overlooked something important?” and listening carefully to what you hear in response.

If that master caution light is on, go back through the day and check to see which problem areas are lit up, so you can give them the attention they need.  Dr. Spencer Johnson used the metaphor of cheese, in his book “Who moved my cheese” for this caution light. We all have caution light, but living in our comfort zone, we tend to overlook when it starts flashing, or we start convincing ourselves that there might be some snag, soon the light will go off and everything would be fine. But there is nothing in this world which happens on its own, there is always a cause for any effect. On seeing the caution light, we should respond like firemen, stay calm, remember the drill, carry what is needed, and give it all we have.

We all have problems. The trick is to learn to look at a problem as a challenge. My friend and business associate Mr. Sameer Bhatia taught me to fix my vocabulary and replace the word problem with challenge. This little tweaking with my language, developed an entirely new insight and changed my way to look at the obstacles, difficulties and problems which no longer remained problems but transformed into challenges. The word problem has a negative connotation, which puts you down, automatically generates negative and defeating chain of thought; whereas, challenge has positive connotation, the mere sound of the word, asks you to get up and face it, and the voice inside you starts singing, yes you can conquer it, it also starts playing old tapes of your successes and achievement, just in case.

Long back, I read somewhere – “If you can’t change a situation, change your attitude towards it”. I still trust this. There are many situations around you which pose challenge to you, but you can’t fix them instantly, but changing your attitude towards them, changes your way of looking at them, and gives your mind clues to surpass, overcome or circumvent it.

Another advantage of looking at problems as challenges, it makes you in-charge, puts you in the driving seat, stops you form looking at the problems, as an opportunity to win sympathy from others, stops you from self-dramatizing, and holding a placard saying – “I am miserable, please pity me”; when you can’t fix it.  

Nicholas James Vujicic is a Serbian-Australian Christian evangelist and motivational speaker born with tetra-amelia syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by the absence of arms and legs. He is one of the seven known individuals planet-wide who live with the syndrome. But Nick is not just living, he is living a full meaningful life, he is helping millions globally by his motivational speeches, he has authored 5 best sellers, got married and has 4 children.

Nick had a choice of considering himself disable and had a choice living dependent on others and no one would have blamed him, because one can not imagine a person without any limbs could be independent and lead a normal life. But he had a different perspective to life, being born with the disorder was not his choice, but how to lead his life was his choice, and he chose to take it as challenge. So  tetra-amelia syndrome was not a problem, it became a challenge. Nick was all geared up to take that challenge head on, and he did.

We all tend to look at the problems we’re experiencing as the biggest ever, until we stop and think about how accurate that assessment really is. The next time you’re facing a major challenge, ask yourself, “Is this situation the worst one I’ve ever faced? How do the problems I’m facing now compare with the biggest problems I’ve ever encountered?” This will help you have your winner cap on and would instil a will to overcome the obstacle. Don’t ever consider yourself a loser. You can’t solve the problem – or even address it – if you are busy convincing yourself that you’re doomed.