Perspective

I wanted to keep this post short but then I started thinking about perspective and how we sometimes lose perspective. When you are in the middle of the woods you really can't see the forests for the trees but if you step away from the woods (and maybe go up on a hill) you can see the entire forest. We all develop habituated ways of thinking about situations & people that can affect our perspective. Habits of thought can cause us to miss cues from the universe that we are headed the wrong way. Spending twenty or thirty minutes a day reading, listening to or watching something from the recommended materials (or even some you may have discovered for yourself) can help us keep perspective and change our habits of thought.
Our habitual thinking is what has manifested the things we have had in our lives, all of our lives. And its these habits of thought that we want to change (if we are looking for more prosperity) and we all know, habits can be hard to break. I love how Jim Rohn describes this; think of your mind as a garden. Negative thoughts are weeds. You can be thinking all day every day, no weeds, no weeds, no weeds but weeds are going to come. You have to pull them up by the roots and throw them away. And you need to understand the seasons. You plant the seeds but you don't have blooms the next day, it takes some time for them to sprout and grow. Even more time to get to the harvest and there is always going to be winter. We each have barriers and walls we have to break thru to have success. For each of us these come at different times and are different things. Personal development helps you break thru faster and with less effort than you would or even could without it. The difference between a success and a loss is perspective; you either look at something and see only the problems or you look at the same thing and see only the possibilities, solutions and rewards. I say that because the average person hasn't yet developed the skills and the ability to focus on the solution and not the problem, the barrier. This is winter. When winter comes you either find a way or you quit. It's that simple. People who quit usually blame everybody and everything except themselves. But this is where personal development changes everything. You learn that winter will pass and if you have tended your garden with care, spring will see your garden blossom. The thing about winter is that you don't always know when it is coming because its different for everyone. The secret to surviving winter is to build that positive mindset and focus on solving the problem. Its uncomfortable to find yourself up against the wall but you stretch, you do the uncomfortable and it starts to feel comfortable. You break thru the wall and you feel fantastic. You build confidence and then when you get to the next wall, you know how to get thru it and you gain even more confidence. Surprisingly, you get to a point where you welcome walls because you understand what getting thru them does for you and that is when you see yourself in a better light. That is when you will see that your habitual thinking is positive, its serene, you are full of love for life and people including yourself. There is an expression that the bigger the breakthrough the bigger the payoff because of what you get when you break through.
So take a step back every once in a while, and look at things from the outside-from a different perspective-and you might be surprised, perhaps pleasantly surprised.