a bag of perspective exercises

Every now and then we get caught up in thinking things are a certain way and we become blind to what is real.

It is in those moments that we need to have a perspective exercise.

Some traditional exercises are:

Asking yourself if this thing will matter in 5 minutes?

Will this thing matter in 5 years?

What if you were in their shoes? How would life be?

These are all perspective exercises to keep in a mental bag for when you start thinking a certain way.

The other way is using math to gain perspective.

Example: “I can’t believe my classmate acts that way!”

What we can do here is ask ourselves how much time out of my week do I interact with this person?

You may say well we have class 3 times a week for an hour each day. So that’s a total of 3 hours right?

Wrong. You probably only interact with this person a few minutes every class. Let’s say you interact for a collective 20 minutes each class — that’s an hour a week.

1 hour out of your 168 hours. Do the math… you see this person .5% of your time.

If you try to change this person’s attitude I can tell you that you will fail miserably. Your .5% will not change what they do the rest of the 99.5% of the time.

That’s perspective. Enjoy the class, interact with your classmate and wish them well. Moving on….