New Perspectives and Appreciation

By nature, I am a person who does a lot of self-reflection about my feelings, strengths, weaknesses, and attitudes. This part of my personality is both good and bad. The good part is that I'm always learning from my life experiences and thinking about what I could do better next time (Event + Response = Outcome). We don't control most of the events in our lives, but the power we have is to control our response, which can greatly influence the outcome. The bad part of all this reflection is that I can sometimes be overly sensitive about things that happen and I get hurt easily. I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. I'm just not good at hiding my feelings.

I'm not sure exactly why, but over the last several weeks, I have been doing a great deal of thinking about all of the things in my life. Between the leadership books that I've been reading, the books on CD that I have been listening to, and the things that I've been watching on TV, I feel like I have gained a whole new perspective on life and have a much greater appreciation for it.

I just finished listening to Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on CD and found it to be paradigm-shifting. Between Stephen Covey, the leadership stuff, and the Planet Green network, I feel like I am a newborn looking at the world for the first time. Stephen Covey says that we think we see the world as it is, but we don't. We see the world as we are, and the only true objectivity lies in understanding that we are inherently subjective and understanding what assumptions, opinions, and biases make up how we see the world. Wow! I had never really thought of it that way before, but Covey is totally right. We are so quick to make assumptions and judgments based on our past experiences and those assumptions are so often wrong. He tells a story about a store manager overhearing an employee say to a customer, "We haven't had any and won't be getting any soon." After the customer walked out, the manager chastised the employee and told him never to say that to a customer. He told the employee to tell customers that we'll soon be getting whatever it is that they're asking about. He then asked the employee about what the customer had inquired and the employee's response was, "rain."

For me, a personal example of making snap judgments is a woman that I dated shortly after I finished college. She was so quick to judge people after only knowing them for a few hours and then she would make disparaging statements about them. Most of the time these statements were superficial and elitist. This really turned me off and was the main reason that I knew her and I had no future. Some of the people that she was judging were people who I had grown up with and whose backgrounds I knew well. She made all of these assumptions without knowing or attempting to understand what they had experienced in their lives that shaped who they were.

The end result of all this self-reflection and self-analysis that I've been doing recently combined with all that I have been learning is a fresh perspective on my life. I appreciate my friends, family, coworkers, and loved ones more than I did even a few days ago. All of my relationships seem more important to me now and I cherish them all more dearly.