A Useful Perspective

I’m in Saigon this week with clients (officially Ho Chi Minh City. I was relieved to find the locals still refer to it as Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City is long to say. And write).

In between work activities, I’ve found time to pursue conversations with local residents. And something rather interesting has come up:

The war that I’ve always known as “The Vietnam War”—they know as “The American War.” 

A bit of a mind-bender, really. Something that's always been so concrete in my experience has a different concreteness elsewhere. Elsewhere here.

Thus endeth the reference to war. This entry isn’t about war, it’s about perspective. 

Perspective is a powerful thing. The way we see things and understand things, the interpretations we make, the expectations we form, all relate to our perspective. And it has the power to inform the thinking and the actions of people at a global level, a national level, a local level, an individual level.

The individual level:

Take a look at your perspective on…you choose: a relationship, your career, yourself as a person, anything that’s critical to you right now. Maybe the way you’ve been looking at your relationship with one of your colleagues hasn’t been serving you or helping you to form a productive relationship. Maybe your perspective on your career has made you stagnant or caused you to lose energy and not take productive action. Perhaps your perspective on yourself is in some way not serving you, has sapped you of your sense of what’s possible for you.

We must deal in facts and truth, not simply perception, yes. Well, one of the facts is that, as humans, there is an element of perspective in just about any situation. And another is that we typically don't step outside of our perspective to see if there's another way to look at things. A better, more useful way.

This week, choose one area that’s important to you right now and in which you feel stuck at some level, and ask yourself if your perspective on the situation is helping you or hindering you. If it’s the latter, consider looking at the situation from a new perspective—one that is productive for you and helps you to get unlocked and move forward.