How to look at things from a new perspective
Every day is full of events. Some of them won’t be what we want them to be. How we interpret those events has a huge impact on our ability to face them, how the stress affects our physical health, and our overall well-being.
One way you can interpret these events is either by seeing it as a threat or by seeing it as a challenge you can master.
To move our interpretation more towards the ‘challenge’ side, there are a few practical things you can do.
A lot of our interpretation has to do about how demanding we believe the event is and how confident we feel about the resources we have to meet it.
Demands are things like: how unfamiliar the stressor is, how hard it looks, and how threatening it feels to our selves or lives.
Resources are your knowledge, capabilities, relationships, and experiences.
To shift towards a ‘challenge’ orientation, you can focus on what you have that helps you to address the stressor. Ask yourself:
Have you overcome something like this before?
What strengths do you have that you can use?
What have you learned about facing stressors in the past?
Who can support and help you in this moment?
You can also remind yourself that this is something that you haven’t mastered — yet.
Every new experience is hard at the beginning. Think back to the last time you started something new, like a new job or school. You are learning everything for the first time. You don’t know who to ask for help. You aren’t sure what ‘good’ looks like. New things are cognitively and emotionally exhausting. But over time, as we all know, new things do get easier. Use the magic word — “yet” — and remind yourself that you just haven’t mastered this, yet, but you will, just as you have done before in other hard, challenging situations.
Not every event can be reinterpreted, of course. But by shifting towards a new way of seeing stressors, we can bring more peace and happiness to our lives.
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