Change Your Perspective; Change Your Life.

I was watching an interview the other day, and it was a gentleman who was in the CIA, and he was explaining how the CIA trains their operatives on how to define the words perception and perspective. At first I heard it, and I had to go back and play it again because I was a little confused with the two words. And the melody line was this. When you have a perception of something and that comes from the way that you're experiencing whatever it is you're experiencing or whoever you're experiencing, it's your perception, and that comes from the eye. It's you and I, and you is limited. It's limited because, you know, at the end of the day, we don't know anything, and we are limited by our perception of everything. And if you've ever had anyone kind of give you an insight and all of a sudden you, like, blew your mind, because all of a sudden now you see something differently, that's going to be the perspective. And when you can compare perception and perspective and understand how big that gap is, you don't want to live in a world where you're trapped by a perception, because, again, you're limited by the way that you see certain things in certain people. And a lot of times that's going to be determined on how you feel, which means that your emotions are going to drive how you think and how you act, and that's the last place that you want to make deliberate decisions from. Because our emotions go up and down, and sometimes we're. We're on a high, and sometimes we're on a low. And typically when we're on a low, we tend to react, and that is not the time to be making important decisions in your life. And so, again, we're limited by our perception of everything. But when you can glean a person, you know, a perspective from someone else, maybe someone close to you, maybe someone that you're learning from, maybe you can get some feedback from someone, or you have a coach, or you have a family member, a spouse, anyone. It allows you to take an objective view of whatever it is that you're thinking about or whatever you're experiencing. And when you can get an objective view and take the emotion out of it, that changes the way that you see everything. You know, my old coach, Dan Sullivan, used to say, change your perception, change your life. And. And it's true, because you can just change something that you're looking at, and it can completely change everything. And I used to go to these strategic Coach workshops every 90 days with all these entrepreneurs, and I'd sit at these tables, and I was the little guy. These guys around me were extremely successful and had built companies really big, a lot larger than mine. And they had experienced a lot of the struggles that I was dealing with before, and they had solved those problems. And when they made a comment and they helped me see something that I couldn't see, they illuminated a blind spot, something that I'd been stuck in just in my own perception for so long. I would walk out of those workshops and I really felt like my entire business completely changed. And I can't tell you how many times it did because it happened so many times. And I was always excited to learn from all these individuals who had been there and done it before, because they're. Their perspective on everything was different than mine. And as a very emotional person myself, I always say, I'll go with my gut. And I can't tell you how many times that I went with my gut, and it served me well. But there have been probably more times where it didn't. And there's probably more times where I had to look back at a problem or a mistake that I made and realize that I went with my gut and it was an emotional decision, and I regretted it and wish I wouldn't have done it. So even though conventional wisdom tells us, go with your gut, listen to your gut. You know, you have to challenge that. You have to challenge why you think that. And one of the ways to do that is to study yourself and become a student of your actions, Take an accounting of your decisions and look back and see how things went and see how things, you know, resulted from whatever it is that you were doing in your life so that you could see, wow, I made a mistake. And I made that decision when I was really emotional about something or because I saw it a certain way. So the bottom line is you want to change your perception, get the objective view and not the emotional view, and stop going so much with your gut. If you're going to go gamble, you don't want to go gamble with your gut. You want to gamble from an objective place where you make a decision, where you can kind of see all the different sides of whatever it is you're experiencing and then make a decision and not in the heat of a moment when you're just in an emotional state. So, again, perception and perspective know the difference. And don't be part of the 99% of the people who are stuck and trapped in this world where they're just. They don't even know there's a different perspective. That's. That's pretty. That's pretty big.