Compared to a few months ago, how are you feeling about life these days?
I hope that you’ve had some time to decompress and destress—even if just a little. For many, the waning days of August feel like our last chance to recharge before the freneticism of fall begins.
Like clockwork, we’ll go from summer holidays and activities to back to school and/or “back in the game” at work. (Apparently, we’ll also be adding a few dashes of recession fear, inflation woes, and pandemic fatigue.)
Given the demands and pressure you’ll be facing this fall, imagine how you’ll feel about life two or three months from now: will you be empowered, energetic, and focused—or overwhelmed, worn out, and bogged down? Personally, the former sounds fabulous, but the latter is more likely. (Example: amid my renewed enthusiasm for global keynoting, the mere attempt at air travel remains pretty dicey!)
And while we can’t always control what comes at us, we can learn to control our response. This power is forged through our day-to-day choices.
So, in gearing up for fall, how can ensure we make the best daily choices? A powerful and often overlooked answer lies in one of my favorite stories from Insight…
My husband just so happens to be a giant nerd (i.e., why I married him). A few years ago, he acquired a “serious telescope.” Every few weeks, my favorite space nerd performed his new ritual: researching when certain objects would be in the sky, setting up his telescope, and precisely configuring it to locate said objects. With childlike delight, he’d scrutinize a red spot on Jupiter, or a crater on the moon, or some specific deep-sky object.
One crisp, clear night at our off-the-grid Colorado cabin, we were cleaning up after dinner. The space ritual seemed imminent. Hearing the back door slam shut, I prepared for the inevitable, “Hey! Come look at this!” whereupon I’d go outside, dutifully look into the lens, and say, “Wooooooow.”
After ten minutes of silence, I went to check on my husband. I found him on the deck, staring at the stars, with the telescope still in its case beside him.
In horror, I asked, “Oh no. Is your telescope broken?”
Chuckling, he assured me it wasn’t. “I came out here, and once my eyes adjusted, I started looking at all the constellations—do you see how beautiful the Milky Way is tonight?”
Sensing my confusion, he explained,
“Sometimes you just have to step back and examine the bigger picture.”
(In so doing, he had found the next, coolest thing to explore that he’d have missed otherwise.)
This concept is simple but so important. When we pull ourselves out of our day-to-day blocking and tackling to take a broader view, it opens up new opportunities for mastery and growth.
As such, I’ve found that people with a “perspective practice”—the habit of strategically considering new perspectives in their daily life—tend to be calmer, more confident, and more in control.
So how can we get there?
One simple hack is to change our focus from our present experience to our journey over time.
One example: I’ve been working with an executive team on a significant strategy and culture transformation. Recently, in one of many meetings on the subject, we spent a whole morning exhaustively reviewing each person’s new goals.
By lunch, we were running behind, but decided to stick with the teambuilding activity we’d planned: each person would briefly share a crisis they’d faced (personal or professional), how they responded, and their reflections on it now.
As I explained the activity, the exhausted executives’ faces said, “we have so much to do today—do we have to do… this?” (Indeed, a perspective practice is often most helpful when it feels least useful!)
Luckily, the team humored me. As they revealed their crises faced, strengths forged, and perspective gained, the energy in the room started to shift. When we dove back into their goals, exhaustion morphed into new energy… from just from 20-minutes of perspective practice.**
When we’re battling so much in the present, it’s counterintuitive to turn to the past. But under stress, humans tend to lose track of what we already know.
And each time we practice perspective, we begin to see more of who we are, who we’re becoming, and who we want to be.
Sometimes, stepping back is the only way to move forward: by uncovering timely insights we’d have otherwise missed; by remembering how we overcame past challenges; and (perhaps most important) by recognizing that what we’re enduring could soon become one small speck in the big, bright, shining constellation of our life.
Dr. Tasha Eurich
is an organizational psychologist, speaker and The New York Times bestselling author of Bankable Leadership. Her latest book, Insight, delves deeper into the meta-skill of the modern world: self-awareness. Tasha’s life’s work is to help organizations succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders and teams. With a ten-year track record in the Fortune 500 world, her expertise has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur and Forbes.
