Choosing Your Perspective
While on vacation last week, I had an experience that reminded me how much our perspective can influence our mental and physical well being. It was also a reminder that we can control our perspective - in other words, we choose how to view different circumstances in our lives.
This Week’s Example
My wife and I were on our annual anniversary trip. Many of you would probably guess that means an extended camping trip. This year we spent a week in a campground on a lake that I had no idea it would be as great as it was. Just a wonderful trip.
On Thursday, we decided to take a drive around the lake. It was a beautiful drive and when we were almost back to the campground, we stopped to fill up on gas at a service station/mechanic shop. When I went to start up the truck to leave, it started up but I had no instrument panel, displays, radio, ac, etc. It was just all blank. That had never happened before. So I turned the truck off and back on and still nothing. Again, it started up just fine and I could even put it in gear but no instruments.
Perspective One
A bit of panic started to kick in and my brain did it’s normal thing of trying to figure out how to solve every possible problem that this could cause. Like getting my trailer home, getting the truck towed to a dealer and all the expense that would go along with all of that. Everything negative you could imagine started to go through my head.
Issue Resolved
Then I realized I was at a mechanic shop. I pulled the truck around the building and stopped. Shortly after that all of the panels came back on. That included the dreaded check engine light.
The guys at the shop hooked up their computer and basically the system had lost communication with most everything on the dash or that went through the dash. I hadn’t had any issues with any of those things so they reset the alerts, I paid a small fee and we were on our way. We went on with the rest of our plans for the day and everything was fine, except for how I felt physically and mentally.
I just couldn’t shake the negative reaction I had had to the issue and was having thoughts about leaving for home immediately. That would have cut our trip short by a couple of days which may not seem like a big deal, but considering school is about to start, this really was our last time for any extended time away.
Perspective Two
As we continued on with our plans, I started to look at the situation just a little bit differently. How blessed was I that the issue happened at a mechanic shop and that they were able to quickly take a look at what was going on? If that had happened somewhere else along the lake and away from civilization, I probably would have reacted even more negatively and maybe even made the situation more complicated than it needed to be.
In addition, I realized that it was a pretty simple and straightforward situation and it was only my immediate negative/worst-case scenario thinking that really made the situation difficult and stressful. And it was those thoughts that made me not feel good physically and impacted much of my afternoon. That didn’t have to happen if I could have looked at it differently from the start.
Choosing Your Perspective
I was doing some additional reading last week and it talked about how at many points in our lives, things will happen or people will say things that we may take offense to regardless of their intention. To be clear, I’m not talking about some of the major issues facing our nation and the world today in regards to race. I’m talking about the little things that those we are close to may say or do. The message is that we can choose to be offended and react negatively or we can choose to take a different path. We may not be able to control the actions or intentions of others but we can control how we react.
I would apply that same thing to general life situations. When something happens that isn’t according to our plan we can choose how we react to a situation. We can look for the positive in it or we can allow ourselves to be pulled down into a negative spiral.
Choosing to look for the positive in any situation won’t necessarily make them easy or even turn something from bad to good, but it will make it easier to get through and we will be even better once it is over.
Summary
This experience helped me to realized that I need to work on not reacting so negatively in tough situations. And I do mean work on it because that doesn’t seem to be how my brain is wired. I know my default is always going to be to go right to the worst case scenario and to try and plan for it. But for my sake and for the sake of those around me, I need to get better about not stressing and trying to find the positive. Or at the very least, not jump into worse-case scenario planning until I need to.