Perspective

What role does perspective play in our lives?

Perspective is just one's way of regarding something, a point of view basically. Let me give you a situation to help you understand it better. For instance, you and your friend planned to get dinner together sometime during the weekend, but they couldn't make it and you get frustrated and sad because you can't meet them and that it's their fault for ditching you. This would be your perspective, you would think that your friend ditched you because they had better things to do than meet you. Right off the bat you wouldn't consider the situation they were in that caused them to cancel their plan with you. And their perspective could be that they had to work, or they had an emergency that they had to go to. Just by looking at this situation, you can understand that perspective plays a major role in our daily life, in even the littlest things. 

Perspective taking is the ability to understand how a situation appears to another person and how that person is reacting cognitively and emotionally to the situation. Take a look at the photo of the iceberg below, what we do see is the reaction to the situation, but we don't know what's underneath it all, what caused the reaction, could it be related to a past experience or a belief or a tradition? To understand another person's perspective is very important. It helps us understand their feelings and helps us to get to know them better. There's the need to look at perspective in all places, maybe someone dashed you in the grocery store without apologizing, why would they do that? Were they in a hurry? We have to look at rational explanations to situations without letting ourselves get upset or irritated. 

I would like to conclude by saying that perspective taking should be used everywhere, even in the smallest situations. Start by asking yourself why the person did what they did? What could've caused the action? Is it completely their fault?