Perspective Makes All the Difference in Our Happiness

Life will bring you plenty of experiences that you can use to grow from and opportunities to change your perspective. You will grow as your experiences expand and eventually everything works out in its own perfect way. However, most often, we fail to see the benefit of our hardships until years later when we look back at our life with a different perspective. But it doesn’t have to be that way…

Our perspective, the way we choose to view things, makes all the difference in our enjoyment level, our happiness, and our success right now.

I believe strongly that our thoughts attract our life’s experiences to us. I also believe that we select (subconsciously) things that we want to learn in this life and that we attract circumstances to us that will help us learn and grow. Once the lesson is learned those type of experiences are no longer needed and therefore they stop showing up in our life. Not so ironically, I learned this life lesson through my life experiences. I have experienced this many times in my life. You’ll see that once I learned the lesson I was meant to learn the negative experiences, that I needed to learn from stopped. So how do people get from a point of experiencing the same things over and over again to a new existence with greater speed? They choose to change their perspective. It is a conscious effort. According to Dictionary.com perspective is a mental view or the state of one’s ideas. A key to living a happy life is all in our perspective and our willingness to view the mistakes we’ve made in a different light. To change our perspective is to change our mental view. So to get past the pain, the lesson, their current story, they change how they choose to look at their past experiences. They change it by “simply choosing.”

So choose. Simply choose…

Choose to look for the lessons you’ve learned. Turn your experience into life lessons or learning experiences. Choose to change your thoughts about your experiences to ones that focus on the life lessons or learning experiences. Choose to look for the golden lining. There will be troubling times. There will be sadness in your life at times. Those troubling moments and times of sadness give us a greater appreciation for the good things in our life. And in every troubled time, there will be a golden lining. Look for it. Choose to look for the positive in the experiences. Our past experiences are flexible. Peter Berger said,

“The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.”

It is our interpretation of the past that can turn those experiences into life lessons or learning experiences. It’s our choice to interpret it the way we want to. If we choose to interpret the event as a stumbling block to success it will be. If we choose to interpret the event as a stepping-stone to higher ground it will be. Albert Einstein said it well when he said,

“In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.”

"The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same." ~ Carlos Castenda. Even a negative experience has aspects that are positive. Focus on that. Choose to look at the for friendships you’ve developed because of those experiences. I’ve gained some friends that I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t undergone the negative experiences. Chance are you have too. So in reality, if you stop to reflect you don’t need regrets – you have opportunities. You have got opportunities…