When you’re doing something day in and day out, living and breathing it, you can easily lose all sense of perspective. When something becomes all encompassing, whether it’s your work, an illness, a family issue, if you’re on the ground and in the thick of something challenging and emotive, your world starts to shrink and the focus of your attention becomes ever more important. That’s often by necessity, because whatever is going on is demanding of your attention, and that’s usually manageable if it’s a short sharp shock, like a crisis situation where you can drop everything else and deal with it without any major consequences.
The difficulty arises when it’s not a crisis situation, when it becomes an ongoing challenge with no real end in sight, and when all of the other responsibilities start to fall behind and stack up and become more problems that need solving.
When that happens, when you’re in the weeds of one thing and you’ve got several other challenges lining up behind it, it’s very easy to lose perspective. So what do I mean by perspective? Really I think it’s the ability to stop and look at everything going on in your life from a step back and in the context of being one of billions of human beings in the big wide world. We’re the centre of our own universe but that doesn’t mean we don’t and shouldn’t compare our lived experience with those around us or that we’re aware of.
Whenever we had a bad day at work, an old (as in no longer working together rather than aged!) colleague of mine used to remind us that what we did wasn’t life or death and put it into perspective by saying “nobody died” to reiterate that a bad day for us didn’t really have the same impact as a bad day for a doctor or a surgeon or nurse, or anyone else with truly important life changing jobs.
Perspective is something you get when you can walk away from the situation for an extended period. Remember that feeling when you come back from holiday, and you go back to work, you don’t know what you’ve missed but you also don’t really care because it’s out of your control. You’ve had some time away and maybe spent time with your family and friends, doing things you love, you’ve caught up on your sleep and had some time to think, and work becomes less important because you’re not living and breathing it.
Perspective helps you maintain an emotional equilibrium. It’s difficult to become angry or frustrated if you’re maintaining your perspective and when you can control your emotions you’re far more effective, so it helps you deal with the challenge more productively.
Resilient people know when they’re in the weeds and need to find their perspective, but they also take care to make sure they build in regular holidays and down time to make sure they stay at their best in the longer term. They set and hold boundaries to make sure the challenges they face stay contained and don’t spill over into other areas of life where possible. They know that, in the scheme of things, the challenges they face will soon pass, they think about how they’re going to get through them in the best way, and then they tackle them deliberately and confidently.