Invisiblock
To clearly demonstrate changing your frame of reference, let’s take a look at this illustration. Click the picture to make it larger.
In your own words, explain what is happening in the illustration.
- Think of a time in your life when this could have been useful to know.
- If you had to live that situation again, how could you improve the outcome?
How to Change Frames
To Another Person
Use your imagination to pretend to be another person. By using your intuition, you can try to understand where they are coming from considering their background experience. Imagine how their beliefs and principles might be shaping them. You don’t have to agree with them, but you can try to understand them.
To truly understand a frame of reference, you must gather more information, and that requires listening. Listen to yourself in those quite times of reflection, and listen to others when things aren’t working in the relationship. When you are talking, you aren’t listening. Don’t interrupt, don’t be overpowering, but be gentle in your approach and honest by saying that you want to learn more about what they experience. This helps build respect not only for others, but for yourself.
To a Situation
You can do this with a situation, too. Pretend that you zoom out of the situation, almost as if your soul rises out of you. Look down upon the situation from a higher vantage point, observe the facts of the objective view, and individually empathize with the people involved. Let go of attachments, expectations, and outcomes because is what creates an emotional fog. Do this, and it will be clear to follow what makes logical sense.
Step by Step
Let’s practice making your frame of reference larger and larger, until you can see the whole planet.
- First, start with where you are. Really pay attention to your senses.
- Next, use your imagination to create a new viewpoint. Let’s call it a camera.
- Imagine the camera is looking down on where you are now. It’s only a few hand lengths above you now. Imagine the top of your head and the immediate environment around you.
- Now, imagine the camera is at the ceiling of the room you are in now. What does that look like?
- Zoom out even further by going through the roof of the building. The camera is now looking down on the entire structure.
- This is where the imagination really kicks into overdrive. You may have never seen the top of your building, but you can imagine. The farther you zoom out, the less details you see. That’s natural!
- Keep going. What if the camera is now positioned over your neighborhood? Your country? Half of Earth?
- Now picture all of Earth. The camera is now able to orbit around the Earth and see it from all angles.
- Imagine, if you were a being that had this view, what would you think of the people on Earth?
This zoom out method is great at looking less at the details and more at the situation in general, like the Forest for the Trees analogy. When you take this view, the details become trivial, the pains become temporary, and you realize that this is just one moment in time. No matter how large a problem gets, it’s still a dot on the timeline of your lifetime. This is not to minimalize your experiences. While the effects from experiences can last, you can diminish the pain by taking this objective view.
Explanation
Just as a person may be blinded by the details of their personal situation, their subjective view may cloud their understanding because of natural biases and emotional connections.
Announote
Become a perspective collector, and watch how you shine.
By elevating to the objective view, you use your intuition and imagination to empathize with another person but also apply logic to the situation. You can do this with each person and each situation, and each time, you get new insights. These insights inform your total understanding, eliminating the blind spots your biases create. This leads to making better, more stable decisions.