How To Get Superman’s X-Ray Vision

Happy New Year, friends! What an incredible way to start the new year–with an opportunity to see differently. Last week we opened a conversation that how you are seeing your world shapes how you are being in your world. So how do you shift from seeing what you have always seen to seeing with new eyes instead? How do you consciously choose the lens you are looking through?

Dr. Viktor Frankl articulates this capacity for choice that we possess in a couple of my favorite quotes from him: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” and “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Dr. Frankl penned those words in his famous book, “Man’s Search For Meaning,” which he wrote after having survived 3 years of imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, losing both of his parents as well as his wife in the Holocaust. True freedom is independent of circumstance, and living from that place is transformational.

So how do you consciously choose a new lens to view your life with? There are several ways, and today I will start you out with one—one way to immediately see with new eyes by challenging the perceptions you currently hold.

Get ready; I’m about to get all MENSA on you. Does one plus one always equal two? Ponder that for a moment. Are there any ways in which one of something plus one of the same something does NOT equal two of that same thing? Consider that one pile of sand plus one pile of sand equals one pile of sand. One wad of gum plus one wad of gum equals one wad of gum. And one person plus another person, given a certain set of circumstances, equals one person. Unless you’re the Duggar family, and then you just lose track.

A client of mine was struggling in his relationship with his wife. Trust was broken. In one of our recent sessions he said, “I just can’t trust her.” So I replied, “Okay, that’s what you know and what you see right now—you can’t trust her. And you have lots of reason for that. But in what way is that NOT so? What way CAN you trust her?” He thought for a minute, his eyes brightened and then he rattled off about 15 ways he does, in fact, trust his wife.

As long as you’re telling yourself that things are a certain way (your lens) you are filtering out any evidence to the contrary. Even when it’s staring you in the face, you’ll miss it. And it’s impacting how you show up in that situation. Once my client saw this, it created a possibility for him to engage in his relationship in a whole new way.

Challenging your conclusions and judgments with questions such as, “How is it NOT that way? In what way is the opposite true?” allows you to see what is otherwise going unseen. Now, there is no guarantee that any other evidence is actually there. But, if evidence is there and simply unseen, would you want access to it? What you seek you will find.

These questions will open up new ways of seeing—seeing yourself, relationships, work, God. Look again at your life, the past and the present. What do you notice? What do you see that was there all along, but wasn’t accessible while looking through your old lens? Now look at your future. What is possible for you there that wasn’t possible before? And how does that impact what is possible for you today?

Utilize that space between stimulus and response. Choose how you will see, and you will consciously create your life, in 2015 and beyond.

To Your Great Life!

Becky