You Don’t Have to Change the World, just Yourself

I met up with an old friend for coffee recently and she had just moved to a new job as a general manager of sales for a medium-sized company. She spent a whole hour telling me all the things she found wrong with her job, namely the company, the system, her boss, her staff, her colleagues, her office, everything. The next time I saw her just a few days later, she was still complaining about the same things. She obviously disliked everything about her job and was whining how she couldn’t perform her job under those circumstances. I had to stop her before she went for another round of complaints and  gave her an unsolicited advise by saying “I see that you have 2 options. Either you make drastic changes in the company that will suit to your liking, or try to look at it from a different point of view and work with them”. My advice seemed to give her a wake-up call, as the next day she texted me to say that she felt more at ease at work because she looked at things with a new perspective.

A greater power than changing someone else’ perspective is changing our own.
Perspective is our ability to see, hear, smell, feel, experience something a certain way because of the way we perceive it. If we ask an Eskimo and someone who lives in the Sahara dessert about their definition of cold, they each will certainly give a different answer. So often we’re caught up in our own ways and try to change everything around us to fit into our ideals, and we forget to check in with ourselves to see if we’ve made the necessary adjustments. Dr Maya Angelou said “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” So instead of looking at a problem and saying “How can others change?”, it’s worth looking inward first and ask “How can I change?”

Perspective is a funny thing, it can make something look good, and with a slight shift, it can make the same thing look the complete opposite. The picture on the left illustrates what perspective is, in which we can see two different images just by shifting our point of view. One image we can see is a young lady looking away and the other is an old lady looking down. We all hold the power to make the changes we want to see.

A story about a King and the leather carpet
Once upon a time there was a king who ruled a prosperous country. One day he went for a trip to some distant areas of his country. When he was back to the palace he complained that his feet were very painful because it was the first time he went for such a long trip, and the road he went through was rough and stony. He then ordered his people to cover every road in the entire country with leather carpets.
Definitely this would need thousands of cows’ skin and it would cost a huge amount of money. Then one of his wise servants dared himself to tell the king “Why do you have to spend that unnecessary amount of money? Why don’t you just cut a little piece of leather to cover your feet?” The king was surprised but he later agreed to his suggestion to make a “shoe” for himself.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy

This article has been published on Outward Bound Indonesia’s blog