Wednesday in the Woods · episode 014
Perspective on Perspective
6:11youtube · Licensio, LLC
description
It’s the end of the year as we know it - and I hope that you feel fine. I sure do.
On this final #2021 episode of #WednesdayInTheWoods, we talk about how important it is to think about *how* we look back. See, it’s easy to pick a #perspective and stick with it.
It might be a cynical or pessimistic perspective. It might be optimistic. It could be narrowly focused on a few specific events - a moment here, a day there, or a particular movie or drive. Or, it might be focused on broad strokes, like the arc of a #hobby, #project, or #job.
We might think about the year as experienced by others, human or non-human. What’s it been like for a #technology, #culture, #nation, or a friend?
We might really take a first-person perspective on ourselves - our #physical health, #mental health, #financial health, or #social #health. We could also translate this first-person perspective to our organizations - if organizations aren’t healthy and #sustainable, then it’s hard to see how they can support healthy individuals in a sustainable way either.
But the real point is to avoid falling into the trap of *any single particular* perspective. By consciously promoting a #diversity of perspectives - narrow and broad, short-term and long-term, first-person and third-person - we can avoid “#groupthink” as it exists inside our organizations and in our own heads.
It may be easy to think about the salient, often negative; it may be most pleasant to focus solely on the positive; but only by synthesizing across of these frames can we truly grow from the experiences we’ve had.
Here’s to rest and health in what remains of 2021. And here’s to a #2022 that we can all look back on with a sense of pride and fulfillment.
See you next year!
transcript
~651 words · showhide
from the human-edited captions published with the video. timestamps jump to that point in the video.
- 0:19
Good morning and welcome to today's episode of Wednesday in the Woods, where we'll be wrapping up the year by discussing perspective and what we can learn from appreciating the different ways to look at the world. So, it's the end of the year and we often get to be a little retrospective as we wrap up another one of these arbitrary periods, a calendar that we've decided to use. And when we look back, we often tend to focus on the things that are salient in a particular worldview.
- 0:55
And it's easy obviously to be either absolutely negative or absolutely positive, to be a pessimist or an optimist in your perspectives on what's happened in a given period, like the past year. 2021 has certainly been a year of many memorable or salient events, and when we look at how we understand the year, I think we can learn a lot about how we can take a perspective on anything, whether it's a project or a program, a specific day, anything really.
- 1:32
And so, let's think about perspective. There are some perspectives like this one that might be up close and personal, right? We can get into the details, we can think about, for example, in the last year, particular days, particular interactions, one particular conversation, or even a word we might have shared with someone. In other contexts, we might be a little bit further a field, we might take a wider, a broader view of what we've done.
- 1:59
We might think about, for example, some hobby or some skill or some job that we've either changed or or we've completed. And we might think about what, in a very big picture, you might change in the upcoming year. Other times, we might look at things from a very, very high level, right? We might look at the arc of a whole life, of a family across different generations, or an organization and what our team or our corporation as a whole has done.
- 2:35
And these perspectives are are often where we might have a, let's say, a longer term strategic view, for example, in the C-suite, or we might have longer arcs of family stories that come into play. Finally, we might think from a first-person perspective as opposed to a third-person perspective. So, in this case I'm wearing a GoPro body cam, and this first-person view - to really be mindful and think about our experience from either a health or a mental or physical perspective can be important.
- 3:12
This also goes for corporations, right? I think there's a lot of discussion or thought about the health of employees, but to some extent, without a sustainable corporation - which has to do with the first-person view of the sustainability of an organization - then there there is no long term for individuals anyway. And so, perspective, clearly something that has well, many perspectives on it, many facets to perspective. And as we go into the end of the year, I think the little bit of advice that I'd like to share is to make sure to step back and take multiple perspectives on what you've done or what your organization has done in the year.
- 3:52
Because any particular perspective, just like "groupthink" or like taking too narrow of a frame, can result in missing things. Whether they're good things that we should celebrate or whether they are bad things that we should learn from, the point is that taking multiple perspectives helps us to understand everything that we can learn from, celebrate, enjoy, avoid going forward. And so with that, let's bring it in. And I hope everyone has a wonderful New Year here on this Western calendar, and we will see you again in 2022.
- 4:32
I can't believe we're saying that. Here we go. Oh, that's a red tailed hawk. I should get out of here.