Change your perspective, change your life?

“Wetwo?” I said, somewhat indignantly. “Why would anyone put ‘Wet wo’ on their license plate?”

This is a question I posed to my friend Linda during a road trip years ago. We had just come up behind the car in question, and I spent a good twenty kilometers or so silently imagining what this license plate decision said about the owners (and admittedly, making judgements left, right, and centre).

Then it happened. “Oh. We two.” And with that, my perspective shifted.

This is the memory I always go back to when I think about perspective and the role that it plays in our lives. You see, nature abhors a vacuum. Apparently so does our brain. Where there is lack of information, our minds rush to fill that void with thoughts and reasoning based on the little data we have. Our minds dig through our past experiences, emotional wounds, defense mechanisms, and world view to come up with explanations to make sense of what’s happening.

But reality, it’s a malleable thing. Which I realized that day as I shifted from a negative perception (“That’s so stupid”) to a more positive one (“Oh isn’t that cute!”), with the re-placement of one tiny letter of the alphabet. And what was even more telling for me was the corresponding shift in how I felt as this ‘reality’ was altered.

Here’s the thing, we always have a choice. So, in the absence of information as to why a friend hadn’t texted back, why that person cut you off in traffic, why that cashier was abrupt (insert your own triggers here), why wouldn’t we choose to imagine good intent? To choose compassion? To assume the positive over negative?

What we focus on expands. The more we focus on the negative, the more we’re going to see that in our “reality” and that will translate to how we feel. And I don’t know about you, but I would much rather feel good than bad! No. Brainer.

Today, I invite you look for places where you can ‘we two your wet wo’, as it were. To shift your perception to the positive. And notice the difference it makes to how you’re feeling. Could be a game changer!

#wellness #shiftingperception #choosepositivity