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The first time I heard the expression, “my hairs’ on fire,” was from a colleague who was so overwhelmed by the workload and deadlines we were juggling, she lost all perspective…as had I. It so accurately captured that off-the-wall, out-of-control feeling we were both experiencing that I took it and ran with it myself... hair ablaze!
“We all have moments where we lose perspective. I know for me, I have gotten caught up in minor panics about trivial things that at the time seemed quite important,” shares Beth Kurland Ph.D. in her article, "When You're Losing It: A Technique for Regaining Perspective," for Psychology Today. “Only later did I realize that I had blown the situations way out of proportion. So how do we maintain perspective and learn to see the whole picture moment to moment, especially when we are stressed?”
If you’d like to learn about Beth’s solution, click on her article above. Today, however, I’d like to unpack my own…one that I developed not long after my hair first caught fire! I so disliked the feeling of losing perspective that I was determined to find a way to get a grip.
Teen falls into vat of boiling cheese
"Teen falls into vat of boiling cheese", read the newspaper headline. Turns out that a young man who was interning at a cheese processing plant for the summer did indeed slip and fall into a vat of boiling cheese, and tragically died. Holy sh*t! While I felt so sad for this young man and his family, at the same time I felt so grateful that, no matter how crazy things got at work, there was no risk of me ever drowning in boiling cheese at the office. Talk about perspective!
For years after reading the article, which I cut out of the newspaper and taped to my office wall, whenever I felt like I was about to lose my sh*t, I looked at that headline and it brought me back from the brink. And even though the physical article is long gone, the sheer memory of it has the same effect on me. At least it did until last week, when a new perspective-changing headline got my attention:
Huge python grabs Thai woman in her kitchen, squeezes her two hours before she can be freed
The AP reported that a 64-year-old woman was preparing to do her evening dishes at her home outside Bangkok when she felt a sharp pain in her thigh and looked down to see a huge python taking hold of her. The four-to-five-meter-long (13-to-16-foot-long) python coiled itself around her torso, squeezing her down to the floor of her kitchen.
Yet again…what could be so horrible in my world?! A rhetorical question.
PsychCentral tells us, “Our perspective is how we perceive people, situations, ideas, etc. It’s informed by our personal experience, which makes it as unique as anything could be. Perspective shapes our life by affecting our choices. But the minute our minds become steeped in worry, perspective goes out of the window. We forget about our triumphs. We stop being optimistic as fear takes the wheel,”
So rather than letting fear take the wheel, feel free to use my strategy to get a grip, or as Beth Kurland suggests, “I encourage you to do your own experimentation with this and see what you discover. Sometimes all we need is a little shift in perspective.”