If you come to my house when I’m having a difficult time with something, you’ll think you’re in a comedy club. That’s what I do. I make jokes-especially when I'm scared or uncomfortable or sad even. In our last newsletter, I wrote about my recent mammogram and, of course, made jokes about my boobs, women touching my boobs, and men maybe liking to see that. I wrote all that because mammograms are uncomfortable on so many levels and so my mind goes to the joke meter! Well the day after we sent our newsletter out, I had to ramp up my game when I opened my patient portal to view my mammogram results and read, “7mm mass in the right breast.”

After a few harrowing days, more tests and me pegging the comedy meter, turns out it’s a benign cyst. Phew. Why am I telling you all of this? Because I had an epiphany as I literally ran to my car while leaving the hospital. They told me the news and I bolted to the first EXIT I could find. You can imagine my sheer joy and relief as I got into my car. Smiling ear to ear, nothing could touch my mood-not that awful weather that day, not the pandemic, not the snarky attitude of the person who parked one inch away from my car.

I started thinking about it. Nothing had really changed. I was the same person who walked in an hour before. The only thing that changed was my perspective. Suddenly, I was thrilled to be alive, to have the life I have, to be facing the challenges I’m facing even. Perspective. That’s all I needed. I’m vowing to hold on to this lesson the next time I'm tempted to feel sorry for myself, to give up, or to complain about something insignificant. I’m remembering perspective and I’ll pile a huge helping of gratitude on top!!

I've heard it said that perspective can either make your problems look bigger or your possibilities look infinite. It boils down to the lens from which you are looking at life.

Research shows that there are three key components that shape our perspective:

1. our mindset
2. our life experiences
3. our point of focus

Let's start with mindset. Have you ever noticed that everything in life seems so much better when you are in a good mood? It's fascinating how the same situation can be perceived so differently depending on our current mindset. If we are feeling positive, grateful and hopeful, we see the world through a brighter, more abundant lens. Yet when we are feeling negative, deprived and hopeless, we see the world through a dark, contentious lens. As the adage goes, "we don't see things as they are, but rather, we see them as we are." And the good news is that our mindset is completely within our control! Therefore, we can choose to wake up each morning and practice intentional gratitude for simply being alive.

This leads into the second component of perspective, our life experiences, and how those experiences tend to create our default lens. This explains why two people can see the same situation so drastically differently. I remember when I first moved to Pennsylvania and I had to pump my own gas for the first time; I thought this was just horrible. You see, I grew up in New Jersey, where by law, you were not allowed to pump your own gas. You sat in your car and a nice person would come and pump it for you. This was all I knew. I was shocked when speaking to Pennsylvania natives that they hated going to New Jersey because they "had to wait for someone to pump their gas!" Same situation, different perspective. This is a simple example, but the truth is that we all have challenging life experiences that we carry around with us that taint our perspective of the present moment. The good news is that we can simply put those heavy issues down and lighten our load a bit so that we can clean our lens and see the full beauty of life more clearly.

Which leads to the final component of perspective, where we focus our attention. We can learn a lot about ourselves by building awareness around our focused attention. Oftentimes we fall back on our brains' default negativity bias, and look for what's wrong in life, rather than what's strong in life. This inevitably leads to an unconscious confirmation bias, where what we look for is what we see. If we go through life thinking the glass is half empty, we will look for evidence to prove this is true. Whereas if we choose to look at life with the intentional focus of the glass being half full, we will find evidence to support that belief. The choice is ours, and we can make it in a split second, creating a cascade of positivity in our lives.