My biggest takeaway from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is to Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Another way to think about this is to be open to understanding multiple perspectives.

Perspective can be defined as a particular attitude toward or a way of regarding something; a point of view. We all have different perspectives that come from our up bringing, knowledge acquired through education living and our general belief system that has been formed over years. We all may see the same problem but come at it from different perspectives and may often have varying solutions to the same problem.

Just because we see things differently or have varying solutions doesn’t make it wrong. Decisions and choices are very context dependent. For us to make the best decisions in the situations that we encounter we need to be able to see things from multiple view points. Another analogy that I like to use is having the ability to look at things through multiple lenses or optics. The more vantage points you have the better you can see, and you will be able to devise the most appropriate plan of action.

Whether you are an athlete, coach or performance professional, being able to see things from multiple perspectives will aid your growth and development. If you are an athlete, being able to see things from a coaches perspective, teammates perspective, opponents perspective, scouts perspective will help create a plan for your own development and improvement.

If you are a sport coach or performance professional, being able to see things from an athletes perspective, another coach’s perspective, medical professionals perspective, performance professionals perspective will aid you in developing the best strategies and program to improve your team.

Seeing things from multiple perspectives can help you develop unique and creative strategies. Perspectives are only gained by keeping an open mind, being a good listener and being willing to be ok with being vulnerable. These are all common qualities of good leaders and managers.

Leaders must be able to see problems from multiple perspectives to find the most appropriate solution. Leaders must guide and develop strategies for the group that they are working with. The best leaders call upon those around them to help give feedback and information because they are offering advice from different perspectives and vantage points.

Lee Cockerell often asked his employees at Disney for their suggestions to make a day at the park a better experience for their customers.

We don’t have all the answers by ourselves. What we currently know to be true and best practices may change tomorrow. We are constantly evolving and changing and we owe it to ourselves to become leaders. We must lead ourselves first before we can expect to lead anyone else. For us to lead ourselves, we must seek to understand ourselves. We must understand our thoughts, our actions, our purpose and the impact that we have on those around us. Leading ourselves can be accomplished if we are fully intentional and learn how to look at ourselves through multiple lenses.

Once we gain a better understanding of ourselves, we must then seek to understand those around us so that we can build the strongest community that we can. If we can truly learn how to look at life through different lenses, I believe we can create a better society and world.

Things are not what they are, they are what we think they are.
Perspective is everything.