Developing a Better You

Tag: best self (Page 5 of 17)

What an Upside Down Pyramid Taught Me About Perspective

I live across from an upside down pyramid.

On a recent nighttime stroll, I stood with my back to the building and looked up at wall sloping out over my head.

To my surprise, I slowly started leaning forward from my ankles to the point where I had to catch my balance. It was completely subconscious. Experimentally, I righted myself and looked up again. The same experience occurred, as if an invisible hand was pulling me forward while my feet remained planted. I realized the unusual slope of the wall above me was tricking my perspective, forcing my brain to compensate by leaning my body to match the angle.

It got me thinking about the power of perspective. A false perspective can fool our minds, manipulating us in ways far more subtle than I experienced with the pyramid. It can lead us to adopt beliefs that aren’t true because they’re based on poor data. This highlights the importance of being committed to facts and truth. Inaccurate perspectives – about ourselves, others, and the world – can have a dramatically negative impact on our quality of life and on the lives of those around us. They can make us angry, jealous, arrogant, entitled, depressed, the list goes on.

So how do we find and maintain an accurate perspective? Here are some suggestions:

  1. Be aware of your tendency to have a false perspective. It’s not just you. It happens to all of us.
  1. Seek out and consider a variety of perspectives from reputable sources. Read, watch, and listen to people who see the world differently than you.
  1. Accept truth even if it means changing your perspective. Burying your head in the sand when you discover facts you don’t like just makes your head dirty.
  1. Practice a daily refocusing habit – meditation, podcasts, prayer, reading, etc. Something that realigns your perspective and gets you back on course from your inevitable drift. I have a morning routine of meditation, prayer, and spiritual reading that I find hugely helpful.

Where to Begin

If you’re wondering where to begin, start by examining your current worldview, the foundational way you perceive life, others, and yourself. What lens do you look through to see the world? What ground do you stand on? We all ground ourselves somewhere and believe in something, whether we acknowledge it or not. It could be in yourself, another person, your career, financial stability, pursing pleasure, helping others, etc. Personally, I find my deepest grounding in my relationship with God. Not in the trappings of any one religion per se, but in God Herself. What grounds us is foundational to our sense of identity and informs our biases, both of which significantly impact our perspective (for more info, see my posts on Identity and Biases)

Examining your perspective choices can bring further clarity. Do you see the glass as half-full or half-empty? Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Do you see yourself as a victim or as being responsible for your own experience? I’m not lobbying for only the “right” answer here – optimism needs to be balanced with realism and personal responsibility balanced with acknowledging your trauma. The trick is not to get trapped on the dark side of the equation and let it control your perspective.

So how about you? How do you perceive yourself? Others? The world? Where might “slanted walls” be throwing off your perspective? Keep your radar up. Consider different points of view. Be willing to change your perspective. Adopt a regular refocusing habit. If you do, you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

13 Implicit Biases That Torpedo Your Personal Growth

I hate realizing I’m wrong.

It’s embarrassing. It’s humbling. It makes me feel like I’ve failed somehow. And it’s completely necessary if I want to grow.

I was reminded of that fact recently when I read a post highlighting author and speaker Brian McLaren’s work on implicit biases (you can read the full post here). Implicit biases are subconscious beliefs we hold about life, ourselves, and other people that impact our worldview.

The insidious nature of implicit biases are that they wield tremendous power over our lives, yet we don’t even know they exist. It’s like looking through tinted sunglasses that distort the color of everything we see, but we don’t know we’re wearing them. We’re convinced we’re seeing things as they really are.

As I read this post, it did more than convict me of my own implicit biases (Comfort Bias – ouch). It helped me understand how reasonable, intelligent people can be so divided on so many issues—political, cultural, social, religious, you name it. We’re looking at the same facts but seeing very different things, in large part because of our implicit biases.

Check out the list of common biases that Brian McLaren outlines below. Can you look at yourself honestly enough to see yours? He writes:

“People can’t see what they can’t see. Their biases get in the way, surrounding them like a high wall, trapping them in ignorance, deception, and illusion. No amount of reasoning and argument will get through to them, unless we first learn how to break down the walls of bias. . . .

Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit.

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth.

Community Bias: It’s almost impossible to see what our community doesn’t, can’t, or won’t see.

Complementarity Bias: If you are hostile to my ideas, I’ll be hostile to yours. If you are curious and respectful toward my ideas, I’ll respond in kind.

Competency Bias: We don’t know how much (or little) we know because we don’t know how much (or little) others know. In other words, incompetent people assume that most other people are about as incompetent as they are. As a result, they underestimate their [own] incompetence, and consider themselves at least of average competence.

Consciousness Bias: Some things simply can’t be seen from where I am right now. But if I keep growing, maturing, and developing, someday I will be able to see what is now inaccessible to me.

Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed.

Conservative/Liberal Bias: I lean toward nurturing fairness and kindness, or towards strictly enforcing purity, loyalty, liberty, and authority, as an expression of my political identity.

Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false. I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth.

Catastrophe or Normalcy Bias: I remember dramatic catastrophes but don’t notice gradual decline (or improvement).

Contact Bias: When I don’t have intense and sustained personal contact with “the other,” my prejudices and false assumptions go unchallenged.

Cash Bias: It’s hard for me to see something when my way of making a living requires me not to see it.

Conspiracy Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that relieve us, exonerate us, or portray us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators.”*

So how about you? What biases have tripped you up in the past? Which might be affecting you now? Take an honest look in the mirror. Acknowledge what you see. Forgive yourself. Read / listen to (podcasts or news outlets) / talk with people who have a different perspective. Commit to having your beliefs, words, and actions match your renewed awareness. If you do, you’ll help heal our social divide, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

* From Brian McLaren, Why Don’t They Get It? Overcoming Bias in Others (and Yourself) (Self-published: 2019), e-book, as shared by Richard Rohr in his daily meditation March 1, 2021 for the Center for Action and Contemplation at cac.org.

3 Metaphors for Healthy Spirituality (Part 2): My Story

I’d like to tell you a story.

In my last post, I gave an introduction to this series, which will focus on three metaphors that I’ve found extremely helpful in my spiritual and personal growth. If you haven’t seen that post, it would help to do a quick read here.

These metaphors can be incredibly powerful tools for nearly everyone, regardless of where you’re at on the spiritual spectrum. I’ll share the first of those next week. For some necessary context, let me give you a bit of my spiritual history and recent struggles.

I was raised in a Christian home and grew up going to church. After a meaningful spiritual experience when I was ten years old, I began taking my personal relationship with God seriously. I attended a fairly relaxed Christian liberal arts college where I studied music performance, then spent twenty-six years as a full-time musical worship leader in various contemporary, evangelical churches. I stopped worship leading several years ago to pursue writing full time.

Over the course of the last seven years, I have gone through a significant and often difficult spiritual journey, during which I questioned many aspects of my faith. My belief in and relationship with God continued to grow during this time, but I began to struggle with a number of the teachings and positions of mainstream evangelical Christianity, including the lack of validity of other faiths, the existence of hell, and the role and interpretation of the Bible. This led me into many years of deep study, thought, and prayer, as well as endless hours of wrestling with these topics in the company of spiritual mentors and close friends.

At my current point in my ever evolving spiritual journey, I no longer call myself an evangelical Christian. This is partly due to the development of my beliefs, but also because that label has been widely adopted by people whose worldview is vastly different than my own. I would not say that I have left the Christian faith, but that I have built a worldview which, as author and teacher Richard Rohr says, “includes and transcends” my former belief system.

What does it mean to include and transcend? As I continue to grow spiritually, I retain some of the basic tenants of Christianity that still ring true for me. These include a belief in the existence of a loving God as the creative force behind the universe, the humanity and divinity of Jesus, and that the best use of my life is to know, love, and follow God. At the same time, I have let go of some tenants that I either no longer believe in or understand in a significantly different light. Some of those I listed above. I liken my transition to setting aside shoes that served me for a time but began to feel too small. I would now call myself a Christ-centered theist who seeks to know and follow Jesus. To me at least, that’s an important distinction.

Some of you who know me from my former church roles may feel confused or even shocked by this. I understand. It’s okay. This evolution in my beliefs is simply the continuation of my life-long spiritual growth arc, the result of many seasons of bare-knuckled soul searching. Though imperfectly, I have walked with God for the last forty-one years. I have no intention of giving up now. I am at peace with where I am at with God and where God is at with me.

The three metaphors I will share in the rest of this series were lifelines for me during that difficult period, when I felt adrift in a stormy spiritual sea. They were candles, lighting my path through a dark and often lonely wilderness of doubt and struggle. My wish and prayer is that these tools will be of value to you on your own journey, whether or not your story resembles mine. I hope you’ll join me next week with an open heart and an open mind as I share the metaphor of The Cosmic Egg. If you do, I sincerely believe you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

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