It’s that time of the year again. Scarier than Halloween could ever be; exhaustion, pain, and never free – it’s exam season.
Yes, I’m currently in the middle of my exams. Whether in college or even school, we’ve all experienced the pain of exam season making it an easy subject to empathise and relate to. But, what about other topics?
Many perspectives and circumstances are hard to understand if you haven’t experienced them, which can often lead to conflict in a relationship. Yet very important aspects and abilities, such as empathy as well as self-improvement, are closely connected to the skill of understanding others’ feelings and thoughts.
So, today I’ve prepared a short guide with some easy exercises you can do to enhance your understanding of different perspectives:
Physical
To start working on adapting your perspective it can sometimes be helpful to actually start with your physical perspective.
Imagine something you see from a different angle. After you’ve imagined it (you might want to take some notes or sketch something), switch to that angle and describe what you see. Afterwards compare the two and assess your skills and which parts need refinement.
Another thing you can start doing is changing the places you usually stand or sit at. Whether that’s in your favourite café, the bus, office, or anything else. Analyse the new location, what benefits and weaknesses has this place, also in comparison to your usual spot. Over time you’ll recognise the characteristics of a place without needing to go there.
These to exercises seem rather insignificant when thinking of empathy, and honestly, they might be for some of us. But, trust me, they are not actually about physically looking at something from different angles. You’ll train your skill to find key elements for orientation, search for important guiding principles and realise more detail; this will help you in other situations as well.
Besides that, many have spots they prefer. By analysing various place’s qualities you can make assumptions about the individual perferencing this specific spot. This will not allow you to read every person on the train, but it can be quite helpful in other scenarios. The qualities of a seat in a bus are not completely different from the ones of a chair in an office.
Mental
Imagine your life in different circumstances. What if I was born in a different country; What if I was born with a different gender; What if I was born with a different skin/hair/eye color; What if I had a disability; What if I chose a different profession; What if…
There are so many different people on this planet, living different lives from your own – the amount of perspectives you could try to imagine is endless.
Besides trying to understand circumstances which differ from your own, understanding or at least acknowledging and accepting other opinions is a crucial part in human society. Try to argue in favour of an opposing viewpoint. This is also helpful in strengthening your own opinion in case you decide to stay with it even after arguing for the other side.
You can always easily practice your ability to understand other opinions by reading news from various sources and with differing perspectives – everyone will write in favour of their own opinion.
Emotional
At times where we’re emotional, adapting to other perspectives becomes even more difficult. We are caught up in anger and frustration, fear or even regret.
When you have a conflict with a loved one try to write down the story in their perspective. It is important that you always make an effort to understand the other one, especially when they’re important to you. You can do this exercise with your own conflicts as well – try to rewrite internal conflicts from the perspective of someone uninvolved.
Obviously, you shouldn’t search or provoke conflict just to practice your perspective adaptation. So, to transform this exercise into something you can do whenever you want to, do the following:
Start writing a short story, literally any kind of story; neither the genre, nor topic, or characters really matter. Then, after you’ve finished give yourself some time, maybe a day, maybe a week – however much you need. Afterwards, revisit your story. Now, write down everything once again, but in the perspective of a different character.
This will allow you to understand the connection between motives and behaviour, which can help in evaluating real life situations as well (though this won’t allow completely correct character analysis).
You can reflect on past situations, maybe even conflicts, your own behaviour, or the ones of others to refine your skill. Analyse the thoughts of someone who’s behaviour (= reaction to thoughts) you know and try to understand the connection between idea or feelings and action.
I hope these tricks are helpful to you in developing your empathetic skills further. I wanted to cover the three main areas physical, mental and emotional today, but there are certainly even more fun and interesting ways to work on understanding different perspectives.
If you’d be interested in hearing more, let me know in the comments or by sending an email, via our contact form.