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Once you have the willingness and skill to observe your first reaction (as we describe earlier in this chapter), you’ll have the opportunity to expand your perception and consider alternative points of view. The wonderful thing about developing this type of awareness is that you can give yourself some choices about what to do next. You can decide to stay stuck in your perspective, but it’s more likely that your mind will become more open and less certain, and that you’ll find it easier to consider different possible perspectives. Expanding your perception and awareness can be very helpful when you are stuck feeling like you have only one option to solve a problem or are in a conflict where it feels like you can’t understand the other person and they can’t understand you. Often strong emotions blind us to alternatives that are really helpful.

Being able to expand your perception is critical to nurturing and maintaining important relationships. Many relationships end when one or both people can’t slow down and see alternative perspectives. Simply seeing another perspective doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily agree with it, and if you can see and understand where the other person is coming from, you can validate their emotions and become more curious and non-judgmental about how they got to their position. If the interaction is becoming escalated, this can decrease the emotional intensity for everyone involved. By approaching it in this way, you’ll help the other person be curious about your perspective, allowing for a more effective conversation.

The following sections walk you through the main steps of expanding your perception and considering other points of view.

Seeing multiple perspectives doesn’t mean that you give yours up; it means that you can be more understanding and open. You may keep your perspective or position, you may adopt theirs, or you and the other person may come up with some unique synthesis of the information together.