“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will start to change.” (Dr. Wayne Dyer)
“I’m the greatest baseball player in the world,” a little boy boasted as he strutted around his backyard.
Shouldering his bat, he tossed a baseball up, swung, and missed.
“I am the greatest ballplayer ever,” he reiterated. He picked up the ball again, swung, and missed again. Stopping a moment to examine his bat, he stooped down and picked up his ball.
“I am the greatest baseball player who ever lived!” The momentum of his swing nearly knocked him down. But the ball plopped, unscathed, at his feet.
“Wow!” he exclaimed. “What a pitcher!”
We often find ourselves stuck in a certain way of thinking. Sometimes things change or don’t go the way we want them to go but we still cling to that one particular thought. Instead, like the little boy, we should be willing to see things from a different lens. A different perspective. Sometimes we may need to look at things from a slightly different angle.
Pat McInally is a former All-Pro punter for the Cincinnati Bengals. By the way, he also caught 57 passes as a Wide Receiver during his NFL career. Anyway, Pat played collegiate ball at Harvard University. He used to say, “At Harvard, they labeled me a jock. In the NFL, they considered me an intellect.”
Sometimes it is just a matter of perspective. Expanding our minds to other possibilities can help us see the answers we’ve been seeking.
Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve problems by using the same way of thinking we used when we created it.”
Are we willing to look at things from different angles so we gain a greater understanding or will we just stay with the same old way of thinking?