EP.11 - How To Find Fresh Perspectives

SHOW NOTES:

We often find ourselves stuck in a certain way of thinking and living. 

And when we're so used to thinking in a specific way, it can be a challenge to find a new way of doing things or to discover a new way of living, to shift our perspective in life.

So how do we do that?

Fresh perspectives require us to take a step back from our current approach and tap into our curiosity. 

When we do that, we start to remove our preconceived judgments and create an open space for awareness. 

This awareness helps you break out of your everyday routines and turn obstacles into opportunities, improving your life in the process.

This is exactly what I did. I want to share with you how I leveraged those obstacles as an opportunity to realise my dream of being a recording artist in the UK.

With awareness comes freedom and I’m here to guide you on how to explore new ways of living, tap into your curiosity and gain new perspectives in life so that you can show up with fearless authenticity as the person you were born to be.

Here are the key takeaways from this episode:

4:55 - Fresh perspectives are about tapping in to your curiosity

5:43 - If you want to do things differently, you have to observe what you’re currently doing 

6:10 - When you put judgment aside, you create space for awareness

9:03 - Conflict is there to ignite the possibility of doing things differently

11:33 - By leveraging obstacles, you’ll be able to create opportunities to tell your story.

13:41 - Rejections are redirections leading you into a different path

Resources:

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About Me:

I help you lead with fearless authenticity by smashing the self-imposed heteronormative stereotypes that keep you playing small through emotional healing inner child and inherited intergenerational trauma. Create a purposeful life of your unique design by disrupting societal norms and expectations of who you should be. Explore mindfulness, fearless curiosity and loving kindness through the lens of Human Design to thrive as the person you are born to be.

Learn more about my coaching method and join my emotional healing, mindfulness, and music community at melissaindot.com.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00

Rejections ultimately are redirections. Rejections are redirecting us into a different path. They are informing us that the path that we're currently on that we hold a great attachment to, that we believe to be the best way, in fact, is not the best way and there is another way for us to explore and experiment with.

00:28

Hey there, welcome to the Fearlessly Curious podcast, your safe space to listen, lean in and learn the diversity of human experiences through the lens of fearless curiosity. When we learn more about each other, we also learn more about ourselves. How? Because when we listen to each other's curiosities and experiences, we relate to that which has been common, and that which sets us apart gives us something to reflect on. We learn through and with each other. I am grateful to you, the global community, for your curious questions. The Fearlessly Curious podcast cannot exist without you.

01:16

Hello, everybody and welcome to yet another episode of the Fearlessly Curious podcast with me, your host, Melissa Indot. And today, we are going to discuss how to find fresh perspectives. So here we are in the year 2023. And typically, when we are living by the Gregorian calendar, the calendar that breaks time down into 12 months in a year, 34 days in a month and 24 hours in a day, we look to the new year, as an opportunity to shift to change old ways of being to change our lifestyle, to invite new opportunities to go for our dreams, to let go of things that don't serve us anymore. And there is a pressure to do that collectively, as well. As typically at the end of the year, we're invited to contemplate the year past as I have also invited you to do so that we can create space for what is burning within our hearts to see into reality.

02:19

The thing is when we're so used to doing things one way when we're so used to thinking in a specific way, it can be a challenge to find a new way of being to discover a new way of living, and to shift our perspective to find a fresh perspective. So how do we do that? Well, one way is to journal. In journaling, we allow for our thoughts and our patterns to come out onto a piece of paper or onto a note, digital notepad. And after we've allowed for that stream of consciousness to come through, then we can create space to then read to them, bear witness to the way that we're thinking, to the patterns of thinking that show up. Now through journaling daily, we will then be able to start to witness if there is a pattern. In order to change something, we first need to be able to see what the pattern is that we want to change. So journaling helps us to get a visual on that.

03:20

The other way to find a fresh perspective is to share what we're thinking with someone else. That could be a friend, a family member, that could be a colleague at work. Perhaps it's a mentor, perhaps it's someone you admire someone older than you that has more life experience. But I also like to invite you to consider avenues of reflection that you had not considered before. That might be your teenager, your teenage child, that could be a friend's young child, someone who's below the age of 10. I would invite you to consider all the options that you actually think are bad options, or all the options that you would minimize that you would cast aside as being inappropriate. Cast aside those options that you feel almost don't make any sense at all. Like what would a young child know? What would a teenager know? How would their limited life experience bring any wisdom to helping me find a fresh perspective?

04:19

But you see that's exactly it because they haven't yet had that specific life experience yet, they might be able to bring a fresh perspective to it. Remember also that because each of us are different. Each of us is living life and viewing life and perceiving life from our own unique perspective. So when we openly invite other people to share what their point of view is, then we invite the opportunity for us to see life, to see that situation through a different set of eyes.

04:55

Fresh perspectives are really about tapping into your curiosity. It's really what is the core of this podcast in and of itself? Which is to invite the question, Why? Why does it look that way? Or invite the question How? How could it be different? And the way to discover it, fresh perspectives is to lean into the very resistance that you may be feeling to lean into the very conflict that you might be experiencing, so that we can transform what we once considered as obstacles like I have this issue, I have this problem, I have the same way of thinking the same pattern and behavior and I can't move past it and you see it as an obstacle. How do we transform that into an opportunity to do things differently?

05:43

In order to attempt to do things differently, to think differently, we first have to be able to observe how we are currently doing things. A key aspect of finding a fresh perspective is to put judgment aside. And so often, when we come up with a new point of view, or a new train of thinking, the mind automatically wants to judge it, and will say, Oh, that's a silly idea. That's foolish. That doesn't make sense.

06:10

In order to allow for new ideas to come through, we have to put judgment aside because when we judge something in a negative manner, what we do is we block the flow of that new way of thinking. Now, it's easy to say to stop judging, but transformation begins when we give ourselves the space to witness things. And it takes time, first of all, to notice the way that we behave and notice the way we think. And from that awareness of observing, we then need to create the space to allow for that to happen. So allow yourself to judge through awareness through saying, Oh, look, I'm making a judgment, you're already in the space of transformation.

06:51

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So when you're feeling stuck, when you want to find a new perspective, on a problem, on an issue, you want to start to cultivate a new way of being, the first step is always to create awareness, the space of safe awareness, you observe yourself, you notice the way that you always do things. And perhaps you'd want to document that by journaling. That which makes you feel uncomfortable, when you have an idea that feels very so different than it makes you feel uncomfortable. You want to be able to lean into that even more and inquire, ask yourself, why does it feel uncomfortable? How can this discomfort transform into a space of delivering something new? How can the obstacle the very thing that I think is blocking my way? How can that become an opportunity for me to discover a new way of overcoming, overriding that obstacle? Perhaps this is an obstacle because I'm trying to get over it. But really, what I need to do is get through it, go across it, go below it, shift to the left, shift to the right, so the obstacle is still there.

07:54

But what you're doing is you're looking for a new way to approach it, where you feel resistance with a situation, lean into that resistance and ask yourself, how can I leverage on this powerful energy of resistance, rather than push against it is that lean into it, follow the energy of it, surrender to the energy of it, so that I can lean into and leverage into my resilience, my ability to navigate that which I think is difficult, because resilience is inbuilt. And the way that we grow, resilience is just like when we go to the gym, we need to flex that muscle. So when you feel that energy of resistance, that powerful energy, leverage on that by leaning into the resistance, as opposed to leaning away from it, leaning into resistance gives you the opportunity to muscle in on to flex your muscle of resilience to stretch that when you're feeling conflict, when you feel stuck in one specific point of view mindset of perspective, and you're conflicted with the idea of shifting it as you come up with an idea to do things differently.

09:03

But you're so in conflict with it, because perhaps it challenges some belief systems that you used to hold. Well, that is encouraging, challenge is encouraging. So again, instead of pulling away from the conflict, lean into that conflict, to get creative. That conflict is there because it is igniting the possibility of doing things differently. And that discomfort is there to support you to stretch the way that you see things, the way that you could live and be in life.

09:39

When I was pursuing my dream of becoming a recording artist or a singer songwriter. I met all four of these, I met many obstacles. I've met a lot of resistance, and I definitely experienced an immense amount of conflict and a lot of rejection. I'm going to touch on rejection shortly. The obstacles that I faced were really down to who I was in the sense that I was a woman looking to make a career in a business that is predominantly male dominated. At the time I was living in the UK. And let's be honest, the color of my skin was not something that was accessible in the UK market. There were very few Asian Southeast Asian artists out at the time. In fact, they were not in the UK market. And so those were obstacles.

10:27

For me, there were also financial obstacles, like I couldn't afford the top notch teams to work with songwriters, producers and arrangers and studios to record in, I just simply just didn't have those resources. So I could have given up faced with those sorts of obstacles, I could have given up. But instead, I used I leveraged those obstacles as opportunities to find different ways of achieving what it was that I was going for. So what I did was in terms of being a woman, and in terms of not looking like anybody else who was in the market, I used that as fuel fuel to drive me further forward to fuel, to encourage me to maybe become the first Southeast Asian woman in the music industry in the UK. And the truth is back in the 90s, we actually made my band at the time called Confucius says, we actually got a full page article in one of the daily newspapers. And we also got a write up in Music Week, which is the music industry paper.

11:33

By leveraging the obstacles, we created opportunities to tell our story. So we turn those obstacles into opportunities. And the resistance that we faced through those obstacles helped us to exercise to flex our resilience, because it was like we basically we're not going to take no for an answer. And by having that grit, by having that determination, and that deep belief in who we are, who I was and what I wanted to do. It helped me show up for myself, and prove to myself the resilience that lived within me the same time, these obstacles were providing a lot of conflicts because it's not an easy experience to navigate when you're being rejected, or not accepted because of the way that you look, because you don't seem accessible to that market. It does make you feel like a misfit. It does make you feel like you don't belong. And so there is a conflict of beliefs in and of itself. And so what we needed to do was get creative with those conflicts, use that powerful energy of conflict, to lean in more compassionately and be creative with that. And that meant having conversations about how through leaning into people who look different to you, we have so much more to learn. And essentially that's the topic of diversity. But I don't want to delve too much into that right now. I just want to touch on how it is that we can find fresh perspectives in life.

13:09

These are the three main ones I'd like you to explore with turning obstacles into opportunities, turning resistance into evidence of your resilience, and transforming conflict into creativity. So we are harvesting. We are leveraging the energy of meeting obstacles being faced with resistance and feeling an immense amount of conflict into ways of being that are more supportive, that are progressive that allow for our forward momentum.

13:41

One of the most powerful experiences in life is rejection. It isn't one of the most painful, but at the same time, one of the most powerful because rejections ultimately, are redirections. Rejections are redirecting us into a different path. They are informing us that the path that we're currently on that we hold a great attachment to that we believe to be the best way in fact, is not the best way and there is another way for us to explore and experiment with. So holding this knowledge this deep knowing that when you are rejected from one particular opportunity, when you feel that life is working for you, that you are being fully supported because you are being redirected into another pathway, another direction.

14:30

And these are ways in which instead of living in survival mode and being so afraid of uncertainty, we can in fact start to thrive in uncertainty, because we reclaim the power to find fresh perspectives in every experience of life. So holding true in your heart, knowing that you can transform obstacles and opportunities, resistance into proof of your resilience, conflict into creative waves of finding connection. And of course, turning rejections into redirections, opening your mind and being curious to see all the other ways that rejection is offering you new opportunities. These are some of the most incredible lessons that I've learned and I now practice in my life, every time I feel down now, and every time I feel my energy is drained from meeting, a belief that no longer serves me that I have faced enough obstacle that I am being rejected, that I am in conflict with the belief or that I'm experiencing resistance, that there is always that choice and ability to lean into that which makes me feel uncomfortable, and transform that energy into something that supports me.

15:44

I hope that you find it helpful too. And I really look forward to you letting me know in the comments, letting me know through our online community through email, and the newsletter and through my other social media platforms, let me know how helpful this is for you because it was transformative for me and what is the purpose of learning in life through our own unique experiences if we don't share it with each other. So I hope that you find this useful, and I really, really look forward to hearing from you. And until the next episode, remember to stay fearlessly curious, that is the core core pillar that will help you find fresh perspectives in life. Until next time.

16:32

If you want more, make sure to subscribe so you never miss a new episode every Friday. And please leave a review. If you enjoy this episode. Don't forget to send me your curious questions and experiences as inspiration for future episodes. Your anonymity will be respected if that's what you prefer. For more guidance and support, join my emotional healing, mindfulness and music community over at melissaindot.com. See you next week.

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