I was driving home one night a couple years ago listening to The Brilliant Idiots Podcast (Warning: explicit content) and the conversation revolved around finding joy, doing the thing you love, and how we often get caught up in the trappings of life and forget about the importance of maintaining that love and passion that we discover.  How important is loving your family, or the love we have for supporting a specific project or developing a particular skill.  In our pursuit of “success” we can lose our way, losing our meaning and our purpose.  But, when you are able to figure your “self” out (your purpose), the world opens up to you because the possibilities of what you can accomplish are endless. It’s a very convoluted concept to explain, yet can be so simple to understand.  Our “self” is constantly evolving because of the knowledge that we gain through reading, learning, and personal experiences.  Hopefully we are evolving into a better version of ourselves.  Depending on how “successful” (according to the world) we become we can lose our “self.”  We become trapped by the “American Dream” or any other construct of success developed by someone else.  One of the most powerful quotes from the show was, “Perspective is the only superpower.” (I can’t remember if it was Charlamage or Schultz that said it). When you understand that there are other perspectives besides yours you can start to be more understanding of others.  You can have empathy for their situations.  You can begin to see that one person’s breakdown is another person’s breakthrough.  When we don’t understand someone’s perspective we immediately call them crazy.  “What were they thinking?!” “Why would they do something like that!?” “That was stupid!” “They don’t know what they are doing to themselves!”

I found my purpose, to serve others, years ago. That purpose, to truly serve others, requires the ability to have perspective.  I have to understand who I am, and who I am not.  Through a lot of mistakes and self-reflection I feel like I have done a pretty good job of identifying my strengths and weaknesses.  One of my favorite tools for identifying those strengths is the Gallup StrengthsFinder.  I took it twice in two different school districts and my strengths seemed to evolve in the time between the two tests.  My top strengths are pretty telling: Developer and Maximizer.  I’ll let you dig into what those are, but from the trainer that went through the reflection, that’s a very unique combination of strengths.

I think I’m growing my perspective daily.  As a leader I hear feedback and criticism pretty consistently.  Sometimes it is about decisions that I have made, or decisions that I enforce.  Sometimes I hear perspectives on current events, politics, social movements.  I find it interesting too that folks have s sense of comfort around me and let their guard down and really expose the perspectives that they may hide from most.  Yes, I’m talking about bias and racism.  Some folks are completely oblivious to how ignorant they sound, but the perspective taker in me often says, “That’s fascinating! Can you tell me more about why you feel that way?” And they do!  Folks want to be heard.  Folks want to share their perspective, but often do not have the platform.  No-one really takes interest.  To serve well though, I have to be interested.  I have to invest the time that it takes to get to know the needs, wants, and perspectives of the people that I serve so I can serve them better.

I  also need to enact the true superpower of having perspective in my life, while welcoming the perspectives of others as well.

If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that there are a whole bunch of perspectives out there that I do not think make sense, perspectives that I agree with whole heartedly, and there are all sorts of perspectives in between. This year I am going to focus on understanding these multiple perspectives and sharing what I learn to help shape my growth and the growth of those around me.