This is the 2nd in a 4-Part Series which offer a practical path to loving your life every day. Click here to read Part 1.

People tend to have a Victim Perspective, and it exaggerates the power of circumstances to ruin their lives. The first blog suggested that your life works far better with a Welcoming Perspective, enthusiastic about dealing with whatever happens. Even when you can’t get the result you want, it feels like a valuable experience, fascinating and instructive. You know that an incident influences different people differently, depending on how they hold it.

But your priorities get screwed up whenever something triggers fear, anger, or a foolish impulse. Those feelings throw you back into your Victim Perspective. Suddenly you feel like you “need” immediate success, pleasure, or ease, or you feel like your life sucks. Even so, there is a way to keep all that from doing you lasting harm.

Here’s a story that sets the stage for that. Vince and Bill have met only once, but they both fall into periodic depressions where life doesn’t seem worth living. Each of them would give his life an “F” during depressed periods and an “A” during normal periods. When Vince rates his life as a whole, he averages together the good and bad times (as most people do), rating his life only a “C”. But Bill is weird about assessing his happiness. He treats his depressive feelings as utterly irrational, attributing them to imbalances in his brain chemistry. He figures that he is not himself while he is depressed, as if another person were occupying his body for a while. Bill rates his life an “A” overall. He doesn’t mind his past depressions, and doesn’t worry about when the next one will hit.

Crazy, right? But it works, and here is a story that makes it easier to understand how you could do something like that with all your victim feelings. Vince and Bill crossed paths just once. They were pulled from the audience by a stage hypnotist, who got them to make complete fools of themselves. Vince has never gotten over the shame of it all. But when Bill got to see himself on video, he laughed harder than anybody else in the audience. He wouldn’t hesitate to volunteer again. Bill figures that he is not himself when foolish feelings distort his priorities or his love of life. Whenever he is overtaken by depression or a burst of rage, he later looks back at it as having been in a hypnotic trance. He just laughs at himself and gets busy cleaning up any messes he made. And if he closes an important door in his life during a trance, he is flexible enough to assume that another one will open.

It takes a little practice, but you can experience that you are only really yourself when you have a Welcoming Perspective. You can treat any victim feelings as throwing you into a trance, where you’re stuck in the illusion that events control your happiness, and where your priorities are temporarily distorted so that you act irrationally. Think about it. Sometimes you want to play the game of life, using your good sense. At other times, you feel like a victim. You do all sorts of things that you know you’re going to regret, or resist doing whatever makes sense. Why not treat your good sense as the real you, and disown the trances?

You begin to lead two lives by noticing your trances as soon as they end, and disowning them. And when you stop counting them, you will be amazed to discover what your undistorted purposes and priorities are. By learning to draw a big fat line between your two identities, the real you will discover the power to love the whole game of life.

Your Welcoming Perspective needs cultivating, by focusing more on your part in each experience than on how it fails to fit your pictures. With some practice you can learn to feel like you are in the driver’s seat even in situations where you have little immediate control. You might focus on how to go with the flow for now, or on being alert to any lessons. This perspective pays off rather quickly.

You love the game of life whenever you have a Welcoming Perspective. When you fall back into a Victim Perspective, your sense of happiness will get bounced around, but only until you are welcoming again, at which point you dismiss the trance-induced happiness judgments. Of course, you are conditioned to have small victim feelings all day long, like:
* irritation when things don’t fit your pictures,
* stress when up against a deadline, or
* resistance to continuing when an important project gets boring.

Sometimes these feelings disappear as soon as you recognize them. But mostly, you just let foolish feelings control you for as long as they do, taking care to notice when your Welcoming Perspective returns.

It is easy to recognize a Welcoming Perspective. You are lighthearted, with no resistance to doing whatever makes sense. But a Victim Perspective can show up in all sorts of ways, such as:
foolish urges or negative feelings,
* fighting to control those feelings,
* hoping things go your way,
* wondering if you are worthy, or
* pushing yourself to keep going.

Irrational feelings are part of the human condition. If you want to be consistently happy, there is great value in distancing yourself from them enough to discover who you are while you are welcoming. By doing so, you free yourself to own your life, rather than feeling bounced around by forces that you can’t entirely control.

Enthusiasm is pretty central is to playing the game of life, and it comes and goes. The next blog is about being enthusiastic in your pursuit of what you want.

Click here to read Part 3.
Click here to read Part 4

Visit Chuck Turner’s website here: WelcomingPerspective