Quotes About Perspective

What do you mean you don't sing?! You talk!" Jim told me later, "It was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn't walk or dance, even though I have both my legs.

Just because someone quotes you a statistic or shows you a graph, it doesn't mean it's relevant to the point they're trying to make. It's the job of all of us to make sure we get the information that matters, and to ignore the information that doesn't.

For a child or an adult, it's extremely powerful to hear someone say, "I get you. I understand. I see why you feel this way." This kind of empathy disarms us.

When your child is disrespectful and talks back to you, when you are asked to come in for a meeting with the principal, when you find crayon scribbles all over your wall: these are survive moments, no question about it. But at the same time, they are opportunities—even gifts—because a survive moment is also a thrive moment, where the important, meaningful work of parenting takes place.

No se sentirán tristes o enfadados o dolidos o solos eternamente. Éste es un concepto que al principio les cuesta entender. Cuando sienten dolor o miedo, a veces les resulta difícil imaginar que no van a seguir sufriendo siempre. Ver las cosas a largo plazo no suele ser fácil ni siquiera para un adulto, y mucho menos para un niño pequeño

Even if an emotion seems ridiculous to you, don't forget that it's very real to your child, so you don't want to dismiss something that's important to her.

By wondering what our kids are trying to accomplish and by allowing them to explain a situation before we rush to judgment, we're able to gather actual data from their

Explained most simply, mindsight is the ability to see our own mind, as well as the mind of another. It allows us to develop meaningful relationships while also maintaining a healthy and independent sense of self. When we ask our children to consider their own feelings (using personal insight) while also imagining how someone else might experience a particular situation (using empathy), we are helping them develop mindsight.

También es esencial tener en cuenta que por mucho que los sentimientos de nuestro hijo nos parezcan frustrantes y absurdos, para él son reales e importantes. Es fundamental tratarlos como tales en nuestra respuesta.

we parent, and especially when we discipline, we need to work hard to understand our children's points of view, their developmental stage, and what they are ultimately capable of.

The experiential, subjective side of reality is non-objective in that you couldn't weigh it, hold it in your hand, or capture the subjective nature of such inner experiences with a camera—not even with a functional brain-imaging scanner. This

Denial of our emotions isn't the only danger we face when we rely too heavily on our left brain. We can also become too literal, leaving us without a sense of perspective, where we miss the meaning that comes from putting things in context (a specialty of the right brain). This is part of what causes your eight-year-old to become defensive and angry sometimes when you innocently joke around with her. Remember that the right brain is in charge of reading nonverbal cues.

Denial of our emotions isn't the only danger we face when we rely too heavily on our left brain. We can also become too literal, leaving us without a sense of perspective, where we miss the meaning that comes from putting things in context (a specialty of the right brain).

Experienced happiness refers to your feelings, to how happy you are as you live your life. In contrast, the satisfaction of the remembering self refers to your feelings when you think about your life.

higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.

I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.

The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?

I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Averaging two guesses by the same person does not improve judgments as much as does seeking out an independent second opinion. As Vul and Pashler put it, "You can gain about 1/10th as much from asking yourself the same question twice as you can from getting a second opinion from someone else." This is not a large improvement. But you can make the effect much larger by waiting to make a second guess.

focusing illusion, which can be described in a single sentence: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Because it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the