This is the 1st in a 4-Part Series which offer a practical path to loving your life every day.

I love playing games. I try to win, but I also enjoy the learning curve, the interactions with other players, and being ready for whatever happens. If all you care about is winning the game, it might more like an ego trip than playing a game.

The same goes for living your life. You love to pursue pleasure, success, and ease. But the only way to be consistently happy is to love the pursuit as much as the good results. You have a natural enthusiasm for relationships, growth, and being ready for whatever happens. You like good results partly because they are mixed together with obstacles and failures. You only bask in pleasure and pride when things go well, but whenever you are enjoying the pursuit, you experience being in the driver’s seat. Even when you make mistakes and run into roadblocks, you have the sense that you are figuring out what you really want, practicing, and broadening your experience.

Suppose you finally got everything you wanted in life, in a steady flow of successes, pleasures, and ease. Once you got used to that level of results you would not be any happier than you are now. We know that from the lives of super-successful people who have been able to buy all the pleasure and ease they want. Many or most of them are less happy than they were on the way up. Some of them choose new and bigger goals, because happiness is in the pursuit. We want a game with obstacles and failures. It gets boring to watch somebody else play, and boring to play a game that is too easy.

There are two very different perspectives on life. With a Victim Perspective, you think that bad things can ruin your day or your life. Your happiness is bounced all over the place, by your own failings and by things beyond your control. You are at the mercy of good and bad luck, as if your fate were controlled by the gods. You are driven by your “need” for good results, like people who play games only because they “need” victory.

With a Welcoming Perspective, you are ready to face whatever gets thrown at you, focused as much on your pursuit as the results. You feel like you are in the driver’s seat, watching for hidden opportunities or lessons. What someone else would see as an obstacle, you see as a challenge. While others feel helpless during a disaster, you are confident you can do something to minimize the damage.

Your brain has been conditioned to exaggerate the power of bad results to ruin your day or your life. But you can learn to roll with the punches. Some people land on their feet after what should have been a knockout punch, like Helen Keller (struck blind and deaf), Stephen Hawking (paralyzed and unable to speak), and Nelson Mandela (locked up for thirty years of a life sentence). One secret to rolling with the punches is flexibility about what happiness looks like. When life deals you lemons, you are only likely to open a lemonade stand if you are free to let go of blocked hopes and find a new path.

Life goes sideways sometimes. Depending on your perspective, you either grow or let it embitter you. The secret is to see the value of being pushed outside your comfort zone once in a while, assuming it might have some long-term benefit. You come out the other side glad to be alive, while those around you come out scarred and victimized.

A Victim Perspective is like a self-fulfilling prophesy. When you give power to events, in increases your stress, anger, or hopelessness. You become a bit superstitious, hoping for good luck and dreading bad luck. As various of your dreams are crushed, you shrink the size of your world, and maybe grow bitter. We were all born with a natural enthusiasm for challenges and novelty, but many people just fall into feeling inadequate, and wishing they had an easier life.

You have the power to replace your Victim Perspective with a Welcoming Perspective, where you like practicing with an ever broader range of experiences. You can awaken a Welcoming Perspective by softening your “need” for good results to happen on any schedule. This frees you to see obstacles as challenges, and failures as lessons. When a door closes, you suspect that another door will soon open, because you are confident that your chance for happiness keeps starting start over from wherever you are.

A Welcoming Perspective is not a matter of forcing yourself to have a positive attitude. Instead, it simply makes more room for your natural enthusiasm for challenges and your inherent fascination with whatever is happening. You have had that perspective lots of times, like when you were in the mood for
* a puzzle that frustrates you a bit,
* an opponent who will be tough to beat,
* a chance to be creative where you know you might get stuck, or
* a fitness regimen where you push yourself to the point of pain and resistance.

No one has a Welcoming Perspective all the time. Victim feelings like fear, anger, hope, craving, and regret are deeply ingrained. Big events powerfully trigger those feelings, drowning out all welcoming. Since a Welcoming Perspective disappears at critical moments, is it worth the effort to cultivate it? We’ll deal with that in the next blog.

Click here to read Part 2.
Click here to read Part 3.
Click here to read Part 4

Visit Chuck Turner’s website here: WelcomingPerspective