Blocks

Perspectives

There are perspectives for literally everything we encounter in life – and the thing about perspectives and “easy” or “difficult” is this:

We often only have to shift our perspective slightly in order to find out that how we do something or how we feel about something has changed.

Now this will happen for us whether we previously found something easy or hard – there is a shift in our experience and a shift in our feelings about that experience.

If you’re not sure what I’m getting at then go and clean your teeth holding the brush in the other hand, and notice what you notice. It feels different, you feel different, you find the same level of dexterity is harder to accomplish at the same speed, you can’t do it very well, you feel imprisoned by being less capable, you’re not very good, and so on and so forth.

This is both amazing and bizarre - purely from doing some well-learned and simple everyday task from a different perspective you notice that a whole raft of perceptions come up that you hadn’t expected or that you hadn’t asked for either! Still – there’s a safety net for you, because you only have to put the brush back in the other hand and all is well and normal once more.

Taking this a stage further, you might imagine that a stroke or some other paralysis had taken out your use of that “strong” or favoured hand. Now you’d have to endure this “hard” way of brushing your teeth every day henceforth in your life. How difficult would this be, to live with, to endure? How will you ever cope even with such a simple task? How might your “confidence” deal with this?

This happened for my mother with her painting hand after her first stroke. She saw how she was coping with signing her name and something inside made her decide to not lift any type of paintbrush for over a year. Her confidence had gone and she couldn’t face attempting to paint or even draw.

When we lose an ability, or think we’ve lost an ability, or feel we can’t possibly master an ability, then our confidence takes a hit. And when the ability is actually our confidence itself then we the take the hit in many more (or sometimes all) areas of our life.

Frames

One of the easiest ways of shifting our perspectives is through the use of frames. By this I mean HOW we frame something, or HOW we set the context.

Take the illusory image below – now you can either see a black vase, or two white faces.

So if our context, our frame, is to look for faces in the image then we’ll ignore the vase and see 2 

faces.

I asked a group of people to count how many ways they could get out of the room. They all counted the number of possible exits because they assumed that as being the frame of the question. When I showed them they could go through every exit in a number of different body positions, or using a number of different ways of moving, they realised their assumption of the frame was restricting their perspective. Suddenly their answers went from “2 doors and 3 windows” into a much larger or potentially INFINITE number of ways.

I coached a young man who was something of a perfectionist. Even in practices he would make mistakes – and then “beat himself up” about making the mistakes. The frame of his perfectionism was bounded by zero tolerance. I pointed out all his successes and how good he was in the eyes of all of those around him, yet he still couldn’t free himself from the self criticism. Until, that is, the moment I changed the frame of the way he judged himself.
I didn’t try to curtail the judging, and when I asked him how he’d got from being less good at something last year to being as good as he is at it RIGHT NOW, his gaze seemed to focus on some very distant point. I expanded on this timeline of his “gaining mastery” by describing everything he did as being “work in progress.” From that moment his judgement perspective shifted from the “finite ideal” that he was comparing everything with, into an infinite point of mastery that he was progressing “towards”. That way, for him everything was now just a step along the way. It enabled him to work on the processes of his technique without constant criticism, which then enabled him to improve that technique with much more effect.

He’d stumbled across the building blocks of how he could get even better!

Blocks

So here we have some blocks - and the images can be seen to represent stumbling blocks or building blocks. Interesting isn’t it how the “stumbling” image is in dull greyscale whereas the “building” image is bright and colourful.

When we think of blocks to or for our progress then even our inner perspectives follow this positive/negative means of representation. They are still just blocks, of course, yet we are very good at constructing, of framing, what contexts they mean for us. Plus we will use specific language to reinforce the meanings and the boundaries of these two frames.

We need to remember that the stumbling blocks have been built by us, out of building blocks.

The “Frameless Frame”

There is a frame of the infinitely possible, a bottomless pool of endless outcomes, an unbounded ceiling of capabilities. 

This is what I call “The Frameless Frame.”

There is a Frameless Frame to what is possible in the world, and a Frameless Frame to our capabilities and potentiality. Fundamentally this is the same for all of us, and applies to all of us.

Within the Frameless Frame there are blocks – an infinite number of blocks that represent the power of thought. Now how we use these blocks is entirely up to us. We can either use them as Building Blocks to help our Understanding of how things work best, or we can use them to construct Stumbling Blocks to our progress towards our Understanding of how things work best.

So let’s say we might ask ourselves, “What am I capable of? Is there nothing I cannot do?” If we apply the context of the Frameless Frame to our questions then the answer is “Yes, I can do anything.” And for as long as we continue to apply the Frameless Frame then we will use those blocks in the way they were meant to be used. We might still construct the odd Stumbling Block and discover that something doesn’t work so well – yet provided we remain with the Frameless Frame, then we can deconstruct the Stumbling Block and assemble something else, something more useful with the blocks.

If we become unsure, however – if we question our security – then we have constructed the limitation, the stumbling block, of insecurity. We have stepped into the finite and shrinking area of possibilities. We are no longer capable of “anything”, but have now constructed a reduced number of our capabilities. We are stumbling along life’s path; our route is restricted by large boulder-like stumbling blocks.  

“So how easy is it to use the Frameless Frame – of viewing life from that perspective?
Can I try it out first or do I have to go ‘all-in’?”

Well, let’s go back to using our toothbrush in the other hand. What are we going to notice about how it feels and how we feel? What are we going to be saying to ourselves as we do this? HOW are we going to Notice and Listen?
Are we noticing or hearing limitations? Are we colliding with constructed Stumbling Blocks? If so we need to ask ourselves “How might I deconstruct these Stumbling Blocks and use them differently, perhaps as Building Blocks?”

IF we needed a reminder just consider the number of times Thomas Edison invented a light bulb that didn’t work until he eventually stumbled across a constructed light bulb that DID. He never bumped up against the walls of “this will never work” or “I just can’t do this”. He was working within the Frameless Frame, and as such he knew it would work it was just a matter of HOW and (since this was always and only ever Work in Progress) and WHEN.

Conclusion

The blocks are just blocks – blocks of thoughts if you like. How we use them and what we construct with them is entirely of our own making. Life is just full of blocks – in some people’s perspectives there are building blocks and in others’ there are stumbling blocks. How we experience the blocks is entirely up to us as well.

So, maybe if you encounter a stumbling block, you need to take a different perspective – perhaps take a trip around the block – and then you’ll see it for what it really is, as well as the easiest way to deconstruct it for Good!