What Is “Perspective”?

Also known as worldview, mental model, or mind-set, our perspective of the world is based on the sum total of our knowledge and experiences. It defines us, shaping our thoughts and actions because it represents the way we see ourselves and situations, how we judge the relative importance of things, and how we establish a meaningful relationship with everything around us.

Cultivating a wise perspective is the first step toward developing wise leadership capacity. In our research, we found that a shift in perspective tends to occur in two ways: either it is triggered involuntarily by extreme external circumstances like a crisis (desperation), or it is induced voluntarily by a conscious effort to change oneself for the better through high aspiration. Raj’s perspective shift came about through the latter: he reached out for help because he intuitively felt a need to change his life. But often we find that a perspective shift takes the former course: it is imposed on people after a life-changing event of some kind. That’s exactly what happened to Viktor Frankl.

Frankl was born and raised in Vienna and became an accomplished psychiatrist and neurologist. During World War II, Frankl, who was Jewish, spent three years in a Nazi concentration camp, where he experienced an epiphany about the way we can find or create meaning in our lives regardless of how harsh our circumstances are. Frankl realized that although the Nazis could incarcerate him and torture his body, they could not control his mind and spirit. He believed that he retained the freedom to give meaning to his life even in the face of deprivation, suffering, and humiliation. The moment Frankl recognized that his mind and spirit were free and his identity was not restricted to his body and what he did, he reframed his self-perception. His perspective suddenly shifted from a helpless victim to an empowered individual. Frankl then helped other prisoners shift their own perspective, and based on these experiences, he established a new school of psychotherapy, called logotherapy, after his liberation from the camp.²

Ultimately, meaning motivates human beings more than power, Frankl postulated. Discovering meaning happens by creating a work or doing a deed, experiencing something (in Frankl’s case, great and unavoidable suffering), or encountering someone.³ These may sound like easy or everyday tasks, but we tend to get sidetracked along the way to finding meaning, and we suffer some more. Frankl’s work, based on the concept that striving to find meaning in one’s life should be a primary motivation and driving force, has broad implications beyond psychotherapy. Shifting perspective, as Frankl did, allows us to see patterns that we have never been aware of before. It can lead to our awareness of existential meaning and not just intellectual understanding in our lives and help us deal with difficult situations.

For our purposes, shifting perspective means becoming sensitive to the context around us and being able to see the world without any filters. It allows us to broaden our worldview and empathize with people who think and act radically different from us. A perspective shift could yield different insights and actions for different leaders depending on the kind of colored glasses—red or blue—they are used to wearing.