The importance of perspective

Toastmasters Motivational Strategies (French) Pathway, Level 1, Evaluations and Feedback, Second Speech.

Introduction

Three weeks ago today, I left the MTO, and as always when I’m driving past Toronto in an introspective mood as always when I drive by such a crowded place, and considering that there are 2,794,3561 people in one city, as part of a country of 36,991,9812 people and a world of 8091734933 people, and no two people in that city, or the country, or even the world, have exactly the same perspective on life.

So why is prespective imporant? Well I’ll give you three reasons: first, understanding perspective helps us understand more about ourselves, second it helps build Metacognitive skills, and finally, it helps build empathy.

Understanding ourselves

First, what is perspective? The definition of perspective changes depending on the context in which it is used (ironically enough), but for this speech I’m presenting perspective as the “the interrelation in which a subject or its parts are mentally viewed”4. Without delving into the Theory of the Mind, this influences the way people including you and I, interpret things in the world around us, and the neat part is that everyone is different! Weather you blieve in Nature, Nurture, or a combination of both as most researchers do, Since no two people will ever get the same Nurturing, everybody is individual, and since no one is the same by Nature, that also means everyone is throughly unique. Awareness of perspective and how it influences yourself is a powerful step to enabling the twin engines of Metacognition and Empathy.

Metacognition

Secondly understanding perspectivs is an important part of metacogintion. Metacognition is defined as “thinking about one’s thinking” and is associated with imporved learning5. Understanding how you perceive information and how information is perceived by others is crucial to making learning easier to implementing Metacognitive strategies not only for yourself, but for others around you as well. Once you start learning how to regulate your own your own learning you can follow the Feynman method6 and start teaching others to learn improving your own capacity, while also helping other people.

Empathy

Thirdly, Understanding your perspective is also crucial to building empathy. At a young age children are encouraged to “Take Perspective” which simply involves putting yourself in the shoes of other peoplearound you. This simple but effective activity can be a great way to start understanding where people with different experiences than yours may be coming from. But a more effective way of putting yourself in the shoes of other people is literaly doing the thing.

Last year I was privileged enough to be forced into an environment where I completely changed my perspective unwillingly when I fell off my bycicle and lost the ability to move my elbow and was physically couldn’t to tie my shoes until I learnt of people who either can’t use or don’t have both their hands doing youtube tutorials on tying shoes7. I don’t want to act like falling off a bike was an amazing thing that everyone should try, or that having a disability is fine aktually, but I really feel like putting yourself temporarily into the position of someone other than yourself can really help you feel for people in situations different than your own. After falling off that bike, I spent the lot of time implementing accessibility features at the MTO, though this could have the Frequency illusion8 playing tricks on me. It also broke a routine I’d been in for the majority of the summer in ways that didn’t get me but really forced me to think hard about how effective my routine really was, and little ways I could improve it.

While my example is a little excessive, hopefully it illustrates the point that putting yourself in a completely different situation - weather volontary or not - can help you understand a some of the problems of different people and maybe help you lend some of your experience to solve it.

Conclusion

In Conclusion, whether it’s imporoving your own understanding of your self, building Metacognitive ability, or just making it a little easier to understand where someone else is coming from, perspective is a vital part in improving and striving to be the best person possible. While not a particularily in depth speech, I hope this speech helped you to understand why I value perspective so much. In a world of nearly 809173493 people you sometimes.

  1. Statistique Canada via City of Toronto ↩

  2. Statistique Canada ↩

  3. United Nations ↩

  4. Merriam Webster Dictionary ↩

  5. University of Waterloo ↩

  6. University of Colorado Boulder ↩

  7. Logan Aldrige ↩

  8. Wikipedia ↩