The 5 Perspectives That Make Smart People Smart (10.1)
Fred Kofman
Executive Coach | President at Conscious Business Center International - CBC
“The more you become nobody, the more you can become anybody. The more you become anybody, the more you become everybody.”
A sign of cognitive development is your ability to see systems. As you become more intelligent you make sense of reality as a web of interconnected events in time and space, a coherent whole that fits together. Things don’t just “happen.” They “follow,” naturally and logically, from the structure of the system and how it shapes its components’ behaviors.
Another sign of cognitive development is your ability to take multiple perspectives. As you become wiser you make sense of human experience as a complex web of interconnected meanings, a multi-faceted jewel that shows up different to different points of view. Things don’t just “are.” They “appear to be” to a particular subject, with a particular mental model.
Different subjects, with different mental models will experience different realities. And the more you can liberate yourself from the illusion that things appear to you as they “really are,” the more you will be able to experience reality from other points of view.
In other words, the more you become nobody, the more you can become anybody. And the more you become anybody, the more you become everybody.
In the following video, I introduce five essential perspectives that you can use to develop your wisdom and your compassion. In the next five posts, I will explore each one of them in more detail.
Should you have any trouble viewing the video please click here to view on Fred's slideshare page
Readers: How does looking at reality from these five points of view help you see something you didn’t see before?
Fred Kofman is Vice President at Linkedin. This post is part 10.1 of Linkedin's Conscious Business Program. You can find the introduction and structure of this program here. Follow Fred Kofman on LinkedIn here. To stay connected and get updates please visit Conscious Business Academy and join our Conscious Business Friends group.
Head of People and OD and Non Executive Director (Solace)
5 年Great to have a model to work with
Create. Collaborate. Community
5 年It opens your eyes by seeing things from someone else's perspective as everyone creates or tells the story they believe to be true. So the only way to understand others is to understand where they are coming from.
Managing Partner, Executive Coach/Facilitator - Programs with ??, ?? and ??(in Kenya!)
6 年It helps by simply taking you out of yourself and viewing a situation from a different angle. I wonder if all people are capable of doing this - is it an inherent or learned ability? I'm an empath, so it comes with my territory. But I recently had a conversation with someone about a mutual family member - the mutual? family member's daughter is an addict, and this person was incapable of putting herself in the shoes of the parents of the addict. She just couldn't do it, and could only come up with one solution (the one coming from the "I" stance).
Driven and energetic learning professional. Focus on organizational needs, big picture, collaboration, and involvement.
6 年One of the hardest, yet most important, ways to really connect with people is to see things from their point of view.? And, for training, to address as many possible issues as possible, I have to consider as many possibilities and perspectives as I can.