Points of View

Have you ever wondered how truly understanding different perspectives could transform your worldview? Join me, Don Thompson, as I guide you through a powerful mindful exercise inspired by Sean Fargo. This episode promises to teach you practical steps to engage with opposing viewpoints meaningfully, from political and cultural differences to spiritual beliefs and even conspiracy theories. You'll learn how to uncover the needs, fears, and concerns that shape others' beliefs, all while reflecting on your own conditioning and background.

We'll embark on a journey to foster empathy and compassion without the pressure to change your opinions. Armed with a pen and paper, you'll answer thought-provoking questions designed to deepen your understanding of both yourself and the diverse world around you. This isn't just about gaining insight into others but achieving greater self-discovery and compassion. Whether you note your thoughts down or just ponder them, this practice is sure to enrich your understanding and build bridges across differing perspectives. Don't miss out on this enlightening exploration!

Inspired by the work of Sean Fargo.

Music: 'Point of View' by Atellar.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hi Don Thompson here with another podcast for you today, and what I'd like to do today is explore a topic which I think is very important. It has to do with looking at other people's point of view, or you might say, exploring another person's viewpoint, and I'm going to step through this exercise, and it's inspired by or based on the work of Sean Fargo, and Sean does some excellent work out there with mindfulness. So let's step through a few of these points and I'll chime in with some comments of my own as well. We all have different viewpoints in various ways. We look at various topics and issues and we form opinions about these for a variety of reasons, but they're largely dependent upon our personality and our past experiences and our conditioning. We often unconsciously assume that the way we view the world is representative of the truth, and yet we are the holders of only just one perspective, and I've gotten into this in some recent podcasts related to the truth and the facts and all that stuff. So this is expanding on that a little bit and including an exercise. So what I'm inviting us to do here is to mindfully and consciously take the time to consider another point of view that is in contradiction with our own point of view and in doing this, I think we'll find it to be very enlightening, and it is a powerful practice that helps us to understand the beliefs of other people, of other people. It's not really an exercise to change our point of view and opinion that can be one outcome of this practice but it's not really the intent. The intent is really just to open your mind up to the process of looking at somebody's point of view, of considering it, of having some empathy, and it's a simple way of getting to know ourselves and where we might find a greater understanding and compassion for the perspective of someone else.

Speaker 1: 2:58

So let's go ahead and step through a practice. The first thing I'd ask you to do is to take a moment to choose a viewpoint you would like to adopt for five minutes, and whatever viewpoint you choose, you're invited to wholeheartedly imagine that you believe in the stories and perspective of reality that someone who has this viewpoint holds, and some examples of views you might consider include. This is not a full and complete list, but you could use this as a springboard. So let's step through some examples the viewpoint of a political party that is not what you believe in. That's an easy one in today's era and age, the viewpoint of someone who stands on the other side of the debate surrounding an issue that's important to you? The viewpoint of a religious or spiritual figure whose views contradict your own? The mindset of another culture that is different from the one that you are a part of, the viewpoint of someone who believes in a conspiracy theory or world story that you don't agree with?

Speaker 1: 4:15

Now, once you've chosen this particular topic, why don't you just take aif you don't have a piece of paper, I would suggest you go ahead and grab one. You might want to not just mentally note this down, but actually take notes. It might be a little bit easier. So if you can grab a pen and piece of paper, that's probably the easiest. So let's just take, you know, 10 seconds to do that. So if you have a piece of paper, that's great. You can jot down these questions and take some notes. If not, then you can just mentally note them. That's fine as well. Either way will work.

Speaker 1: 5:03

So here are the questions what are the needs and concerns or fears of this person or group? What might be the background, experience or conditioning that contributes to your own beliefs and views? Now, the great thing about this podcast is you can pause it, you can stop it, you can go back and re-listen to the questions if you want to, if you want to. But whether or not you're mentally noting them down or jotting them down on a piece of paper, I just suggest that this really is a wonderful way to explore where we might find greater compassion towards other people, other points of view and understanding another person or group of people. It does not mean we make the in quotes right viewpoints that are harmful or disrespectful to others. That's not what we want to do. It simply deepens our understanding of why some people hold the views that they do and why we ourselves hold the views that we do. In other words, it's a little bit of an exploration of self-discovery.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Why is it that we hold the beliefs that we do? What is it that we're clinging on to? Or maybe we're valid in our perspective and we can pretty much back it up by research or the facts or whatever you know reading that we've done our education and so on and so forth. So you know, you want to note that. What is it that allows you to hold the beliefs that you do but, at the same time, if you can empathize with another person's point of view without being patronizing, and that's a key point as well. You know, I think a lot of us can become patronizing in our attitude towards other people, basically because we feel that we're superior to them, because our point of view is superior, for whatever reason, because it's based upon a well-researched perspective on a particular view or issue, and we feel that we have the facts behind us. We feel that we have, perhaps, life experience behind us and that we can call on these life experiences to inform the present, these life experiences to inform the present. Regardless, you know, I do believe this exercise can be very, very powerful and helpful in terms of empathizing with other people's point of view.

Speaker 1: 8:05

This is a relatively short podcast today, but I wanted to jump in. I've gone through, you know, these topics in a couple of podcasts leading up to this one, so I thought we'd maybe go through an exercise to help us to solidify or work with some of these issues that we've been talking about. As always, I appreciate your time and you listening to this podcast. I truly do, and I'll, uh, look forward to talking to you soon. Okay, bye-bye. I'm addicted to the way you bring me high. I like to climb these feelings we're choosing. I don't think we'd ever lose our stars tonight. I know you could give me time To change you up, like Like I Bye, thank you. Maybe you could give me a time to change your life, but I really want to just change the one. You Really want to just see what we can do, really want to just change the one. You Really want to just change the one. You. I'm going to do what I do, thank you.