What’s Your Worldview?

Three people look at the same situation and see three different things. You walk out of a movie and talk about it with the person who sat next to you, and it seems like you saw different movies.

Same situation. Same movie. Different responses. Different insights. The differences come from our lenses or our worldviews.

Our world view – the lens through which we look at the world – has a real and often unnoticed impact on our words, thoughts, feelings, choices and actions.

Which begs two questions – what is your worldview, and why does it matter?

What is Your Worldview?

Our worldview is what we view when we look at our world: What we notice, what we ascribe value to and how we interpret what we see. This is why you have the experience when you walk out of the movie with your companion. You both saw the same story on the same screen with the same images, but what you noticed, cared about, and tuned into (and much more) might be quite different.

One of you loved a character and the other didn’t.

One thought the plot made more sense than the other.

One noticed the background in the scenes and the other didn’t.

And those differences impacted what you thought about and felt because of watching it.

How we feel about a movie is one thing, but this phenomenon – our worldview – doesn’t just change how we experience a movie, it influences how we see everything in our lives.

Why Does it Matter?

While life isn’t a movie, the metaphor is apt.

How you view a situation will be different if you see abundance in the world compared to seeing a world of limitations and lack.

Do you see something as a challenge or an opportunity? Both may exist, but what you see will impact the choices you make.

Ultimately, our worldview impacts what we think, how we feel, what we talk about, what we do, and the choices we make.

Since this (what we do, say think, feel and choose) is the short list of what we have in our control as an individual, if our worldview impacts all of them, it is a more important part of our life than we might realize.

Our worldview is shaped by many factors – from genetics, our upbringing, the culture we live in, the identity we have created for ourselves, what we read and watch, and much more. Some of these foundational components are much easier to adjust or shift than others, but we can change or expand our worldview if we wish. Stay tuned – I will talk about that here next week.

In the meantime, be more conscious and aware of how your worldview influences your experiences, decisions, and results. Because becoming more conscious of it is a critical step to adjusting it when it might serve you better.