I am very glad that you are curious about the Mindset Mood Lenses, as these will be a powerful set of tools in your arsenal as you work to manage your thoughts, feelings and behaviors. I have already described the role these lenses can play in shaping your view of yourself, your life and your future, and now I will tell you a little more about them. One helpful way of understanding their impact is to think about the effect that lint may have on the lens of a camera. When a bit of dust or dirt is on the lens of a camera, that obstruction will often have a noticeable effect on the pictures that we take while using that lens.
And if we proceed to view pictures taken with that dirty lens and project it onto a screen, it will appear on the resulting image as a “defect” or “problem” with what we are viewing, when, in fact, the actual distortion is on the lens of the camera with which we took the picture in the first place. As a result, we could mistakenly believe that the imperfection is embedded within the image itself (and think of the image as yourself, your life and your future). Therefore, we must remain aware of theses distortions, biases or incursions, and realize that they are a function of a dirty lens versus a dirty image. We need to do this because, if we try to identify and/or correct these spots on the images themselves, we will not find them, and will therefore fail to notice the actual problem (a dirty lens). Hard as we may try, we cannot fix the inside by retouching the outside. As I like to say, the best healing is an “inside job.”
And indeed, by analogy, if we can adjust and balance the way we look at things, the meaning of the things we are looking at will change. However, if we expend our energy on trying to retouch and fix all of these images, and we focus on changing the “outsides” of ourselves in order to be happy, we are highly likely to experience repeated frustration, failure, and hopelessness. The best antidote to this “spin cycle” is to clean the lint off of our own lenses, and purify our own vision of ourselves, our lives and our future.
Now, let’s proceed to looking at the first Mindset Mood lens, which we’ll call The Black and White Lens.
Mindset: Perspective Is Everything 