Coaching practices for Perspective Taking

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Perspective Taking, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I take my health, my safe home, water from the tap completely for granted
• I’ve built up this villain version of the other person in my head
• Every approach I come up with sounds like me, because I keep ruling out anything that doesn’t feel like something I’d do
• I replay what happened and I only ever see it from my own side
• I’m so deep inside this that I’ve lost all perspective

Practices that may help

1. Take the perspective of someone without what you have
   Vividly inhabit the perspective of someone who lacks something you currently take for granted.
   Negative Visualization for Gratitude: The Stoic Path to Appreciation
2. Take their perspective accurately
   Build a precise model of how the situation looks from their side, not a caricature.
   Tactical Empathy
3. Ask what a specific other person would do
   Step into a named other’s perspective to access approaches you would not generate as yourself.
   Oblique Strategies, Made Practical
4. Observe from multiple angles before drawing conclusions
   Deliberately take different perspectives on the experience before deciding what it means.
   Structured Reflection: Kolb’s Learning Cycle in Practice
5. Distancing reappraisal
   Step back from the situation and think about it as if you were an observer, or as if it were happening to someone else.
   Cognitive Reappraisal vs. Suppression, Made Practical
6. The spatial zoom-out
   Mentally lift yourself out of the room and rise until you see the whole world spread below you.
   The View from Above
7. Adjust for your egocentric starting point
   Actively consider how your message looks from a perspective that does not share your context.
   Closeness-Communication Bias
8. Write from the voice of an unconditionally kind friend
   Adopt the perspective of someone who loves you completely and sees your situation clearly.
   The Self-Compassion Letter, Made Practical
9. The view from above — cosmic perspective
   Zoom out to see your situation from a vast distance — then return to act more calmly within it.
   Pierre Hadot’s Spiritual Exercises
10. The view from above
    Zoom out — picture your situation from high above, in the scale of the city, the world, and time.
    Stoicism, as a Set of Practices

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.