Zoom out of your failure for a moment

When using a device with a touch screen, there’s a common gesture known as pinch to zoom.

You’ve probably already done this a few times today with your phone or tablet. You touch two fingers on the glass, usually thumb and forefinger, and pinch together to zoom out on the image.

Magically, the content on your screen shrinks and gives you a bird’s eye view.

It’s a marvel of modern digital technology.

But it’s funny, considering how many hundreds or even thousands of times the average person touches their phone on a given day, we still haven’t mastered this move for our analog lives.

Because we don’t need a device to perform it. Zooming out is among the most powerful cognitive reframing tools in the human repertoire.

Whether you experience failure, rejection, boredom or overwhelm, you have the ability to figuratively pinch your fingers, widen your emotional lens and get perspective on the complete picture of your situation.

It’s a ritual like anything else.

Think about how it works from a visual perspective. When you take the time to zoom out on an image, you gain an instant understanding about the context. You realize that things aren’t quite what thought they were, now that you have contrasted an isolated section of a picture with the entire canvas.

It’s like when I took my mortifying ninth grade yearbook picture. The first thing I did was open to my class page and obsess over how ugly my hair was, how hideous my braces looked, how blemished my skin was and how unstylish my clothes were.

But then I zoomed out on the page of my entire junior high class and realized something.

Everybody else looked like that too. Because we were fourteen years old. It was the early nineties when high fashion was flannel shirts, baggy jeans, combat boots and lip piercings. And all five hundred of us were going through puberty with varying levels of awkwardness.

Maybe my appearance wasn’t mortifying as my teenage brain thought it was.

How will you strengthen your sense of emotional proportion in response to setbacks? What finger pinching can you do to get perspective on the complete picture of your situation?

Seligmen, the grandfather of positive psychology, found that the secret to making a counter argument against our worrying mind is remembering that most things are not permanent, pervasive or personal. Even if they are painful, powerful and preposterous.

That’s what zooming out can do for us. It’s a form of faith. Training our minds to immediately state that the cause of our suffering isn’t that bad.

Even if our high school yearbook picture makes us look like the lead singer for an awful grunge band.

What’s right in front of us that has a perspective that’s been there all the time but we never considered because our vision was too narrow?