It's easy to become rigidly fixed and sclerosed within a view of who you are ("This is just the way I am") -- unable to envision possibilities for expanding your personal capacities, your thinking or emotions -- outside of that fixed view. Unfortunately, that disables you from enlarging your perspective, which can be essential for solving conflicts or problems that you feel stuck inside of, unable to change or alter. That's especially true for solving relationship difficulties.

President Eisenhower once said that if you're having difficulty understanding a problem and how to solve it, "enlarge" the problem. Certainly that applies to life beyond the battlefield. That is, "enlarging" how you envision the problem or situation you're stuck within can free yourself from the limitations of the perspective that imprisons you to begin with.

How can you do that? Some new empirical research shows how and why it helps. It shows that, in effect, distancing yourself from a problem or conflict enhances your reasoning; it helps you find new solutions through a broadened perspective. And that provides greater wisdom to bring to bear on the conflict. Researchers from the University of Waterloo and the University of Michigan, as reported in Psychological Science, examined "the ability to recognize the limits of one's own knowledge, search for a compromise, consider the perspectives of others, and recognize the possible ways in which the scenario could unfold. The research found that you may think about a conflict more wisely if you consider it as an outside observer would."

 

Read the full article "Caught in a Relationship Conflict You Can't Solve? Why 'Leaving' It Helps" at The Huffington Post.