Putting issues on a scale has brought me much perspective in life. I have been able to see what is important and what is not important. I have been able to see when to act, react, and instigate. I have not always done a great job at analyzing life on this scale. I have been trying…that is pretty much the same right!? Not so much.

But the moments in my life I have put things into perspective for myself have made an immense difference when I was over or under acting in a situation.

For instance, when I start to look at life through a scale of 1 to 10, I can see the valuable moments versus the valueless moments. When I am upset about something and I throw it on this scale, I can see how upset I should really be. Are my actions truly to scale of the situation. Am I about to flip a table at a restaurant because I have not had my iced tea refilled in the last ten minutes?

Am I totally downplaying the importance of family and ignoring my wife in order to watch another episode of Hell on Wheels?

Usually when I get this scale out of whack it is because I am out of whack. When I see myself react to situations out of proportion, I know something else is wrong. Something else is misaligned in my life. Usually whatever I am under or overreacting about is not the real issue, there is something else behind the issue for me. However, using this metric I am able to see how I should be acting and reacting to situations.

How do you tell whether or not you have a piston misfiring? How often do you overreact or under react to situations? How would your actions & reactions change if you put everything into a relative scale of 1 to 10?

Scaling,

–JT