Your Daily Boost – Episode 659

Perspective Can Make You Feel Small

The first time perspective ever really knocked the wind out of me wasn’t on a mountaintop or during some profound spiritual moment. It was the day I became a father, almost thirty years ago. I remember holding this tiny human and realizing, all at once, that my life was no longer just mine. Someone else’s survival, safety, and future were now partially in my hands. That moment didn’t make me feel powerful. It made me feel small. Not in a poetic way. In an overwhelming, slightly terrifying way.

Small, in that moment, felt a lot like inadequacy. It felt like staring at something so important and so fragile that any confidence I thought I had evaporated on contact. I didn’t feel irrelevant…yet. I felt overwhelmed by the size of the responsibility and quietly unsure if I had what it took to do it well.

That’s the thing about perspective. We tend to talk about it like it’s a gift. And it is. But it’s also a disruption. Perspective doesn’t always arrive gently. Sometimes it shows up and rearranges your sense of capability without asking permission. Perspective has a way of zooming out just enough to expose the size of the task in front of you. And when that happens, it can make you feel very, very small.

This doesn’t just happen with life-altering moments like parenthood. It happens all the time, in quieter ways. You decide you want to lose fifty pounds and suddenly the math becomes very clear. Calories. Consistency. Time. Discipline. You don’t feel inspired anymore. You feel exposed. Or you take on a project at work that seems manageable until every step you take toward understanding it reveals three more layers underneath. The more clarity you gain, the bigger the thing becomes.

That’s the paradox. Perspective is supposed to help. But sometimes the more you see, the less capable you feel.

When people say, “Just get some perspective,” they rarely mention the emotional whiplash that can come with it. Because perspective doesn’t just show you where you’re going. It shows you how far you are from the finish line. And that distance can mess with your head. Feeling small is not the same as being small. But your nervous system doesn’t always know the difference.

One of the hardest things to fight when perspective hits is the quiet suggestion that maybe you don’t matter as much as you thought you did. Not in a dramatic, existential crisis kind of way. More like a low-grade hum in the background. Am I actually useful here? Am I equipped for this? Am I just taking up space? This is where perspective becomes a double-edged sword. On one side, it strips away ego. It reminds you that you are not the center of everything. On the other side, if you’re not careful, it can cut into your sense of agency. You stop asking how you can contribute and start wondering whether you should even try.

And that’s where things get dangerous. Not because perspective is wrong, but because of what we do with it.

There’s a subtle difference between realizing you’re one part of a much larger system and deciding that your part doesn’t matter. Perspective is meant to orient you, not erase you. But when you’re standing in front of something massive, your brain doesn’t always make that distinction cleanly. The older I get, the more I notice how often we confuse scale with value. We assume that because something is big, our contribution must be small. And because our contribution feels small, it must be insignificant. That logic feels convincing in the moment. It’s also deeply flawed.

Scale does not determine value. It never has.

A parent doesn’t raise a child by solving every problem that child will ever face. They show up. Consistently. Imperfectly. A team doesn’t succeed because one person carries the entire load. It succeeds because people do the parts that are theirs to do. No more. No less.

Perspective doesn’t ask you to be everything. It asks you to understand where you are. And sometimes that understanding is uncomfortable.

When you step outside of your own narrow view, you start to see the complexity of the systems you’re operating in. Family. Work. Society. Life. You notice how many moving pieces there are. How many variables you don’t control. How many people are involved. That awareness can feel like standing at the edge of something too big to manage. The mistake is assuming that because you can’t manage all of it, you shouldn’t manage any of it.

Feeling small often triggers an all-or-nothing response. Either I can fix this, or I’m useless. Either I can handle it alone, or I shouldn’t be involved at all. But perspective doesn’t require isolation. In fact, it often points in the opposite direction.

Sometimes clarity is simply an invitation to stop doing things alone.

Perspective can be a wrench in your plans. It can disrupt your timelines. It can force you to admit that what you thought would be simple isn’t. It can make you confront the fact that effort, discipline, patience, and help are required. That doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re seeing things more clearly. The danger isn’t in realizing how small your role is. The danger is letting that realization convince you that your role doesn’t matter. There’s something grounding about accepting that you are one person among billions. It humbles you. It pulls you out of unnecessary self-importance. But that same thought, taken too far, can make you feel disposable. Like your presence is optional. Like your effort won’t move the needle. Both interpretations come from the same fact. One leads to peace. The other leads to paralysis.

Perspective doesn’t diminish you unless you let it.

When I think back to that moment of becoming a father, I realize something important. I didn’t need to know how to raise a human for eighteen years. I needed to know how to show up that day. That clarity didn’t make the responsibility smaller. It made it manageable.

That’s the kind of perspective that actually helps. Not the kind that overwhelms you with the size of the mountain, but the kind that shows you where your next step is. You don’t need to carry the whole thing. You need to carry your part.

Feeling small can be a signal that you’re seeing more clearly than before. It can mean you’ve stepped outside your old assumptions. It can mean you’re finally aware of the complexity you’re dealing with. That awareness isn’t weakness. It’s the beginning of wisdom.

The trick is not letting that awareness turn into self-erasure. You are allowed to be one piece of a very large puzzle. You are allowed to contribute without controlling the outcome. You are allowed to matter without being the most important thing in the room. Perspective is not meant to make you disappear. It’s meant to help you find your place.

💡Perspective can make you feel small, but small doesn’t mean irrelevant. Clarity shows you the size of the task, not the size of your worth. You don’t need to be everything…you just need to do your part.

#LeadWithLove #JJAllTheTime #Perspective