Point of View: A Fresh Look at Work, Faith, and Freedom - Softcover

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Elisabeth Hasselbeck is an Emmy Award-winning former talk show host and New York Times best-selling author of The G-Free Diet and Deliciously G-Free. Elisabeth is a busy mother of three and is married to ESPN/NFL correspondent and former NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck.

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1

Learning to See Differently

You are the God who sees me.

— Genesis 16:13

As a fourth grader, I thought I could see perfectly. After all, I made good grades and participated in school, my cursive handwriting was on point, and all my spelling tests seemed to check out okay. Didn’t all the other students walk up to the chalkboard to see the spelling words and then sharpen their pencils? Or was that just me?

The smell of the mildewed sponges used to wash the chalkboards at the end of each day is still clear in my memory. But looking back, I know that was about the only thing clear to me at the time.

When the day came for us to report to the school library for our annual vision test, I stood in line obediently, smoothing my navy-blue plaid jumper over my midsection. I kept thinking, Next year I won’t be stuck in this thing. I’ll finally get to wear the fifth-grade skirt and blouse, yet knowing I was an entire school year away from that rite of passage. I felt we waited in line forever. I needed to stay focused. It was almost my turn.

Finally, the school nurse called my name, and I stepped my Mary Jane shoes to the masking tape on the library floor.

“Place this plastic piece over your right eye, and tell me what you see,” she said.

“Okay. And now the left,” she continued.

When I wasn’t thinking about my uniform, I was listening carefully to students ahead of me as they read the letters on the vision chart. I had memorized them, which is why I confidently told the nurse what they were. I had figured out over the years that the benefit of having a last name that began with F and not with A was that I never really went first for anything. Even when the teacher reversed alphabetical order to give students with last names beginning with T or W a chance to go first, I was still in the middle. That definitely had its advantages on vision testing day.

Once I had aced the test, the nurse said, “Okay, next student please step up.”

That’s how it went each year.

The nurse had no idea that I had a secret. I knew I could not see the letters, but she didn’t! Saved by the power of my good memory! As long as I could repeat what I had heard, I wouldn’t have to get glasses.

Or so I thought. Despite my faking success on the eye exam, one of my teachers mentioned to my parents that she thought an eye doctor should examine me. I was mortified!

“Your teacher is helping you,” my parents told me.

Treason is what her recommendation felt like to me. Betrayal. The worst.

A week or so later, I found myself in the eye doctor’s office without anyone with an A–E last name ahead of me in line to tell me what the letters on the chart were. There was no alphabetical order to grant me time to figure out the sequence. It was just me—and the eye doctor.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know how you have been doing your schoolwork because you really need glasses. You are not seeing anything clearly.”

That didn’t seem true to me. I was just fine. I just had to get really, really close to something, and then it looked clear.

I grumbled as I grew quietly curious. What have I been missing? I wondered. What more will I really be able to see if I get glasses? Will things look different? Will they look better? Worse?

With the glasses prescription in hand, my mom and I darted to LensCrafters. I can still remember the parking spot we pulled into. I knew this excursion was important. What I did not know was that I would never see the same again.

With the guarantee that my glasses could be done in less than an hour, we began our search for the perfect frames. I must have tried on every pair while my mom waited patiently and helped me. And then I was ready. The decision was made.

With a familiar, encouraging-but-protective voice, my mom asked, “Are you sure about these frames? As long as you like them, that’s all that matters.”

Like them? I thought. I loved them! They were the biggest, reddest, widest lenses I could ever have imagined, and in about fifty-nine minutes, they would hold the power to let me see all the things the eye doctor said I had been missing.

“Yes, Mom. These will be great.” I was sure.

While the people at LensCrafters made my lenses, I ran errands with my mom, as she had taken the afternoon off from work for the big event. The sky grew darker, and the big fuzzy red lights on the backs of the cars in front of us told me it was almost dinnertime. My stomach sent the same message with its growling. I was getting hungry—and a little nervous.

Mom and I returned to the eyeglass store fifty-five minutes after we had left, and there they were.

Putting on those glasses for the first time was something I will never forget.

I finally saw what I had been missing out on all those years. The leaves on the trees—I could see them from across the street, and I could see all of them! I could see everything on the wall from all the way across the room! Those fuzzy red car lights were not fuzzy at all! Even better, they were not just one big blob of red blurry light. There were two—and they were sharp and square! (I am dating myself. These were the days before the innovative third brake light.)

I could read street signs for the very first time. I spent the entire ride home calling them out: “Papa Gino’s!” “CVS pharmacy!” “Dry cleaners!” “Kmart!” “Gulf!”

I could see people—their faces and their expressions.

My mom had the biggest smile on her face—and a little tear. I had been faking her out with my way of being okay with the blur for so long that she likely felt both overjoyed that I could finally see and perplexed and guilty about not catching it earlier. It was not her fault at all. She was the smartest, most caring mom (and she still is). I was just really good at memorizing eye charts.

Seeing as Others Do

I was seeing everything for the first time. I mean, really seeing everything, not just knowing it was there. There is a huge difference. And I never ever wanted to be without that ability again. My first time wearing glasses was also when I learned that the way I saw things wasn’t necessarily the way others did—nor was my blurry or clear necessarily the “right way.” Those big red glasses showed me that sometimes others had a completely different view of the world around them.

Even though this lesson was in the physical sense of sight, I soon learned that the same truth applied in the metaphorical sense. The way I looked at a situation or an issue might not be the same way someone else saw it—and it would take more than a pair of glasses to make sense of this. I realized that we all have our own point of view, based on our experiences, our education, and our outlook. Merriam-Webster online defines point of view as “a position or perspective from which something is considered or evaluated.” This distinction became very important when I began my broadcasting career.

One of the first lessons I learned about conducting interviews is that extracting the point of view, or POV, of the person being interviewed is essential. Doing so allows the interviewer the chance to see the issue or topic through the other person’s eyes. Getting as close as possible to seeing the truth of the matter from that person’s viewpoint is the goal. Almost always, seeing the story as that person sees it requires a shift in perspective. For decades I have practiced and...