Change your life, change your reference point! - Part 5
Continuing on this six part series, we now present part five which talks about the complex situations where you cannot find a path forward.
Difficult situations can be solved through new 'references'
Firstly, here is some differentiation that I will make with what people refer to as ‘gut feelings’ or intuition and their conscious thinking. What I mean is the ability to understand the intuition and gut feelings for what it is but also to understand the rationale thinking that goes behind this. The mistake that many people make is that they rely entirely on their gut feelings and take no course of action which is why their incident is played out again and again, like a broken record.
What needs to be done is understand that those intuitive thinking and gut feelings are triggers for your rational mind to take some kind of action. It does not mean that your reactionary response is the sufficient and final response, you will have a wave of thoughts afterwards and due to our heightened reactions we often ignore those altogether. Your body and mind is alerting you to some kind of instinctive thoughts flooding your head and you need to take heed of this as well as your thoughts the moments after.
Here the techniques of ‘reference pointing’ becomes exceptionally important and very useful to mitigate harmful or stagnant reactions that follow. So much so, that you could say that this the area of application where this technique can bring about the greatest improvement in your lives.
Let’s follow an example that would help us to better apply this technique. Say that a couple constantly argues over a specific point. That is to say that we are creatures of habit and some arguments are required for a healthy relationship but anything that leads to much stress and frustration are not. A typical example would be that your partner is always late in getting ready to go out and this drives you mad. Typically, the opponent may do the following…
Huff and puff until he/she cools down
Decides to tell the other party to be ready by a certain time and fibs about the actual time
Outrightly tells the other person of his/her frustration of being constantly late
Use contempt and try to do the same with the other party
You can see how this can pan out and many couples would frustratingly wave their heads and say nothing has worked.
I will give you another example of someone’s constant irritating behavior to others and what others find offensive that they just do not understand this person’s behavior. When you find yourself in a situation like this just remember, this is the exact form of ‘study’ regarding reference points that you can possibly hope to encounter and it will lead to greater understanding. You will know that this person is at ills with their own perception of thoughts and thinking and it does not always tally with the real world. So how does ‘reference pointing’ help in this matter? Very simple…
If you understand the techniques of reference points, where everyone internalizes their behaviour with other people, you will know how to go about either helping or shifting your energies away from negative to positive. From a psychological point of view, these people have deep seated fears about the real world and their way of attacking people and the rest of the world is designed to cover up those insecurities. Now that you understand this point, you will know that there is no one that can help them with this kind of problem except themselves. They are the most likely candidates to go to the next stage of depression since they have not grappled with their inner perceptions and tallied it with the rest of the world. If they did comprehend the techniques of ‘reference pointing’, there maybe a chance to help them.
So the key to ‘reference pointing’ in complex situations such as shown above is to detach yourself from the incident or event. Basically to fully grasp the benefits of ‘reference pointing’, you need to understand another crucial concept of detachment. You cannot make it personal and then you can truly be in a position to truly change yourself AND then others.
So a simple exercise when you come across those situations is to first ‘detach’, ‘understand’ and to jot down your thoughts on paper. The order is very important to bring more perspective to the situation. In Part six of this article we will breakdown the specifics of how to train yourself with these techniques and then you should be able to tackle the world head-on and move with confidence and vigor that you never thought possible. Stay tuned for more…
