Inflection Points
Inflection Points
One of the most uncomfortable feelings I experience from time to time is nothing I can put my finger on in the moment. I just know that I am in an emotional space of discomfort and my initial response is to seek comfort. That comfort can be in a variety of forms and I try to ensure that it is a productive outlet but that is not always the case. What I have learned and am working towards doing is being able to consciously enter these inflection points because this is in fact where we can experience an incredible amount of growth.
Inflection points are simply those emotional spaces of great discomfort. These spaces are so uncomfortable that they will take us off our line and cause us to divert and seek out comfort and safety. Our brains are wired for comfort. Their job is to keep us in a place where things are predictable so that we are safe and comfortable. Once our prediction loops are created it take conscious effort to step outside and disrupt it. There are more than a few methods to accomplish this, one of them is called priming.
Priming is the act of using words to change behavioral lanes. Usually we fall victim to this unknowns fly as priming speaks to the unconscious processes we are all governed by. In one experiment individuals in their twenties were observed to be walking much more slowly than they normally would after being primed with words that are associated typically with senior citizens and the elderly. Priming is a powerful tool and one we can use to guide us into our inflection zones.
Why is it beneficial for us to enter our own inflection zones? For one it will free us from the grip of the emotion that is managing us. By stepping into tension we loosen its grip on us and come out of the other side with more grit, resilience, and confidence to not only face it again but to challenge another inflection point in the future.
A mindset that is required to embrace this practice is to in fact recognize that our emotions and feelings are not static. They come and go. Not only are they not static, we have much more say into constructing them than many of know or care to believe. The biometric feedback of bodily states that read increased heart rate, pupil dilation, blood shunt to the stomach, heightened adrenaline production, increased blood flow to the extremities, are all the same for anger, fear, excitement, anxiety, and falling in love/lust. So what makes them different? The manner in which we have been conditioned to label these states when we experience them. We generally use context we have been conditioned with. So we in fact create the emotion with our thoughts process.
Our experiences solidify these associations overtime and they happen very quickly so we generally do not believe we are creating these labels, but we are. So when we decide to enter an inflection point we are now armed with the knowledge that not only are we going to be ok just sitting in the space of emotional discomfort, but we are in fact creating it.
We are all more emotional than not which means we are all more irrational than not, it's part of being human. What practicing stepping into our inflection points does for us however is empower to be that much better equipped to manage ourselves and to hopefully make better decisions in a high pressure moment or situation. A decision that will produce a productive outcome and result in a socially healthy bond.
One of the most uncomfortable feelings I experience from time to time is nothing I can put my finger on in the moment. I just know that I am in an emotional space of discomfort and my initial response is to seek comfort. That comfort can be in a variety of forms and I try to ensure that it is a productive outlet but that is not always the case. What I have learned and am working towards doing is being able to consciously enter these inflection points because this is in fact where we can experience an incredible amount of growth.
Inflection points are simply those emotional spaces of great discomfort. These spaces are so uncomfortable that they will take us off our line and cause us to divert and seek out comfort and safety. Our brains are wired for comfort. Their job is to keep us in a place where things are predictable so that we are safe and comfortable. Once our prediction loops are created it take conscious effort to step outside and disrupt it. There are more than a few methods to accomplish this, one of them is called priming.
Priming is the act of using words to change behavioral lanes. Usually we fall victim to this unknowns fly as priming speaks to the unconscious processes we are all governed by. In one experiment individuals in their twenties were observed to be walking much more slowly than they normally would after being primed with words that are associated typically with senior citizens and the elderly. Priming is a powerful tool and one we can use to guide us into our inflection zones.
Why is it beneficial for us to enter our own inflection zones? For one it will free us from the grip of the emotion that is managing us. By stepping into tension we loosen its grip on us and come out of the other side with more grit, resilience, and confidence to not only face it again but to challenge another inflection point in the future.
A mindset that is required to embrace this practice is to in fact recognize that our emotions and feelings are not static. They come and go. Not only are they not static, we have much more say into constructing them than many of know or care to believe. The biometric feedback of bodily states that read increased heart rate, pupil dilation, blood shunt to the stomach, heightened adrenaline production, increased blood flow to the extremities, are all the same for anger, fear, excitement, anxiety, and falling in love/lust. So what makes them different? The manner in which we have been conditioned to label these states when we experience them. We generally use context we have been conditioned with. So we in fact create the emotion with our thoughts process.
Our experiences solidify these associations overtime and they happen very quickly so we generally do not believe we are creating these labels, but we are. So when we decide to enter an inflection point we are now armed with the knowledge that not only are we going to be ok just sitting in the space of emotional discomfort, but we are in fact creating it.
We are all more emotional than not which means we are all more irrational than not, it's part of being human. What practicing stepping into our inflection points does for us however is empower to be that much better equipped to manage ourselves and to hopefully make better decisions in a high pressure moment or situation. A decision that will produce a productive outcome and result in a socially healthy bond.
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