If you grow up in a poor family and your parents told you that in order to be rich, you’ll have to study hard, get a good job and work hard all the time, do you think that this experience is going to affect your life? Of course, just like the life of Oprah Winfrey (If you don’t know her story, read this, Oprah Winfrey Success Story), if the same situation happens to others, they will live a life full of pain. This is simply because their life experience greatly impact the way they live.

If you live in a rich lifestyle, you were born in a wealthy family where your parents love you and they will give you anything you ask for, what is going to happen if one day all of these luxury items and pampering are not there anymore? What happened to you in the past will become your life references. In the future, when something similar ever happen again, you will then search deep in your mind for the same references that you have experienced before and act exactly the same way as you were before.

Let me give you a clear example here. If you like to play tennis and you the first time you are in for a tennis game, you win the game marvelously, everyone praise you and you feel like you’re the top tennis player among your friends. How is this experience going to affect your life? Do you think that you will raise your confidence in the next tennis game? Do you think that you will do better in the next match? Or do you think that you have the talent and want to explore more in this field? This is the life experience or reference that I’m talking about.

References are all the experiences in your life that you stored in your giant cabinet in your mind. Some references are picked up consciously, some unconsciously, while some you found yourself and some you created by listening to what others had to say.

Just like if you found a bag and inside this bag there is $50,000 cash, what are you going to do with it? Will you return this bag to its own or make a police report? Or are you going to keep those money as your own? Your action depends on your life references. Clearly, if you choose to return this money to it’s owner, it is because of the past experiences that you have had in your mind that told you to do so. Maybe you have developed a belief that returning something lost to it’s owner is doing a good deed and you will be rewarded by good karma because you trust in the golden rule of life.

What if you choose to keep the money and use it on your own? Maybe it is because you have encountered this similar situation before, you lost $10,000 cash in a bag and you found it back with nothing inside the bag. This will then create a strong reference on your brain that if you find any something not belongs to you, you should keep it as your own. This is how life references can affect you. People act according to their references.

Why will a baby pull out a cigarette butt from a dirty ashtray and put it in his mouth? It is because he does not have a reference of this before. The baby does not have any reference that tells him it is dirty and he and it is not good for him.

The key now is, are your life references empowering or dis-empowering?

The way you use your references will determine how you feel, because whether something is good or bad it is all depends on what you are comparing it to. It is just like if you bring someone from a very poor family that live in an isolated village to a lousy and cheap hotel room in New York City, I bet that he will be thrilled and tells you that it is a very luxury. Sometimes you will lose perspective that good and bad are merely based upon your references.

Therefore, you must learn how to make use of your references, how you can make them to empower you in your life and help you change and improve the quality of your life. You must then understand…

The Contrasting References

It is good to know that the references you have in your life are the ones that are going to affect the way you make decisions and every action that you take. However, in order to use your references to help you to build a better life and be more successful, you will need to have empowering references.

Imagine this for a moment. One of your friends is very successful, he is rich and he has a lot of money. One day he invited you to his big luxury bungalow to have a birthday party. So you accepted and you go for his party. He then found out that his bungalow is huge and it costs him $3 million. Not only that, the door of his house is made of half marble and that door itself cost him $500,000. Plus, he had a BMW and a Benz park in his garage. Wow, what a waste of money you may think, right?

But if you put it in a different perspective, will this event inspire and drive you into taking action and wanting to make more money? Of course it will. Certainly, there are rooms in your life for you to think bigger, pushing limit and imagine the unimaginable. The use of contrasting references is one of the most powerful ways to shape your life, to change your feelings and emotions.

Now, you may say that what if you are already very wealthy and you have everything you ever wanted? All your friends around you use you as their contrasting references, you don’t have any friends that you can use as contrast references. What should you do then? Think carefully, it is the perspective, the meaning that you give toward the references that create the emotion and the feeling.

You can come from a poor family, but if you look at it as an empowering reference, then it will empower and help you to achieve more in your life. It is all about the meaning you choose to give. Just like Oprah Winfrey, she was sexually abused and lived a painful life, but she never complained about it. Instead, she gave those references or her experiences empowering meaning.

She said that because she had gone through all those pain, she can now talk to anyone who has been in the same situation before, because she was there once too! So you see, it is how you make use of your references. Here is one very powerful quotes for you, “The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible”.

Continue to read the next article, Life References: How To Create References That Empower You.

Popularity: 4%

Posted on October 13th, 2008 by Shawn
Filed under: Strategic Success

I Strongly Recommend You My Goal Setting Formula System. How You Can Set And Achieve Your Goals Like A Winner. Transform Yourself Into A Super Achiever NOW! Discover My Goal Setting Formula And Achieve Your Goal Setting Success Today!