Get Happy: Reference Points and Comparisons

Google mid-life and happiness and you’ll be bombarded with article after article about how our happiness dips tremendously in our 40s.  Couple this with being a Gen X woman, where we’ve been brought up to believe we can have-it-all, and yet, even when we do, we are completely exhausted and not sure any of it is what you really wanted in the first place. 

This week’s episode is the second in the Get Happy series which is all about understanding what reference points are and how they tend to be the undercurrent of our unhappiness not just in middle age but at any age. 

Reference Points are the situations, statistics, data, and people with which we surround ourselves and compare ourselves to in our minds. The reference points literally change the way we view the world and alter how we feel.

A reference point is something that confirms a person’s identity, feeling of sanity, and sense of stability, safety, and normalcy.  Your mind, is  your most important intangible reference point. It is how you interpret the physical world and make sense of it and yourself through your beliefs.

Your computer, phone, home, car friends, family and other familiar things are all reference points. The way you wake, fall asleep, weather, route to work, stores, buildings anything you encounter regularly. These reference points confirm where you are and who you are.

How to Manage Your Reference Points:

• If you’re going to use reference points, make sure they make you stretch without making you shift out of who you are. 
• Compete with yourself. Wake up every day and decide what you can do better, how you can be better today than you were yesterday.  
• Decide you are where you are supposed to be in your life and take it from there.
• Love yourself, be accepting of who you are. 
• Pause the good. We, as humans, become bored with things. We take them for granted and get used to them. Studies show that pausing the good and taking breaks from it allows us to appreciate them more. Always comes back to gratitude. 

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Join Our Facebook Group Just Gen x — The Resting Mind  

The Today Show with Hoda & Jenna 

The Big Leap (book)

Articles + Podcasts: 

Get Happy: What is Happy? (podcast) 

How Color Can Change Your Life (article) 

Free Resources 

Get Happy! Download this FREE guide to learn how to use the PERMA model to add more happiness to your everyday life. Download it here

New Course!
Are you living a life of quiet desperation? Get out of your own way and Get Unstuck. 

Get Unstuck is a self-led, digital workshop where you'll learn:

• The who, what, and why of being stuck 
• The emotions of transformation 
• How to use the 8% Rule of Transformation—this is the step-by-step process we talked about on Today with Hoda and Jenna. 

All of this means you get the tools for true, life-long, and life-ch

Get your free copy of our digital magazine, GEN neXt, The Voice of the Modern Gen X Woman. www.moderngenxwoman.com/gennext

GEN NeXt is a collection of insights from incredible organizations, women, and industry experts who have dedicated themselves to the same cause—turning up the volume of women 40+.

We're not just Gen X we're GEN neXt