Get Smart! About Modern Romantic Relationships Your Personal Guide to Finding Right and Real Love
By Michelle L. Casto
Chapter One (continued): Get Smart! Decision Making
Active Reflection
The process of preparing yourself for love, choosing a Life Mate, and developing a committed romantic relationship is complex and often confusing. In order to make well thought-out, "smart" decisions, it is helpful to engage in active reflection. To be active means to focus energy towards an activity, and to reflect is "to ponder/meditate." Active reflection is to invest energy toward your thought process, which will enable you to tap into your intuition. It is really about consciously thinking about what you do before you actually do it. Through active reflection, a process central to the Get Smart! approach, you can more accurately interpret what is going on in your love life, which will lead to smarter choices.
As is true with all processes, when new information becomes available, perspectives change. As your own romantic relationship unravels itself, revealing more of what you may not have been aware of, your thoughts and feelings may become altered or change completely. Unfortunately, out thought processes can be much more like a computer that locks up. We become unable to process new information and/or move forward. What needs to happen is when new data becomes available; we immediately make a mental note and then check it out against what we already know. This allows us to analyze out thoughts and feelings.
Most of us unconsciously choose to disregard relevant information, particularly about our romantic relationships - it's as if we "shut down." We lose our ability to comprehend anything contrary to what we want to believe. Foolishly, we make up our minds about someone we are interested in almost immediately. It is quite common for decisions to be based on our initial thoughts and feelings, but as we move deeper into the relationship, we reach a higher state of "knowing." When we are unable or unwilling to process the new information it is usually because we do not like to admit that we made a bad choice. In order to compensate for this, we convince ourselves that we are still right even though we know somewhere deep down that we are really wrong. When we are not able to clearly perceive, hear, and understand what is going on, we tend to make not-so-smart decisions.
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