Let’s say you are giving a speech, and you’re so nervous and so busy observing yourself that you forget what you wanted to say. You’re thinking, that third person from the left in the second row looks bored.
Dereflection is a technique whereby you take your obsessive self-reflecting and turn your reflection over to the audience instead and the message you want them to know about.
What is the mechanism by which dereflection works? We might put it this way: Dereflection distracts you from the distraction.
However, this is a superficial view of things. Dereflection is not a mere distraction technique to take you away from thoughts that are preoccupying you.
The real power of Dereflection is that it summons up your capacity for self-transcendence. There are situations in which we transcend our biological urges to say “no” to something that is bad for us or that is morally wrong. There are situations in which we transcend our circumstances, as in someone who, born without hands, uses feet to do whatever hands usually do.
In Dereflection we are not merely transcending biological urges or self-centered preferences for the sake of a higher cause. By turning off the self-observation mechanism, we are transcending the tendency to think about ourselves at all. We are transcending ego itself.
This makes Dereflection self-transcendence of the highest order.
Dereflection resets the “default” button from “anxiety about how I appear to others” to “values I care about.” By do doing, you reach for your full human stature.
You begin the process of self-transcendence as soon as you interpret the meaning of the distraction and understand what you need to learn from it. If there is something you need to do to take care of yourself, then taking care of yourself is revealed as the value. If you are being sucked into fear and anxiety, then this will tell you that you’re sabotaging your ability to fulfill your values, and you need to ask yourself what those are.