Where Do You Get Your Authority? Internal vs External Frames of Reference

One of the quiet programs running underneath almost everything we do is our frame of reference. It shapes how we figure out what we need and want, and how we judge whether we did well. Think about the plumbing of it: where do your rights, permissions, and sense of being allowed actually come from? And how much feedback, and what sort, do you require before you'll believe you performed well? These authority frames set what we believe and what we decide is worth caring about, and those decisions steer a life in ways large and small. They also govern the private commentary, the running story we tell ourselves about whatever just happened.

A generation ago the expectations were blunt. Women born in the 1970s and earlier were often raised to defer to a man's opinion, to honour and obey, to do as they were told. Young women now have no real sense of what that meant, and neither do young men. Some young men are genuinely put off watching older men treat women as somehow less than full people. Young women tend to look baffled by the whole idea of deferring to a man by default. That change has settled in, and it frees both younger women and younger men from a worn-out way of moving through the world.

An internal frame of reference means you treat yourself as the authority. You do what you want to do, drawing on your own thoughts, feelings, and judgments to decide. Action comes without first collecting permission or approval, including from the imagined panel in your head: what mom or dad would do, what the boss might say, what a partner would prefer. You don't pause to wonder whether your parents would sign off on a given choice. There's a steadiness to it. You feel reasonably sure of your own values, skills, and tastes, and you still gather information from elsewhere when it helps. Being able to decide for yourself is what self-motivation, self-regulation, and confidence are built on.

You can hear the internal frame in the words. Asked whether you did a good job, you reach for I, me, my: "I was happy with how the interview went. I put my best self forward."

Pushed to an extreme, though, the internal frame tips past confidence into arrogance. It starts reading as self-absorbed, as an unwillingness to take in what other people are saying. Close the door too far and you stop noticing that circumstances have shifted, or that the results you expected aren't showing up, and the frustration builds from there.

An external frame of reference puts your authority and your permissions outside of you. Every child begins here, and has to. We're picking up skills from the trusted adults around us, watching how they use power. Kids who are mistreated at home often build an even more externalized frame, because that is how you survive the family you were handed. The frame gets set and embedded by the people raising us. "Wait till your father gets home" is the classic version. It works for a tired mother at the end of a long day because borrowing the father's external authority stops the kids fast. It grabs control of a situation, even if only for a little while. And some external reference is genuinely necessary; we need advice from people who know more than we do. Nobody is born understanding the consequence of eating two pounds of chocolate, and some of us never do learn it. Any time you step into something new or unmapped, an external frame makes a decent guide. The trouble starts when you let it run your every move.

The deepest problem with an extreme external frame is the loss of self-motivation. Decisions for yourself become hard, because so much energy is going into pleasing other people. These are the ones who land in the career Dad picked, with the partner Mum approved of, inside a life the culture applauds, and then can't understand why a seemingly perfect arrangement leaves them flat and uninspired. They drift out of contact with what they actually enjoy, down to the clothes they'd choose or what they'd put on the TV. Using their own voice, saying what they think, tends to bring on anxiety. Public speaking becomes a nightmare, panic surfacing, and underneath it sits the constant worry about what everyone will make of them. They often won't move until everyone around them has moved first. Call it a herd instinct.

Criticism lands hard in an extreme external frame. Taken personally, it can flatten a capable salesperson or employee, knock a struggling student off course, or hollow out a marriage. The one place you really don't want an external frame is your own sense of self. Treating other people's slanted opinions of you as fact is a direct route to low self-esteem.

So why would anyone lean on an outside authority at all? We pick it up young, because quoting an authority is a reliable way to take control of whatever is being discussed. "Your father is going to..." "Well, the government says..." "The doctor said..." "My teacher says..." We noticed early that when someone invoked an authority, the room paid attention and usually fell into line. Even fathers and teachers and other authority figures will defer to another authority. Watch what happens when one of them gets pulled over for speeding by a police officer. Rank doesn't save you.

Health is where this gets expensive. The doctors, the reports, the experts: they said, so it must be so. "Well, they're doctors, they should know." Then comes the jolt of realizing the doctors never studied nutrition in medical school. Wait, you can know more about your own body than the doctor or the weight-loss expert who claims the authority? One person's version of this: I said yes to everything they recommended and ended up in a terrible mess. I stopped listening to my body and listened to the experts like everyone else does. Even Oprah listens to them, and Oprah can't be wrong, so the fault had to be mine. These diets fail on me, so something must be broken in my body, something wrong with me. That is external authority writing the internal beliefs, and it can wreck a person.

When science and medicine can't account for why someone isn't healing inside their usual models, the patient often gets the blame. IBS and fibromyalgia get described as auto-immune, so the message becomes: yes, your own body is attacking you, and there's not much we can do, because, after all, it's your body. Hand your full authority to the outside and you give away an enormous share of your own capacity to heal, which is central to any health and wellness work. You have to bring the whole of yourself, body and mind, a self-determining and self-organizing being, and then work with care about what you accept. Suggestions get made loosely, and some of them can quietly erode your belief in your ability to recover, so watch for those. The doctors and the medically trained scientists are human beings too.

A client recently described working to clear a virus from her system using a range of approaches, only to hear from the lab, again and again, that there was no point in keeping on testing because she'd have it for life. Had she believed that, she might have stopped doing the very things that were helping her.

These inner frames shift without much difficulty once you can see them running and notice the choices they've been making for you. The question to put to any of them is simple: is this frame useful for the outcome I'm after?