...and that was too abstract. As a writer, I’d recommend—though YMMV—that you try interlacing an abstract explanation like this one with a specific, concrete technique. I know nothing of NLP, so you needed to explain “submodalities of motivation” or at least link it (Google doesn’t show how any such thing could be helpful). You’re assuming knowledge of things I’ve never heard of, and would probably be allergic to most standard expositions of (I can’t stand standard self-help writing style).
You don’t seem to have a strong instinct for realizing what the other person already knows or doesn’t know, but then most people appear to me to lack this instinct, which I suppose indicates that I possess a talent in this area. Unfortunately, that also means I have no idea how to advise people who lack that talent. You’d have to ask someone who started out without talent and developed skill.
As a writer, I’d recommend—though YMMV—that you try interlacing an abstract explanation like this one with a specific, concrete technique.
Yeah, that’s what I’m doing in the rewrite of Thinking Things Done that I’m working on right now. Chapter 2 will start with the “thoughts into action” technique in my video, and use it as a demonstration of several specific principles about how thinking-for-action differs from ordinary “thinking”. (In my previous arrangement, I had several chapters of theory before getting to the technique in chapter 6, but this way I think I’ll actually be able to maintain a lot better theory-to-practice ratio throughout.)
I know nothing of NLP, so you needed to explain “submodalities of motivation” or at least link it
What you would do is think about something you’re motivated to do, and something you “could” do, but are not motivated to do. (As opposed to being motivated to avoid or NOT do.)
Then, you observe what your autonomous representation of these actions are, and compare the representations. Do you see pictures? Hear sounds? Where are they located, what size, moving vs. still, etc. (WIkipedia’s “Submodality” page has a list of typical qualities of these kinds.)
After you’ve identified the differences between the two, you can try changing your representation of the thing you’re not particularly motivated by so that it matches the representation of the thing you are motivated by—move it to the same place, same size, brightness, etc. etc. -- and observe whether you now feelmotivated to do that thing. You can also experiment with changing the various qualities, and noticing what effect it has on your felt-response to the idea.
This is not a permanent change—there are other things you have to do to make it stick or to contextualize it appropriately. And you may have to tweak some things to do it at all; it helps to use more than two examples, I’ve found, even though submodality elicitation always seems to get taught with just two. Many people also have trouble paying attention to their images; I worked with someone yesterday who was much better focusing consciously on their sounds, and then their images changed in response to changing the sound qualities (including direction, volume, and location).
Anyway, while not permanent, it represents a simple demonstration of NLP’s practical rendition of an idea that I believe originated with General Semantics: that is, our behavior is determined by our internal representation of concepts. It just so happens that NLP shows the driving representations aren’t primarily verbal.
Which makes sense, evolutionarily. After all, we had to be able to decide things and act on those decisions long before we had language.
The hardest part of learning to do any NLP or similar technique is simply learning to “shut up” one’s ongoing verbal analysis and argumentation long enough to actually pay attention to what the rest of your brain is doing… which is why a lot of the original NLP creators tend to speak very disparagingly of the conscious mind. (e.g. “Any conscious verbal statement of the client is to be treated as unsubstantiated rumor until and unless it is confirmed by an unconscious non-verbal response.”)
But I’m digressing a bit. Submodalities are a basic building block of a wide variety of NLP techniques, and they’re only one of NLP’s building blocks. There are also plenty of ways to change submodalities without direct manipulation; I personally specialize in using questions that cause people to indirectly change their submodalities, on the basis that we change them indirectly all the time, and for a lot of people, that leads to less conscious interference… presumably because the verbal mind at least gets to ask the questions then. Whereas, direct submodality interventions leave the verbal mind free to critique itself and/or the process, making it impossible to actually pay attention, at least for me most of the times I’ve tried direct-manipulation techniques. Strangely, though, if I have someone else there to talk me through it, I can usually do them… answering someone else’s real-time question seems to commit my attention better.
You’re assuming knowledge of things I’ve never heard of, and would probably be allergic to most standard expositions of (I can’t stand standard self-help writing style).
I understand, believe me. My allergy was more to doing things than to reading about them, though. I discarded techniques because I didn’t like the theories.
Problem is, everybody discards techniques because they don’t like the theories or the writing styles—which is why there are so many hundreds upon hundreds of books that describe what are basically the same techniques, in slightly different styles. (Of course they’re the same—our brains are the same.)
You don’t seem to have a strong instinct for realizing what the other person already knows or doesn’t know, but then most people appear to me to lack this instinct, which I suppose indicates that I possess a talent in this area. Unfortunately, that also means I have no idea how to advise people who lack that talent. You’d have to ask someone who started out without talent and developed skill.
Yes. I’ve realized this year that I suck at this and other teaching-related skills, which is why I’ve been studying instructional development and why I’ve also started over on my book; it was halfway finished, but early feedback showed it wasn’t reaching my goals for knowledge transfer OR motivating people to act on the knowledge that was transferred.
After you’ve identified the differences between the two, you can try changing your representation of the thing you’re not particularly motivated by so that it matches the representation of the thing you are motivated by
Yeah, that sounds really suspicious, actually. See, there’s this thing called the “placebo effect”. How do you know which of your willpower tricks work only because you expect them to work? Or should I not ask that?
See, there’s this thing called the “placebo effect”. How do you know which of your willpower tricks work only because you expect them to work? Or should I not ask that?
The placebo effect is a term that refers to psychological reactions intruding on studies intended to measure non-psychological effects. When both the thing being tested and its outcome are purely psychological to begin with, then the term “placebo effect” is either meaningless or a misleading term for all uncontrolled variables. If you want to accuse a psychological study of failing to control for an important variable, you have to name that variable, and “placebo effect” is not specific enough.
It seems to me that for this kind of self-treatment it doesn’t really matter if it’s a placebo effect or not. It’s even a little unclear if the distinction is meaningful. Isn’t the main question whether it works or not? If the benefits are largely a placebo effect then it would be useful to pare down the techniques to ‘the simplest thing that fools me enough to work, with the minimum of mumbo-jumbo’ but the important thing is the working.
If you want to carry out a scientific study on how and why the techniques work then untangling the placebo effect is more important but if there are benefits to be gained from a not-completely-understood process then it seems worth at least considering taking them, while being aware of possible negative consequences.
First, the boost in mental energy you get from a placebo effect is likely to diminish as time goes on. Your initial enthusiasm will cool and you will get more and more used to whatever ritual is the basis of your placebo effect so it will have less of an effect on your thinking.
Second, the amount of mental energy you need to overcome whatever akrasiatic temptation you are facing varies from day to day and is quite high on some days.
So eventually what is likely to happen is that a day will come when your placebo effect does not work for you. After that, your faith in the placebo will be undermined and it will be even less effective until it completely peters out.
Does this process happen in real life? I think so. I’ve tried more than one self-help technique which seemed to work for a while and then stopped working after a while. I think most people who have tried to improve themselves have had similar experiences. In fact, I would guess that PJ Eby’s own self-improvement campaign hasn’t been going all that well.
So to succeed, one needs to understand and address exactly (or nearly exactly) what is going on in the mind. As Eliezer would say, you need to come up with a generalization that explains both the rule and the exception.
Yeah, that sounds really suspicious, actually. See, there’s this thing called the “placebo effect”. How do you know which of your willpower tricks work only because you expect them to work? Or should I not ask that?
Actually, it’s a trope of the Mind Hacker’s Guild that “if you’re not surprised, you probably didn’t change anything”. So expectation is not required, only sufficient suspension of disbelief to actually carry out a process. (As I said, I’ve tested techniques I thought were downright stupid, and found that as long as I actually did them, and emphasized unconscious non-verbal components over analytical/verbal ones, I was able to get results.)
Now, in order to get almost any technique to work, you have to assume that it’s possible for it to, at least in principle, in much the same way that you aren’t going to find a way to get FAI to work unless you assume that it’s possible, at least in principle. Otherwise, you’ll give up way too soon to get results.
Within all usable techniques, there are certain steps that might be called “entry criteria”. For example, in my thoughts-into-action video, I describe the “mmm test”, which is an entry criterion for engaging the particular kind of motivation demonstrated. You have to pass the test for the technique to work. If you don’t, then there’s no point bothering with the rest; it’s simply not going to work.
Similarly, for many NLP techniques, the entry criterion is being able to identify driver submodalities for some characteristic. If you don’t achieve that criterion, the rest of the technique is irrelevant. Meanwhile, your failure to achieve the entry criterion does not mean the technique is broken; it simply means you haven’t learned to achieve that criterion unassisted. (Some criteria are easier to achieve than others, especially unassisted.)
This might sound suspiciously like moving the blame from teacher to student. But to use a martial arts analogy, you can’t successfully perform a combination move, if you can’t yet perform the individual moves within the combination. This doesn’t mean the combo is useless, it means you haven’t learned the prerequisites.
Here’s what happens, though, when people try to learn techniques without feedback about the entry criteria: either they accidentally or inconsistently stumble through the criterion, or they mistakenly believe they’ve reached it, when they’ve actually misunderstood the criterion. The former people get results, the latter people don’t.
(i.e., if you already “get” punching and kicking, you’ll master combinations more quickly, but if you’re punching and kicking wrong, it doesn’t matter if you can do the combination of those wrong punches and kicks.)
You can test all this and see for yourself: watch my video and compare what happens when you do and don’t achieve criterion. You can also try teaching it to other people, with and without the criterion test, and see whether it works or not.
You could interpret entry criteria as meaning that “some things work for some people”, but I think this is an error. If you do that, you won’t try hard enough to find different ways to teach.
Hildegard’s hypnotizability research was off-base because it assumed that “hypnotism” was a fixed sequence of exactly-repeatable steps, i.e., that if you tape-record an induction and play it back to a bunch of people, it’s an acceptable test of “hypnotizability”.
In practice, just like everything else, hypnotism is an interactive process with entry criteria. A good hypnotist varies their behavior—timing, rhythm, tone, choice of words or images, etc. -- based on the subject’s real-time responses. They use externally-visible entry criteria to test the subject’s depth and responses, before engaging in suggestions, etc.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well. What I’m saying is, Things That Work have testable criteria and include parts that require looking for ways to achieve those criteria, where the ways of achieving the criteria vary from one person to another, but the net effect of getting to the criterion is that you can do something that’s universal or very nearly so.
Achieving those criteria is also an objective matter, even if the perception of those criteria is subjective. That is, you should be able to objectively determine whether something feels a certain way, even if nobody else can observe it on the outside.
(Part of formal NLP training for therapists, however, involves learning to observe the exterior signals of these feelings, so that you’re not dependent on a client’s skills in subjective introspection. I don’t use that in my work, though, because I work long distance without the aid of remote video.)
Anywho… what I’m trying to say is, you will be able to tell whether you’re experiencing a placebo effect or not, because to achieve entry criterion for a technique, you will have to try some things, and some of them will not work. Your own observation of what personally works or does not work, will provide you with adequate demonstration that it is not just a placebo effect, unless you just so happen to be (un)lucky enough to stumble on the right thing at the very first try. ;-)
...and that was too abstract. As a writer, I’d recommend—though YMMV—that you try interlacing an abstract explanation like this one with a specific, concrete technique. I know nothing of NLP, so you needed to explain “submodalities of motivation” or at least link it (Google doesn’t show how any such thing could be helpful). You’re assuming knowledge of things I’ve never heard of, and would probably be allergic to most standard expositions of (I can’t stand standard self-help writing style).
You don’t seem to have a strong instinct for realizing what the other person already knows or doesn’t know, but then most people appear to me to lack this instinct, which I suppose indicates that I possess a talent in this area. Unfortunately, that also means I have no idea how to advise people who lack that talent. You’d have to ask someone who started out without talent and developed skill.
Yeah, that’s what I’m doing in the rewrite of Thinking Things Done that I’m working on right now. Chapter 2 will start with the “thoughts into action” technique in my video, and use it as a demonstration of several specific principles about how thinking-for-action differs from ordinary “thinking”. (In my previous arrangement, I had several chapters of theory before getting to the technique in chapter 6, but this way I think I’ll actually be able to maintain a lot better theory-to-practice ratio throughout.)
What you would do is think about something you’re motivated to do, and something you “could” do, but are not motivated to do. (As opposed to being motivated to avoid or NOT do.)
Then, you observe what your autonomous representation of these actions are, and compare the representations. Do you see pictures? Hear sounds? Where are they located, what size, moving vs. still, etc. (WIkipedia’s “Submodality” page has a list of typical qualities of these kinds.)
After you’ve identified the differences between the two, you can try changing your representation of the thing you’re not particularly motivated by so that it matches the representation of the thing you are motivated by—move it to the same place, same size, brightness, etc. etc. -- and observe whether you now feelmotivated to do that thing. You can also experiment with changing the various qualities, and noticing what effect it has on your felt-response to the idea.
This is not a permanent change—there are other things you have to do to make it stick or to contextualize it appropriately. And you may have to tweak some things to do it at all; it helps to use more than two examples, I’ve found, even though submodality elicitation always seems to get taught with just two. Many people also have trouble paying attention to their images; I worked with someone yesterday who was much better focusing consciously on their sounds, and then their images changed in response to changing the sound qualities (including direction, volume, and location).
Anyway, while not permanent, it represents a simple demonstration of NLP’s practical rendition of an idea that I believe originated with General Semantics: that is, our behavior is determined by our internal representation of concepts. It just so happens that NLP shows the driving representations aren’t primarily verbal.
Which makes sense, evolutionarily. After all, we had to be able to decide things and act on those decisions long before we had language.
The hardest part of learning to do any NLP or similar technique is simply learning to “shut up” one’s ongoing verbal analysis and argumentation long enough to actually pay attention to what the rest of your brain is doing… which is why a lot of the original NLP creators tend to speak very disparagingly of the conscious mind. (e.g. “Any conscious verbal statement of the client is to be treated as unsubstantiated rumor until and unless it is confirmed by an unconscious non-verbal response.”)
But I’m digressing a bit. Submodalities are a basic building block of a wide variety of NLP techniques, and they’re only one of NLP’s building blocks. There are also plenty of ways to change submodalities without direct manipulation; I personally specialize in using questions that cause people to indirectly change their submodalities, on the basis that we change them indirectly all the time, and for a lot of people, that leads to less conscious interference… presumably because the verbal mind at least gets to ask the questions then. Whereas, direct submodality interventions leave the verbal mind free to critique itself and/or the process, making it impossible to actually pay attention, at least for me most of the times I’ve tried direct-manipulation techniques. Strangely, though, if I have someone else there to talk me through it, I can usually do them… answering someone else’s real-time question seems to commit my attention better.
I understand, believe me. My allergy was more to doing things than to reading about them, though. I discarded techniques because I didn’t like the theories.
Problem is, everybody discards techniques because they don’t like the theories or the writing styles—which is why there are so many hundreds upon hundreds of books that describe what are basically the same techniques, in slightly different styles. (Of course they’re the same—our brains are the same.)
Yes. I’ve realized this year that I suck at this and other teaching-related skills, which is why I’ve been studying instructional development and why I’ve also started over on my book; it was halfway finished, but early feedback showed it wasn’t reaching my goals for knowledge transfer OR motivating people to act on the knowledge that was transferred.
Yeah, that sounds really suspicious, actually. See, there’s this thing called the “placebo effect”. How do you know which of your willpower tricks work only because you expect them to work? Or should I not ask that?
The placebo effect is a term that refers to psychological reactions intruding on studies intended to measure non-psychological effects. When both the thing being tested and its outcome are purely psychological to begin with, then the term “placebo effect” is either meaningless or a misleading term for all uncontrolled variables. If you want to accuse a psychological study of failing to control for an important variable, you have to name that variable, and “placebo effect” is not specific enough.
It seems to me that for this kind of self-treatment it doesn’t really matter if it’s a placebo effect or not. It’s even a little unclear if the distinction is meaningful. Isn’t the main question whether it works or not? If the benefits are largely a placebo effect then it would be useful to pare down the techniques to ‘the simplest thing that fools me enough to work, with the minimum of mumbo-jumbo’ but the important thing is the working.
If you want to carry out a scientific study on how and why the techniques work then untangling the placebo effect is more important but if there are benefits to be gained from a not-completely-understood process then it seems worth at least considering taking them, while being aware of possible negative consequences.
I see two problems with this:
First, the boost in mental energy you get from a placebo effect is likely to diminish as time goes on. Your initial enthusiasm will cool and you will get more and more used to whatever ritual is the basis of your placebo effect so it will have less of an effect on your thinking.
Second, the amount of mental energy you need to overcome whatever akrasiatic temptation you are facing varies from day to day and is quite high on some days.
So eventually what is likely to happen is that a day will come when your placebo effect does not work for you. After that, your faith in the placebo will be undermined and it will be even less effective until it completely peters out.
Does this process happen in real life? I think so. I’ve tried more than one self-help technique which seemed to work for a while and then stopped working after a while. I think most people who have tried to improve themselves have had similar experiences. In fact, I would guess that PJ Eby’s own self-improvement campaign hasn’t been going all that well.
So to succeed, one needs to understand and address exactly (or nearly exactly) what is going on in the mind. As Eliezer would say, you need to come up with a generalization that explains both the rule and the exception.
Actually, it’s a trope of the Mind Hacker’s Guild that “if you’re not surprised, you probably didn’t change anything”. So expectation is not required, only sufficient suspension of disbelief to actually carry out a process. (As I said, I’ve tested techniques I thought were downright stupid, and found that as long as I actually did them, and emphasized unconscious non-verbal components over analytical/verbal ones, I was able to get results.)
Now, in order to get almost any technique to work, you have to assume that it’s possible for it to, at least in principle, in much the same way that you aren’t going to find a way to get FAI to work unless you assume that it’s possible, at least in principle. Otherwise, you’ll give up way too soon to get results.
Within all usable techniques, there are certain steps that might be called “entry criteria”. For example, in my thoughts-into-action video, I describe the “mmm test”, which is an entry criterion for engaging the particular kind of motivation demonstrated. You have to pass the test for the technique to work. If you don’t, then there’s no point bothering with the rest; it’s simply not going to work.
Similarly, for many NLP techniques, the entry criterion is being able to identify driver submodalities for some characteristic. If you don’t achieve that criterion, the rest of the technique is irrelevant. Meanwhile, your failure to achieve the entry criterion does not mean the technique is broken; it simply means you haven’t learned to achieve that criterion unassisted. (Some criteria are easier to achieve than others, especially unassisted.)
This might sound suspiciously like moving the blame from teacher to student. But to use a martial arts analogy, you can’t successfully perform a combination move, if you can’t yet perform the individual moves within the combination. This doesn’t mean the combo is useless, it means you haven’t learned the prerequisites.
Here’s what happens, though, when people try to learn techniques without feedback about the entry criteria: either they accidentally or inconsistently stumble through the criterion, or they mistakenly believe they’ve reached it, when they’ve actually misunderstood the criterion. The former people get results, the latter people don’t.
(i.e., if you already “get” punching and kicking, you’ll master combinations more quickly, but if you’re punching and kicking wrong, it doesn’t matter if you can do the combination of those wrong punches and kicks.)
You can test all this and see for yourself: watch my video and compare what happens when you do and don’t achieve criterion. You can also try teaching it to other people, with and without the criterion test, and see whether it works or not.
You could interpret entry criteria as meaning that “some things work for some people”, but I think this is an error. If you do that, you won’t try hard enough to find different ways to teach.
Hildegard’s hypnotizability research was off-base because it assumed that “hypnotism” was a fixed sequence of exactly-repeatable steps, i.e., that if you tape-record an induction and play it back to a bunch of people, it’s an acceptable test of “hypnotizability”.
In practice, just like everything else, hypnotism is an interactive process with entry criteria. A good hypnotist varies their behavior—timing, rhythm, tone, choice of words or images, etc. -- based on the subject’s real-time responses. They use externally-visible entry criteria to test the subject’s depth and responses, before engaging in suggestions, etc.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well. What I’m saying is, Things That Work have testable criteria and include parts that require looking for ways to achieve those criteria, where the ways of achieving the criteria vary from one person to another, but the net effect of getting to the criterion is that you can do something that’s universal or very nearly so.
Achieving those criteria is also an objective matter, even if the perception of those criteria is subjective. That is, you should be able to objectively determine whether something feels a certain way, even if nobody else can observe it on the outside.
(Part of formal NLP training for therapists, however, involves learning to observe the exterior signals of these feelings, so that you’re not dependent on a client’s skills in subjective introspection. I don’t use that in my work, though, because I work long distance without the aid of remote video.)
Anywho… what I’m trying to say is, you will be able to tell whether you’re experiencing a placebo effect or not, because to achieve entry criterion for a technique, you will have to try some things, and some of them will not work. Your own observation of what personally works or does not work, will provide you with adequate demonstration that it is not just a placebo effect, unless you just so happen to be (un)lucky enough to stumble on the right thing at the very first try. ;-)