I’ve long believed TAPs are a fundamental skill-building block. But I’ve noticed lately that I never really gained, or solidified as well as I’d like, the skill of building TAPs.
I just reread this post to see if it’d help. One paragraph that stands out to me is this:
And in cases where this is not enough—where your trigger does indeed fire, but after two weeks of giving yourself the chance to take the stairs, you discover that you have actually taken yourself up on it zero times—the solution is not TAPs! The problem lies elsewhere—it’s not an issue with your autopilot, but rather with your chosen action or some internal conflict or hesitation, and there are other techniques that can be used to illuminate and solve those problems.
I think my biggest confusion right now is how to get TAPs to reliably fire, in a chaotic world. I had set a tap recently of “make sure to close a particular door fully, every time I used it.” I practiced doing it as I walked through a few times. But then it failed to fire when I was carrying a heavy thing, or in the middle of a conversation, or when I was walking my scooter through the door. I couldn’t figure out a way to practice the trigger that was versatile/robust. I would practice on each new variation I noticed, and I’d try practicing other variations to “cross train”, but they never seem to generalize to the situations I actually need.
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Some random notes
I find this bullet confusing:
Try gain-pain movies—first imagine some exciting or attractive aspect of the future where you’ve achieved your goal, and then think about the obstacles that lie between you and that future, and then repeat several times.[1]
I think I’ve previously read this sort of thing with a “and then, visualize overcoming those obstacles” clause, or something similar.
Hmm:
Locke and Latham (2002) review decades of research on goal setting and performance. Among their findings: people who set a challenging, specific goal tend to accomplish more than people who set a vague goal (such as “do as much as possible”) or those who set an easy goal.
On one hand, I think I have set challenging/specific goals for myself, but I think some part of me is still just going through life with an overall “try to do more good in the world” lens. I guess I do regularly channel that into concrete things, but I could maybe use more specificity sometimes.
I’ve long believed TAPs are a fundamental skill-building block. But I’ve noticed lately that I never really gained, or solidified as well as I’d like, the skill of building TAPs.
I just reread this post to see if it’d help. One paragraph that stands out to me is this:
and the Tips for TAPS section, which help clarify what TAPs are for.
I think my biggest confusion right now is how to get TAPs to reliably fire, in a chaotic world. I had set a tap recently of “make sure to close a particular door fully, every time I used it.” I practiced doing it as I walked through a few times. But then it failed to fire when I was carrying a heavy thing, or in the middle of a conversation, or when I was walking my scooter through the door. I couldn’t figure out a way to practice the trigger that was versatile/robust. I would practice on each new variation I noticed, and I’d try practicing other variations to “cross train”, but they never seem to generalize to the situations I actually need.
...
Some random notes
I find this bullet confusing:
I think I’ve previously read this sort of thing with a “and then, visualize overcoming those obstacles” clause, or something similar.
Hmm:
On one hand, I think I have set challenging/specific goals for myself, but I think some part of me is still just going through life with an overall “try to do more good in the world” lens. I guess I do regularly channel that into concrete things, but I could maybe use more specificity sometimes.