I’ve been a bit confused by this post, but it’s probably because I’ve never really done such short-term work with people; mostly I work with people on things that require one or more years of sustained effort across dozens of individual “breakthroughs” to reshape their life or personality the way they want (though of course they are getting incremental improvements all along the way).
So the idea of asking somebody a year after they’re done seems weird to me, as why would the year after their last year be different than the year after their first? (And when I do hear from people a year or more later, it’s nearly always to refer a friend or to work on something that’s come up in the context of a new job, project, business, etc., usually with little relation to past work.)
Still, when someone gets excited about a breakthrough, I usually caution them that we won’t know for a couple months whether it sticks (IME most fallbacks happen within 6-8 weeks). OTOH, when someone is skeptical about a breakthrough that’s only a slight change to their automatic feeling response, I usually remind them that progress is progress, and that less dramatic changes are less likely to revert.
IOW, assuming a slight regression to the mean + cautious optimism is the best frame. (Two steps up and one step back is a meme for a reason!)
Also, in my experience, the “real” (i.e. most sticky) breakthroughs feel more like grief and regrets and loss than they do “exciting new breakthrough”. The feeling is more like, “oh f*** I could have been doing things differently all this time, I didn’t need to do XYZ or avoid ABC, crap!” (Or sometimes, it’s just realizing how messed up some of the things that happened to you actually are.)
I think these types of changes stick better because the feelings are more reflective of “shift in values / perspective / actually seeing things in a new light” than “excitement about an idea in the present moment.” This applies to me too, because I tend to get very excited when I spot where some of my behavior or feelings are coming from, and then forget to do the painful part that results in the actual perspective shift!
In such cases the problem comes “back” (not that it ever really left) within days, rather than weeks. Luckily I don’t usually make that mistake with clients, as I have notes that keep me on track so I don’t forget to pop the stack in session (and because any excitement is an obvious reminder we’re probably not finished). But when i do stuff on myself I’m often just walking or standing around with no tracking of any sort.
tl;dr: being excited about a change is overall a bad sign for its longevity. The most positive signs are surprise (or sudden inspiration to actualy do something), grief/loss/sadness, or relief/release. (Not necessarily in that order)
afterthought: one of the reasons insight breakthroughs are more likely to fail is that more often than not, they represent an intellectual understanding that must be realized in action in order to benefit from, but most of the people i work with are working with me precisely because “intentions into actions” is the thing they have problems with. It’s like, now you have even more ideas you have difficulty implementing, great. ;-) So it sticks for as long as they can maintain enthusiasm (2-3 weeks) then forget about it for another few weeks before something reminds them of the problem again (around 6-8 weeks).
But you can also have genuine breakthroughs (automatic feeling/behavior shifts, not intellectual ones) that revert around that time, but in that case it’s usually a reinforcement/equilibrium of forces/”ecology” issue. For example, I once had a client who had made many improvements to his workflow to reduce stress… only to abandon those changes after a couple months. Turns out his family believed that if you’re not stressed, you must not be doing anything very important/high status. So his new stress-reducing—aka status-lowering—workflow changes always felt subliminally wrong and uncomfortable until he shrugged them off again.
Anyway, I’m mighty curious about how these indicators and timeframes mesh (or don’t) with others’ experiences and practices. (And now that I’ve thought about detailed instances of specific personal and client cases, I’m realizing my 6-8 weeks is an outside limit, like 90-95th percentile? I think the median for things coming back is a lot lower, and my measurement might be skewed upward by how many weeks usually occur between sessions. IOW, probably half of everything that’s going to come back does so within 3 weeks. So I say a couple months to be on the safe side, because the reinforce-extinguish patterns can take that long sometimes, even if it’s not that often they actually do. (And partly because I now have tricks I use to try to identify them ahead of time.)
I mean, technically I have some clients who only stick around for a few months, but they’re sorta not clients—they’re the people who basically binge-watch my workshop recordings and figure stuff out for themselves, then say okthanxbye. There’s not very many of them and they always seem really happy and seem to have only had one or two things they needed to figure out, and maybe only needed 1-2 calls with me to get clear on how to do something from the materials. I suppose it might be interesting to do a long-term followup with some of them, but I can only think of 2-3 people who ever did it that way.
tl;dr: being excited about a change is overall a bad sign for its longevity. The most positive signs are surprise (or sudden inspiration to actualy do something), grief/loss/sadness, or relief/release. (Not necessarily in that order)
Interesting! This seems like an unusually concrete claim (as in, it’s falsifiable).
Have you tried testing it, or asked other coaches/therapists for what they see as the most encouraging signs in a client/patient?
I’m not sure what you mean by “testing” here. Other coaches and therapists have reported similar things, though.
My own interpretation is that excitement about the idea of a change or the epiphany involved in it, is an indicator that it has only been processed intellectually, not viscerally. (And thus represents a change in thinking/talking about the problem, rather than a change in values, feelings, or behavior.)
The other emotions are hard-to-fake signals of actual change or learning, in that 1) surprise equals learning something you didn’t realize before (usually a realization that one could in fact do some simpler better thing than one is doing, without negative consequence), 2) the grief/loss stuff is a natural response to recognizing some pursuit as futile, and 3) the relief or release is a natural response to realizing one no longer has to engage with a painful pursuit of some kind.
So which one you experience is very situationally dependent on what kind of change is actually being made, but them arising spontaneously is a good short-term sign that some kind of change has taken place. Longer-term signs are spontaneously behaving differently in a situation to how you did before (i.e. finding yourself acting differently without conscious intent to do so), or forgetting you had a problem to begin with. (Or in the case where you’re both acting differently and forgot the way you acted before, having other people comment on your changed behavior!)
The forgetfulness thing is perhaps one of the most widely-reported phenomena, perhaps because it just seems so weird. Lots of therapists also talk about the importance of grief in working through various things, but they’re usually not as systematic or aggressive about inducing it as I am, I don’t think. I find a strong correlation between successfully inducing a grief response regarding experiences of personal rejection, and an immediate reduction in the perfectionistic or self-critical impulses that were linked to that class of rejection. (Which is why I consider it a positive sign.)
I’ve been a bit confused by this post, but it’s probably because I’ve never really done such short-term work with people; mostly I work with people on things that require one or more years of sustained effort across dozens of individual “breakthroughs” to reshape their life or personality the way they want (though of course they are getting incremental improvements all along the way).
So the idea of asking somebody a year after they’re done seems weird to me, as why would the year after their last year be different than the year after their first? (And when I do hear from people a year or more later, it’s nearly always to refer a friend or to work on something that’s come up in the context of a new job, project, business, etc., usually with little relation to past work.)
Still, when someone gets excited about a breakthrough, I usually caution them that we won’t know for a couple months whether it sticks (IME most fallbacks happen within 6-8 weeks). OTOH, when someone is skeptical about a breakthrough that’s only a slight change to their automatic feeling response, I usually remind them that progress is progress, and that less dramatic changes are less likely to revert.
IOW, assuming a slight regression to the mean + cautious optimism is the best frame. (Two steps up and one step back is a meme for a reason!)
Also, in my experience, the “real” (i.e. most sticky) breakthroughs feel more like grief and regrets and loss than they do “exciting new breakthrough”. The feeling is more like, “oh f*** I could have been doing things differently all this time, I didn’t need to do XYZ or avoid ABC, crap!” (Or sometimes, it’s just realizing how messed up some of the things that happened to you actually are.)
I think these types of changes stick better because the feelings are more reflective of “shift in values / perspective / actually seeing things in a new light” than “excitement about an idea in the present moment.” This applies to me too, because I tend to get very excited when I spot where some of my behavior or feelings are coming from, and then forget to do the painful part that results in the actual perspective shift!
In such cases the problem comes “back” (not that it ever really left) within days, rather than weeks. Luckily I don’t usually make that mistake with clients, as I have notes that keep me on track so I don’t forget to pop the stack in session (and because any excitement is an obvious reminder we’re probably not finished). But when i do stuff on myself I’m often just walking or standing around with no tracking of any sort.
tl;dr: being excited about a change is overall a bad sign for its longevity. The most positive signs are surprise (or sudden inspiration to actualy do something), grief/loss/sadness, or relief/release. (Not necessarily in that order)
afterthought: one of the reasons insight breakthroughs are more likely to fail is that more often than not, they represent an intellectual understanding that must be realized in action in order to benefit from, but most of the people i work with are working with me precisely because “intentions into actions” is the thing they have problems with. It’s like, now you have even more ideas you have difficulty implementing, great. ;-) So it sticks for as long as they can maintain enthusiasm (2-3 weeks) then forget about it for another few weeks before something reminds them of the problem again (around 6-8 weeks).
But you can also have genuine breakthroughs (automatic feeling/behavior shifts, not intellectual ones) that revert around that time, but in that case it’s usually a reinforcement/equilibrium of forces/”ecology” issue. For example, I once had a client who had made many improvements to his workflow to reduce stress… only to abandon those changes after a couple months. Turns out his family believed that if you’re not stressed, you must not be doing anything very important/high status. So his new stress-reducing—aka status-lowering—workflow changes always felt subliminally wrong and uncomfortable until he shrugged them off again.
Anyway, I’m mighty curious about how these indicators and timeframes mesh (or don’t) with others’ experiences and practices. (And now that I’ve thought about detailed instances of specific personal and client cases, I’m realizing my 6-8 weeks is an outside limit, like 90-95th percentile? I think the median for things coming back is a lot lower, and my measurement might be skewed upward by how many weeks usually occur between sessions. IOW, probably half of everything that’s going to come back does so within 3 weeks. So I say a couple months to be on the safe side, because the reinforce-extinguish patterns can take that long sometimes, even if it’s not that often they actually do. (And partly because I now have tricks I use to try to identify them ahead of time.)
This makes a lot of sense if you work with all clients for a long time!
I mean, technically I have some clients who only stick around for a few months, but they’re sorta not clients—they’re the people who basically binge-watch my workshop recordings and figure stuff out for themselves, then say okthanxbye. There’s not very many of them and they always seem really happy and seem to have only had one or two things they needed to figure out, and maybe only needed 1-2 calls with me to get clear on how to do something from the materials. I suppose it might be interesting to do a long-term followup with some of them, but I can only think of 2-3 people who ever did it that way.
Which are these workshop recordings you’re talking about?
The ones in my membership site. There’s rather a lot of them.
Interesting! This seems like an unusually concrete claim (as in, it’s falsifiable).
Have you tried testing it, or asked other coaches/therapists for what they see as the most encouraging signs in a client/patient?
I’m not sure what you mean by “testing” here. Other coaches and therapists have reported similar things, though.
My own interpretation is that excitement about the idea of a change or the epiphany involved in it, is an indicator that it has only been processed intellectually, not viscerally. (And thus represents a change in thinking/talking about the problem, rather than a change in values, feelings, or behavior.)
The other emotions are hard-to-fake signals of actual change or learning, in that 1) surprise equals learning something you didn’t realize before (usually a realization that one could in fact do some simpler better thing than one is doing, without negative consequence), 2) the grief/loss stuff is a natural response to recognizing some pursuit as futile, and 3) the relief or release is a natural response to realizing one no longer has to engage with a painful pursuit of some kind.
So which one you experience is very situationally dependent on what kind of change is actually being made, but them arising spontaneously is a good short-term sign that some kind of change has taken place. Longer-term signs are spontaneously behaving differently in a situation to how you did before (i.e. finding yourself acting differently without conscious intent to do so), or forgetting you had a problem to begin with. (Or in the case where you’re both acting differently and forgot the way you acted before, having other people comment on your changed behavior!)
The forgetfulness thing is perhaps one of the most widely-reported phenomena, perhaps because it just seems so weird. Lots of therapists also talk about the importance of grief in working through various things, but they’re usually not as systematic or aggressive about inducing it as I am, I don’t think. I find a strong correlation between successfully inducing a grief response regarding experiences of personal rejection, and an immediate reduction in the perfectionistic or self-critical impulses that were linked to that class of rejection. (Which is why I consider it a positive sign.)