And the easiest way to learn perfect front crawl isn’t to do it over and over again with tiny changes, but to practice exaggerated and simplified “drills” that teach particular fragments of muscle memory.
This reminds me of something that happened in my early years of teaching mind hacking: I noticed that some people were way better at applying the techniques than others, and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn’t yet know how to teach. (For example, some people were just better at “shutting up and listening” or not adding interpretations onto their experiences.)
Faced with a given stroke problem, I can look over a list of about eight different front crawl drills to find the one best suited for fixing it. To place some objective measure on the improvements, I can time my swimmers or count their strokes per length.
I certainly wish I had technology that specific: what I have now are mostly mnemonics, rules of thumb, and individual coaching feedback. Objective measures are particularly hard to come by, though I suppose I have a couple of them.
The objective measures? Primarily, the change in response to a cue thought, and the experience of surprise. A person who isn’t surprised at least sometimes by their introspection isn’t obtaining any new information, and a person whose behavior doesn’t change in ways that surprise them hasn’t changed their spontaneous behavior. A lack of change in autonomous responses to a stimulus is likewise an indication that no actual self-modification has occurred.
Gendlin’s Focusing—taking time to feel what comes to mind, then finding satisfying words to describe it, strikes me as quite powerful.
Interesting. That’s the Litany of Gendlin Gendlin, isn’t it? His Wikipedia page about levels of knowing sounds a heck of a lot like some of what I’ve been teaching.
The wikipedia description of “focusing” sounds like a subset of what I teach with respect to RMI, since it describes only a “felt” sense, and SEEDs usually involve more than just a feeling. Still, I’ll agree with the part that describes there being a “something” that people do that is externally observable. I can certainly tell by a person’s voice tone, and I’ve learned to do it from word choices as well, so that I can read what someone emails me or posts on a forum and tell whether they’re doing it or not.
I’m definitely going to check out some of his work, as it sounds like there’s overlap and perhaps he’s found some things I missed. It also always helps to have other people’s books I can recommend, instead of having to figure out how to write them myself. ;-)
Have you experimented or played around with ways of teaching these lower-level skills?
Yes. As a practical matter, it’s more like teaching people what to stop doing than what to do—i.e. to stop talking over their experience and speculating about it. Some people are worse about doing that than others; you have to stop them a lot before they “get it”.
More recently, I’ve been teaching people my SEED mnemonic, and it seems to help them realize what they’re supposed to be paying attention to, but I don’t have any real empirical data on that. I’d have to get a bunch of untrained people and test how quickly they were able to stop abstracting experiences, having split them into a control and experimental group… and then I’d still have no way to blind myself, unless somebody else taught them about SEEDs.
This reminds me of something that happened in my early years of teaching mind hacking: I noticed that some people were way better at applying the techniques than others, and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn’t yet know how to teach. (For example, some people were just better at “shutting up and listening” or not adding interpretations onto their experiences.)
I certainly wish I had technology that specific: what I have now are mostly mnemonics, rules of thumb, and individual coaching feedback. Objective measures are particularly hard to come by, though I suppose I have a couple of them.
care to list them ?
The objective measures? Primarily, the change in response to a cue thought, and the experience of surprise. A person who isn’t surprised at least sometimes by their introspection isn’t obtaining any new information, and a person whose behavior doesn’t change in ways that surprise them hasn’t changed their spontaneous behavior. A lack of change in autonomous responses to a stimulus is likewise an indication that no actual self-modification has occurred.
Gendlin’s Focusing—taking time to feel what comes to mind, then finding satisfying words to describe it, strikes me as quite powerful.
Interesting. That’s the Litany of Gendlin Gendlin, isn’t it? His Wikipedia page about levels of knowing sounds a heck of a lot like some of what I’ve been teaching.
The wikipedia description of “focusing” sounds like a subset of what I teach with respect to RMI, since it describes only a “felt” sense, and SEEDs usually involve more than just a feeling. Still, I’ll agree with the part that describes there being a “something” that people do that is externally observable. I can certainly tell by a person’s voice tone, and I’ve learned to do it from word choices as well, so that I can read what someone emails me or posts on a forum and tell whether they’re doing it or not.
I’m definitely going to check out some of his work, as it sounds like there’s overlap and perhaps he’s found some things I missed. It also always helps to have other people’s books I can recommend, instead of having to figure out how to write them myself. ;-)
Gendlin’s Thinking at the Edge takes Focusing into cognitive work.
Have you experimented or played around with ways of teaching these lower-level skills?
Yes. As a practical matter, it’s more like teaching people what to stop doing than what to do—i.e. to stop talking over their experience and speculating about it. Some people are worse about doing that than others; you have to stop them a lot before they “get it”.
More recently, I’ve been teaching people my SEED mnemonic, and it seems to help them realize what they’re supposed to be paying attention to, but I don’t have any real empirical data on that. I’d have to get a bunch of untrained people and test how quickly they were able to stop abstracting experiences, having split them into a control and experimental group… and then I’d still have no way to blind myself, unless somebody else taught them about SEEDs.