Thanks, Kaj and PJ. The Instant Irresistible Motivation video seems to ring true with me, I am currently in a very motivationally difficult sitation, so we’ll see if it works out.
I’d like to know more about how to banish negative motivations too: I seem to have a bunch of them. Is there anything I can read now about that?
The Instant Irresistible Motivation video seems to ring true with me, I am currently in a very motivationally difficult sitation, so we’ll see if it works out.
For the reasons Kaj and I posted, it won’t be of help to you in the long run, unless you first ditch the negative motivation that makes you feel you need it in the first place.
Is there anything I can read now about that?
The internet is full of such things, and most can be made to work, including the various works of Byron Katie, Morty Lefkoe, Henderson-Doyle, EFT, Sedona, and many, many others.
The catch is, you need to be able to do RMI, and to observe the process of your thoughts, not just the content, and avoid believing in any interrupting thoughts. If you can do this, you can use almost any technique.
Recently, I heard from a guy who was trying to use EFT to fix a confidence problem, and he tried it the same way over and over, thinking the whole time that it wasn’t going to work. I asked him if he tried using EFT on that thought… and it hadn’t occurred to him.
I use this as an illustration of the bigger problem: when you’re not paying attention to the process of your thoughts, you completely miss the point of what you’re trying to do, and then end up thinking the technique doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, this is only one example of the sorts of paradoxes one can get into, trying to use these techniques without some sort of outside assistance to help you see what sort of thinking box you’re actually in.
(Btw, I don’t actually recommend people bother learning EFT—it’s about the most ridiculously complicated way of doing what it does that there is. An NLP researcher actually demonstrated that you could use a keychain “Simon” game to produce similar results, without needing to learn an elaborate tapping sequence—suggesting that the beneficial function of EFT comes from overflowing your sensory/motor buffers with a complex sequence, not that it’s the particular complex sequence that makes a difference.)
From experience, I find that the acronym uniqueness threshold is about four: if an acronym is at least four letters long, it will be easy to search Wikipedia or Google for its expansion, but if it’s only three letters long, it may be impossible.
Anyway, I’m guessing that EFT is the Emotional Freedom Technique, RMI is Relaxed Mental Inquiry, and NLP is Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
So your recommendation is that I see a therapist re: negatives, blocks, etc?
Not really; the degree of “clue” to be had by therapists ranges from good to abysmal. If you do see one, look for a solutions-focused/”brief” therapist, not a “talk about your life history” one.
You’ll get almost as much benefit from talking to a friend, or journalling; the real benefit is in seeing your thoughts from the outside. You can do this mentally, too, it’s just not as easy, because you have to learn to split yourself in two—alternating between having thoughts, and observing them critically, without crossing the beams, so to speak.
Anyway, what I recommend is that you pick a technique—any technique—and practice its application in a scientific way. By which I mean, carefully observe/record what you do and what happens, without getting involved. If something doesn’t work, you observe that “I did X, Y happened—now I will try Z”—not, “this sucks, it doesn’t work, and I hate myself”. ;-)
Combine this with journalling or friend-conversation to identify what things you should be applying the technique to, because your first guesses as to what to use it on will be “inside the box”—i.e., things that won’t actually change your basic assumptions. The outside view provided by journalling (or better yet, another human being) will help you to see what those more-basic assumptions are, so you can apply the techniques to them instead.
(Applying the techniques to things that are “inside the box” is another common reason people get frustrated with self-help techniques… the technique may or may not work, but in that situation it doesn’t really help, since it’s not being applied to the assumptions or thinking processes that are creating the real problem.)
Or that I try to get this Chapter 7 that you and Kaj are talking about?
It does contain the easiest de-negativization technique to learn that I know of in the entire self-help universe, and the one that I always teach people first.
There’s one technique for it in Eby’s free book chapters (chapter 7 specifically); he doesn’t want a direct link to them being passed around and I’m not sure on how much I’m allowed to quote, but sign up to his mailing list and you should get a link eventually. (I’m not sure if you get a link to all the chapters on sign-up, or if you need to wait for the next mailing.)
I haven’t really gotten it to work myself yet, though, and I haven’t figured out what it is that I’m doing wrong.
You might not be doing anything wrong, but the way to know for sure is to try it on a food dislike first. That’s a good test of your technique, because if you can’t get rid of a food dislike with it, it is indeed your technique that’s wrong.
If you’ve succeeded with a food dislike, but are having trouble with something else, it’s much less likely your technique, and more likely that you have something the method doesn’t work on. (Or that you haven’t fully surfaced the emotional threat, i.e., haven’t asked “what’s bad about that?” enough to get to a strong feeling.)
Eby randomly posts updates on the list, and each update recently has contained links to all the chapters. (Yes, I know that this is a rather inconvenient and clumsy system to get new people to sign up...)
Thanks, Kaj and PJ. The Instant Irresistible Motivation video seems to ring true with me, I am currently in a very motivationally difficult sitation, so we’ll see if it works out.
I’d like to know more about how to banish negative motivations too: I seem to have a bunch of them. Is there anything I can read now about that?
For the reasons Kaj and I posted, it won’t be of help to you in the long run, unless you first ditch the negative motivation that makes you feel you need it in the first place.
The internet is full of such things, and most can be made to work, including the various works of Byron Katie, Morty Lefkoe, Henderson-Doyle, EFT, Sedona, and many, many others.
The catch is, you need to be able to do RMI, and to observe the process of your thoughts, not just the content, and avoid believing in any interrupting thoughts. If you can do this, you can use almost any technique.
Recently, I heard from a guy who was trying to use EFT to fix a confidence problem, and he tried it the same way over and over, thinking the whole time that it wasn’t going to work. I asked him if he tried using EFT on that thought… and it hadn’t occurred to him.
I use this as an illustration of the bigger problem: when you’re not paying attention to the process of your thoughts, you completely miss the point of what you’re trying to do, and then end up thinking the technique doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, this is only one example of the sorts of paradoxes one can get into, trying to use these techniques without some sort of outside assistance to help you see what sort of thinking box you’re actually in.
(Btw, I don’t actually recommend people bother learning EFT—it’s about the most ridiculously complicated way of doing what it does that there is. An NLP researcher actually demonstrated that you could use a keychain “Simon” game to produce similar results, without needing to learn an elaborate tapping sequence—suggesting that the beneficial function of EFT comes from overflowing your sensory/motor buffers with a complex sequence, not that it’s the particular complex sequence that makes a difference.)
From experience, I find that the acronym uniqueness threshold is about four: if an acronym is at least four letters long, it will be easy to search Wikipedia or Google for its expansion, but if it’s only three letters long, it may be impossible.
Anyway, I’m guessing that EFT is the Emotional Freedom Technique, RMI is Relaxed Mental Inquiry, and NLP is Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
what is RMI?
Relaxed Mental Inquiry. There’s a more detailed description of it at one of the book chapters.
So your recommendation is that I see a therapist re: negatives, blocks, etc? Or that I try to get this Chapter 7 that you and Kaj are talking about?
Not really; the degree of “clue” to be had by therapists ranges from good to abysmal.
If you do see one, look for a solutions-focused/”brief” therapist, not a “talk about your life history” one.
You’ll get almost as much benefit from talking to a friend, or journalling; the real benefit is in seeing your thoughts from the outside. You can do this mentally, too, it’s just not as easy, because you have to learn to split yourself in two—alternating between having thoughts, and observing them critically, without crossing the beams, so to speak.
Anyway, what I recommend is that you pick a technique—any technique—and practice its application in a scientific way. By which I mean, carefully observe/record what you do and what happens, without getting involved. If something doesn’t work, you observe that “I did X, Y happened—now I will try Z”—not, “this sucks, it doesn’t work, and I hate myself”. ;-)
Combine this with journalling or friend-conversation to identify what things you should be applying the technique to, because your first guesses as to what to use it on will be “inside the box”—i.e., things that won’t actually change your basic assumptions. The outside view provided by journalling (or better yet, another human being) will help you to see what those more-basic assumptions are, so you can apply the techniques to them instead.
(Applying the techniques to things that are “inside the box” is another common reason people get frustrated with self-help techniques… the technique may or may not work, but in that situation it doesn’t really help, since it’s not being applied to the assumptions or thinking processes that are creating the real problem.)
It does contain the easiest de-negativization technique to learn that I know of in the entire self-help universe, and the one that I always teach people first.
There’s one technique for it in Eby’s free book chapters (chapter 7 specifically); he doesn’t want a direct link to them being passed around and I’m not sure on how much I’m allowed to quote, but sign up to his mailing list and you should get a link eventually. (I’m not sure if you get a link to all the chapters on sign-up, or if you need to wait for the next mailing.)
I haven’t really gotten it to work myself yet, though, and I haven’t figured out what it is that I’m doing wrong.
You might not be doing anything wrong, but the way to know for sure is to try it on a food dislike first. That’s a good test of your technique, because if you can’t get rid of a food dislike with it, it is indeed your technique that’s wrong.
If you’ve succeeded with a food dislike, but are having trouble with something else, it’s much less likely your technique, and more likely that you have something the method doesn’t work on. (Or that you haven’t fully surfaced the emotional threat, i.e., haven’t asked “what’s bad about that?” enough to get to a strong feeling.)
[]
I’ve signed up to this list—do the chapters just come at random, or after some prespecified time?
Eby randomly posts updates on the list, and each update recently has contained links to all the chapters. (Yes, I know that this is a rather inconvenient and clumsy system to get new people to sign up...)