Why not just have people spend some time working with their existing goals?
Matt Goldenberg(Matt Goldenberg)
I usually explain my process these days to clients with the acronym LIFE
Learn New Tools Integrate Resistance Forge an Identity Express Yourself
Learn New Tools is cognitive-emotional strategies, of which TYCS is an example. Fwiw a some of TYCS is actually deliberate practice to discover cognitive strategies ( as compared to something like CFAR which extracts and teaches them directly), but the result is the same.
The important thing is to just have a clear tool, give people something they know they can use in certain situations, that works immediately to solve their problems.
But the thing is, people don’t use them, because they have resistance. That’s where parts work and other resistance integration tools come into play.
Even when thata done, there’s still the issue that you don’t automatically use the techniques. This is where forge an Identity comes in, where you use identity change techniques to make the way you see yourself be in alignment with a way of being that the technique brings out. (This is one thing TYCS gets wrong in my opinion, trying to directly reinforce the cognitive strategies instead of creating an identity and reinforcing the strategies as affirming that identity.)
Finally that identity needs to propogate to every area of your life, so there’s not situations where you fail to use the technique and way of being. This is just a process of looking at each area, seeing where it’s not in alignment with the identity, then deliberately taking an action to bring it to that area.
IME all of these pieces are needed to make a life change from a technique, although it’s rarely as linear as I describe it.
The way I do this with my clients is that we train cognitive tools first, then find the resistance to those habits and work on it using parts work
can you give examples?
I can hover over quick takes to get the full comment, but not popular comments.
Why not show the top-rated review, like you do at the top of the page?
The art change is pretty distracting, and having to hover to see the author is also a bummer, plus no way to get a summary (that I can see).
It’s seemingly optimized for a “judge a book by it’s cover” type of thing where I click around until I see a title and image I like
Appreciated this writeup.
How long have you been using the tool, and do you find any resistance to using it?
Do you always assume the underlying issue, or do you do focusing each time? Or do you find a contradictory experience through intuition without knowing why it works?
I haven’t looked into this recently, but last time I looked at the literature behavioral interviews were far more predictive of job performance than other interviewing methods.
It’s possible that they’ve become less predictive as people started preparing for them more.
Thanks. Appreciate this. I’m going to give another shot at writing this
Request for feedback: Do I sound like a raving lunatic above?
Surprising thing I’ve found as I begin to study and integrate skillful coercive motivation is the centrality of belief in providence and faith of this way of motivating yourself. Here are some central examples: the first from War of Art, the second from The Tools, the third from David Goggins. these aren’t cherry picked (this is a whole section of War of Art and a whole chapter of The Tools).
This has interesting implications given that as a society (at least in america) we’ve historically been motivated by this type of masculine, apollonian motivation—but have increasingly let go of faith in higher powers as a tenet of our central religion, secular humanism.This means the core motivation that drives us to build, create, transcend our nature… is running on fumes. We are motivated by gratitude, w/o sense of to what or whom we should be grateful, told to follow our calling w/o a since of who is calling.
We’ve tried to hide this contradiction. our seminaries separate our twin Religion (Secular Humanism and Scientific Materialism) into stem and humanities tracks to hide that what motivates The Humanities to create is invalidated by the philosophy that allows STEM o discover. But this is crumbling, the cold philosophy of scientific materialism is eroding the shaky foundations that allow secular humanists to connect to these higher forces—this is one of the drivers of the meaning the crisis.
I don’t really see any way we can make it through the challenges we’re facing with these powerful new technologies w/o a new religion that connects us to the mystical truly wise core that allows us to be motivated towards what’s good and true. This is exactly what Marc Gafni is trying to do with Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, and what Monastic Academy is trying to do with a new, mystical form of dataism—but both these projects are moonshots to massively change the direction of culture.
Or invisible?
The original reasoning that Eliezer gave if I remember correctly was that it’s better to make people realize there are unknown unknowns, rather than taking one specific strategy and saying “oh, I know how I would have stopped that particular strategy”
Some quick calculations from chatGPT puts the value from a british government bond (considered the world power then) at about equal to the value of gold, assuming a fixed interest rate of 3% with gold coming out slightly ahead.
I haven’t really checked these calculations but they pass the sniff test (except the part where chatGPT tried to adjust todays dollars for inflation).
This is not what I mean by wisdom.
Compared to what? My guess is it’s a better bet than most currencies during that time, aside from a few winners that it would have been hard to predict ahead of time. E.g., if 200 years ago, you had taken the most powerful countries and their currencies, and put your money into those, I predict you’d be much worse off than gold.
I think oftentimes what’s needed to let go of grief is to stop pushing it away, in doing that, it may be felt more fully, which once the message is received, can allow you to let it go. This process may involve fully feeling pain that you were suppressing.
. It doesn’t hurt the way pity or lamenting might; there’s no grief in it, just well-wishing.
While true, I think there’s a caveat that often the thing preventing the feeling of true love from coming forth can be unprocessed grief that needs to be felt, or unprocessed pain that needs to be forgiven.
I think there’s a danger in saying “if love feels painful you’re doing this wrong” as often that’s exactly the developmentally correct thing to be experiencing in order to get to the love underneath.
I think most people have short term, medium term, and long term goals. E.g., right about now many people probably have the goal of doing their taxes, and depending on their situation those may match many of your desiderata.
I used to put a lot of effort into creating exercises, simulations, and scenarios that matched up with various skills I was teaching, but ultimately found it much more effective to just say “look at your todo list, and find something that causes overwhelm”. Deliberate practice consists of finding a thing that causes overwhelm, seeing how to overcome that overwhelm, working for two minutes, then finding another task that induces overwhelm. I also use past examples, imagining in detail what it would have been like to act in this different way
You’re operating in a slightly different domain, but still I imagine people have plenty of problems and sub problems in either their life or research where the things you’re teaching applies, and you can scope them small enough to get tighter feedback loops.