How to understand math more deeply and have fun while doing it: tell yourself a story!
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This Sunday, Skullcrusher Household is presenting a three-hour class on beating procrastination by cultivating positive motivation.
When: 2:00-5:00pm
Where:
850 Williams Way, Apt 4.
Mountain View, CA 94040
When you get here, you’ll see a blue garage door with a turtle on it. Go up the stairs to the left, pass the monkey-pony monster by the door, and come right in!
Last week at our IFS practice group we had a full-house of attendees, and there was one issue that was especially popular. Quite a few of the people who came independently picked it to address. It’s the same problem that has come up the most often with the clients I’ve worked with individually. Want to guess what it is?
You know how it goes. You know what you’re supposed to do. What you should do. What you’d be the happiest if you did. Maybe you can imagine yourself doing it, making forward progress, and moving towards the outcomes you care about in your life. Or maybe you have an idea of the result you want, but you find yourself getting stuck when you try to sit down to start. It all still seems murky, and you can’t quite see how it would go.
Practicing regular procrastination is like having your very own choose-your-own-least-favorite-emotion adventure:
Frustration: You don’t understand why you can’t just do it. You know you want to do the thing—it’s important. You can hear yourself making excuses, feel yourself getting tired and bored, and none of it is helping!
Fear: It’s scary not to get work done. Maybe you’re worried about the consequences at your job (or school), or maybe you see that opportunities are passing you by. You’re starting to worry that it’ll be this way forever—that you’ll never be able to apply yourself to anything again.
Guilt: You feel like you’re letting other people down, and maybe you are. As the time passes you wish that you could go back and make it so you’d been working, but you haven’t been. You feel a painful pull when you realize that you’ve been breaking promises to yourself again and again.
Shame: “What’s wrong with me for acting like this?” You get a sick sense of dread when you think about someone finding out what you’ve actually been spending your time on. What would they think? What sort of person would act like that?
Maybe you’re feeling all of them. I know I have.
Because procrastination is widespread, the internet and bookstores are littered with advice about what to do. Make lists and don’t bother prioritizing, prioritize ruthlessly, set a timer, formalize the problem as this thing called akrasia, model it, and understand its nature, procrastinate more strategically, or just do it. There’s good material out there. And I would be willing to bet that diving headfirst into the literature about procrastination is usually just another way to procrastinate.
Overcoming procrastination is a big topic, and we can’t cover it all in one class, so we’re tackling one foundational chunk that you absolutely need to achieve your goal and have fun while doing it.
Once you know that doing something is important, it’s tempting to frame the problem of getting yourself to do it in terms of self-discipline. But knowing that something is important is one thing. Being excited about it, drawn to it, thinking about how you can’t wait to work on it… that’s a different beast. You’re not looking to crank up your self-discipline, you’re looking to actually want, on a gut level—not in some abstract sense—to work on your project.
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it’s only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.
–Paul Graham
You want intrinsic motivation. That’s what works and lasts.
So, this Sunday, we’re going to lead you through a series of three exercises that will identify and multiply your own positive intrinsic motivation.
A cool hack for communicating with our best guess about how we’ll be when we’re older and wiser. And once you’re there, talking to your image of future self, you can get clearer on what it is you really care about having and why it’s important to you. I think of it as learning to talk to my CEV. This exercise will be led by Shannon Friedman.
Once you’ve clarified your values, it’s time to retackle the project you’ve picked and break it down into actionable steps with realistic deadlines. Defining the right subgoals and choosing the right deadlines is somewhat of an art, so we’ll guide you through the process. This exercise will be led by Will Ryan.
To get started and build momentum, use specific small steps and short-term deadlines. To keep your brain churning away at a project over time, you need a clear mental representation of your goal state backed by emotional power. We’ll show you how to ensure that your focus is in the right place. This exercise will be led by Divia Melwani.
Suggested donation is $20-30.
RSVP to divia.melwani@positivevector.com.
P.S. Since our last class, we have added a new instructor (roommate and collaborator), Adam Widmer, to our team. Until this past Monday, he was leading a weekly meetup in New York about rational self-improvement. He is a professional IFS practicioner. He’ll be there on Sunday, so you’ll get to meet him when you come!
A while back, when I was making Anki decks of the life concepts that I found most important, I wrote these two sentences:
“Communication is authentic when what we express externally corresponds to what’s going on internally.”
“Humans crave authentic communication.”
If you’re anything like me, you spend a big chunk of your waking hours talking to people. It’s important the time I spend communicating be fun, not unsatisfying. I don’t like it when I:
Everything I listed above is a symptom of people not talking about what’s actually going on in their heads.
When what you’re saying is strongly connected to the pictures in your head, the feelings in your body, or the thoughts popping into your mind, you can bet I’m making eye contact, relaxing out of my own narrative to focus on you, letting my own emotions respond to your reality. It’s a lot like getting drawn into a good movie.
When what I’m talking about lines up with what I’m thinking about, and you’re listening, it feels like I’m the center of your universe. As I say things and see you respond in real-time, it helps me think. My default state is looking out at reality through my own distorted map, so having another human reacting to my thoughts and feelings is an excellent way to get perspective on the stories I’m constantly telling myself.
As Kenneth Folk, a meditation teacher who recommends dyad noting (where you note out loud with a partner) as a more reliable way to meditate, says, “Feedback is God”.
With that, I give you my best questions to steer your conversations towards authenticity.
Sometimes, simple and direct is best. If you want to know what someone is really thinking about, you can just ask. I’m including it here because sometime last year, when Anna Salamon asked me this question, it caught me off guard in the best possible way. I remember I was sitting in the hot tub with her, feeling somewhat self-conscious because I didn’t know her very well. I asked her what she wanted to talk about and she asked me this question. I could tell she was sincere, and it was very disarming. There was a release of tension as the conflict between following my own train of thought and trying to make her happy dissolved.
When we say stuff out loud and we’re looking to have other people understand us, we look for clues to see if it’s working. Is the other person asking questions that show they understand? Does the other person seem to be feeling the same way I do about what I’m saying? Are they using metaphors that suggest that they have the same pictures in their head as I do? Usually, this checking to see if the other person is on the same page happens indirectly. We try to figure it out, but it’s not quite a shared effort. Give the other person a break by joining in this process. Ask if you seem to be getting it, and mean it. If the other person says ‘no’ or doesn’t seem sure, ask what it is that you’re not getting or what you’re doing that makes them suspect that you’re not getting it.
This is another one that whoever it is that you’re talking to is probably already trying to figure out. We all have our own angles, biases, misconceptions, expertise, and values. And whenever we talk to anyone else, we need to know how much we can trust their information, so we ask ourselves why they’re telling it to us (sometimes consciously, sometimes not). If someone doesn’t believe you about something, chances are they already have a story about why you’d be saying it even though it isn’t true. Be curious. Ask what that story is.
The first three questions were about getting the person you’re talking to share stuff that was already going on their head. This one is about helping the other person think. Say you’re talking to someone who just started learning how to paint, and they say, “I don’t think I could ever paint something truly awesome.” You could ask, “How would you be able to tell whether your painting were truly awesome?” For this to work, you have to ask in a curious way. Show that you’re genuinely interested in what goes on in their head to decide whether a painting they had made would be “truly awesome”. Often the person won’t know the answer right off the bat, so this question can get the wheels spinning.
This one comes from my friend, roommate, and life coach, Shannon Friedman. Sometimes what you want isn’t to follow someone’s train of thought about whatever happens to be on their mind, but to hear what’s going on inside in the other person in response to something you said. In which case, ask! Of course, be prepared for the other person’s response to be something that more about them and less about whatever it was you said. Be curious anyway, and you’ll go deeper.
If you have experience with any of these questions or ones you think should be added to the list, leave a comment!
(Note: When I went over this list with Will, he suggested taking out the qualifier for #2 and change it to “Do I understand you correctly?”. I went back and forth, but decided to leave the qualifier in because it can make people more comfortable answering honestly. I’d recommend experimenting with the wording on all of these and going with what flows. Tone will matter more than the exact words you use anyway.)
It’s been a while since I’ve hosted an official gathering, but I’ve been practicing hard, and I keep getting inquiries, so it must be about time.
The exact time is this Saturday, November 5th from 3:00pm-6:00pm.
And, even better, Shannon has been doing intensive (averaging multiple hours a day!) IFS training with me, so the facilitator to newbie ratio just went up. More individualized attention for you!
Our practice group will meet at our very own secret lair, Skullcrusher Household, complete with painted monkey-pony monster. (What’s with all the screaming???) We’re at Tortuga in Mountain View, CA. Email me for the exact address.
When you get here, you’ll see a blue garage door with a turtle on it. Go up the stairs to the left, admire Shannon’s monkey-pony monster by the door, and come right in!
You should join us if:
Suffering happens when you you’re fighting with yourself. For a more detailed description, I’d recommend Kaj’s Less Wrong post, Suffering as attentional allocation conflict. And that means that by turning your attention to each voice in turn and hearing it out, so that it’s fully and clearly communicated what it needs you to know, you can reliably resolve suffering.
I can’t fix all your internal conflicts in one afternoon—though I keep reading, learning, and practicing to get better and faster because I have A Sense That More is Possible—but I can promise some movement for you on an area where you currently feel stuck. You may not have it all worked out, but you will have a sense that something inside you has relaxed or loosened, and that you have increased clarity.
I know most everyone on this list, and I know you’re all excellent at intellectual understanding and analysis, but research has shown that the greastest change comes when people are in a high experiencing level state. Read this excerpt to see what I mean:
It’s almost like … it kind of feels like … sitting here looking through a photo album. And, like each picture of me in there is one of my achievements. And, I think [inaud] because I wasn’t achieving for me. I was always achieving for … someone else so they’d think I was good enough. It’s like it feels right to me to say … that … I don’t know quite how to say it … It’s like the feeling is there, but l can’t quite put words on it. It feels right somehow to say it’s like I’ve chosen this man as my challenge … knowing that I’d be defeated. That this person wouldn’t respond to me in the same way. So that I could kind of buy right back into the photo album being flipped through. I didn’t have what it took (T: Uhhum) to get what I wanted. Which is kind of…
Anyone who has meditated knows how mind-altering observing yourself (thoughts, feelings, sense of self) can be, and with my own personal growth work I have come to trust Bill Harris’s assertion that:
You can do something destructive to yourself (feelings, beliefs, values, behaviors, etc.) over and over as long as you do it unconsciously (without continuous conscious awareness). But once you begin to do the non-resourceful feeling, behavior, belief, value, etc. consciously, it will begin to fall away. You just cannot do something that is not good for you and also do it consciously.
Give me three hours of your time, and I’ll get you into a high experiencing level state, exactly where you need to be to introspect in a way that produces immediate behavioral change in yourself.
On Saturday, I will give everyone walkthrough handouts about how to lead an IFS process, and I’ll circulate, stepping in whenever anyone gets stuck. Aside from me, we’ll also have:
former leader of the fabled New York Less Wrong Meetup Group, an experienced facilitator who has staffed multiple weekends for The Mankind Project and completed Shadow Work Seminars training
and
an accredited Coactive Coach from The Coaches Training Institute (CTI). She has completed the CTI fundamental training, gotten certificatied, and assisted training workshops, and is currently participating in their leadership training program.
Qualifications aside, we’re all personal-growth junkies who have spent many hours and weeks trying out out tons of stuff and sifting through it, so you can get the good stuff pre-filtered, without having to search and research yourself.
(Incidentally, I learned about IFS from Steve Omohundro, an even more experienced personal-growth junkie, who recommended it as one of the most effective methods he had come across.)
If you want more details about IFS works so you can make see how it will work for you and, check out this description from Jay Earley, author of Self Therapy.
It matters to me to give everyone who attends the best experience, so once you know that you’re coming, please email me and let me know whether you’re coming to mostly work on your own issues and get movement there, or whether you want to learn how to use IFS skills on your own too. Knowing what your motivations are will help me meet your needs.
Suggested donation is $15-40, but don’t let price be the reason you shy away from coming. Come, try it, see what value you get out of it, and then decide how much to pay. Where else can you get get hours of one-on-one work supervised by experienced facilitators for this price?
RSVP to divia@meaningandmagic.com.
Recently I’ve been using the phrase “identify with” a bunch. As in, “I’m learning not to identify with my past self”, or “I try not to identify with my beliefs”, or “the ego is what, when accurately perceived, we stop identifying with”. When a friend of mine asked me what I meant by “identifying with”, I wasn’t immediately sure how to unpack how I was using the words. I said, “Well, when I identify with something it feels like me. It feels like part of my, uh, identity”. He was unsatisfied with this explanation, as was I.
(Prioritizing explaining myself is a heuristic that has served me well. I want meaning.)
Here’s my best one sentence version: When I identify with something, doing an original seeing on it is aversive. I don’t want to take a fresh look at the evidence and see if it really exists in the way I’m thinking of it. In other words, things I identify with seem like part of the territory, not just part of my map. I’ll expand a bit on what this means in terms of identifying with beliefs, emotions, and parts of myself.
I’ve covered almost exactly what I mean by identifying with beliefs in Sticky Claims and Surprise Meters. When I identify with my beliefs, they act as “sticky claims”, and when I don’t, they become “surprise meters”.
Experiences I’ve had with IFS have also helped me understand what it means to identify with my beliefs in a visceral, not just intellectual way. Last August, I was working with my IFS therapist at the time and we were examining a belief of mine that we had discovered that “when I’m upset, I can’t be there for other people”. She asked me how I felt about the belief, and I responded by saying “Well, I think it’s true”. No counter-evidence came to mind; it seemed obvious that the statement was well-supported by my experience. It seemed like a “direction perception of the way things really are”. She said that meant I was “blended with” the belief, which is the IFS way of saying that I was identifying with it.
While blended with the belief, I couldn’t do an original seeing on it and examine whether the belief was truth-tracking and whether holding onto it served me. The belief seemed like a part of me, so much so that I didn’t even realize that I was failing to question it. My IFS therapist had me do an exercise where I visualized the belief and then imagined stepping back from it physically, which is one common strategy for unblending.
Sure enough, immediately upon stepping back from the belief in my mental imagery, I saw that I had evidence for and against it, and that failing to question it wasn’t helping me achieve what I cared about. Just a moment ago, it had seemed “true”. Now it was clear that I had been harvesting evidence for it.
And that’s how the importance of not identifying with my beliefs clicked for me.
When I identify with my beliefs, I think of them as “just true” or “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer”. When I identify with my emotions, they are “reasonable”, “justified”, and “exactly the way I should feel”.
Here’s a recent example. On a recent trip to New York I’d made plans to meet a friend around 6:00. I was running about an hour late, which I had informed her of. On the subway, on my way to meet her, I noticed I was feeling a lot of guilt. I kept having thoughts about how I was a bad person, and I should have known better, and replaying the mistakes I had made that got me into the current situation. I tried to tell myself that the friend I was meeting was late fairly often herself, that she wouldn’t want me to beat myself up about it, and that what I was doing wasn’t helping. I resisted all thoughts that threatened my identity as a guilty person, including thoughts about how I could change my behavior in the future! (I ended up doing some work on myself in the moment, which I’ll blog about too.)
One of the claims of the IFS model is that our psyche is made up of sub-personalities, each with its own set of emotions and beliefs. I can identify a “part” because my degree of identification with all of its emotions and beliefs will change at the same time.
For example, I had a protective part whose role was to stop me from talking when I was upset with other people. Some of its feelings were: anxiety because it believed I was incapable of expressing myself effectively and resentment that other people wouldn’t just read my mind, and some of its beliefs were: that unexpressed anger kept me safe, and that expressing anger would lead to more chaos than I could handle. As I visualized stepping back from this part, my level of identification with each emotion and belief in that cluster lessened in lockstep.
One straightforward hack I use for not identifying with my emotions is rather than saying “I am angry”, saying “I am feeling anger”, or “I am experiencing anger”. This simple verbal transformation helps remind me that my emotions are temporary and dependent on how I am responding to my circumstances.
Physically stepping backwards and visualizing stepping backwards will both help disidentify with parts and beliefs. Conceptualizing the emotion or belief visually, and then interacting with that imagery is often effective. Asking the emotion or belief to unblend sometimes works. Meditation trains the ability to disidentify. In future posts I will further unpack these techniques and more.
Question:
Explain to me why "intimidated" is not a proper feeling-word.
Answer:
"Intimidated" isn't an emotion—the word includes an interpretation of the situation. The emotion on its own would probably be fear, maybe anxiety, maybe some other mix. When you say "intimidated", you're also bringing up a story about the other person's behavior, and I'd say there are also implications about intent. "I feel intimidated when you say that" seems much more likely to provoke defensiveness than "I feel scared when you say that". Does that make sense?
Followup:
Cool, thanks! Someone I am trying to get to know told me he feels intimidated by me and that never sat well with me, thus why I wanted to figure this out.
(Thanks to Dave Jackson for this particular question.)
Question:
I'm still kind of confused about the NVC general sense of the term 'need'.
I'd before been thinking that NVC talks about 'needs' rather than 'values' or 'wants' because by thinking of them as needs, people would respect the desire once noticing and taking account of it, in themselves and/or others. So this was kind of my own way of interpreting the NVC term in a way that didn't state necessity, such as "I need understanding".I put together the facts that NVC talks about needs, you're an experienced user of NVC, and you mentioned you don't like "need" based thinking, and wondered what was your own way of treating the NVC terminology of needs. (Perhaps you oppose the use of 'need' to mean obligations specifically rather than necessity generally?)
Answer:I think I understand your question better now.
I guess I was being somewhat imprecise when talking about "need-based thinking". The needs that NVC lists are all very general. Respect, fun, connection, stuff like that. The most specific ones are stuff like air and water. So sure, you "need" respect, but you don't "need" it from any one person. You "need" fun, but you don't "need" to have fun playing this video game right now. Those are strategies.Question:
How does "I need to..." relate to NVC needs, such as judgments being alienated expressions of unmet needs?
Answer:"I need to" is classified as an internal demand, which is related to a judgment, but a bit different. "Demand" means that fear, guilt, or shame are part of the enforcement system.
Not quite a question, more of a prompt for discussion:
I find it very interesting to say "We don't talk except to meet our needs." At one level it's trivially true because you don't do anything without a reason. At another, it's not as true. Often the need in question is 'fill dead air' or 'satisfy appropriate social convention' or other things that suggest there might not be a 'point' to saying what we are saying, so it's kind of half right. Or of course, as he points out, we might be mad and want to express that without actually needing a remedy as such. As a response one might say that this isn't a productive thing to do and one would benefit if they only had this conversation with a concrete end in mind, which opens up the question of enforcing incentive patterns or other such less tangible goals. It also raises a point that I missed while reading, which is that the word need here seems to be overloaded in the sense that he's using it to mean something distinct from its ordinary English meaning, although it includes ordinary needs. He doesn't say so outright, but he implies that what he calls needs includes what I would usually call wants. It's a vague distinction in English along a gradient, but certainly when he refers to needs he's talking about something far less strong than most people do when they say they need something. I've been told that "need is a strong word" could be considered one of my catch phrases. (Reminds me of George Carlin: " 'My needs aren't being met.' Drop some of your needs!)
Response:
I am in general interested in better understanding what is meant by NVC needs. I think what distinguishes needs from strategies (which are more like wants) is that with strategies you can ask "why do you want that" and get something more fundamental as an answer, but with needs you can't. Well, maybe not exactly, since you can certainly answer "why do you need food?" with "so I don't die". But I think it's a decent heuristic. And something is a need instead of a strategy if you are going to keep experiencing a negative emotion until you get it met one way or the other. I agree with you completely that "need is a strong word", and I'm still okay with using it for NVC-type needs since they're so general, and they never depend on a specific other person doing anything. So if I need to "be heard" and you don't feel like listening I can always listen to myself for find someone else to listen to me, filling the need that way. And I think it's fair to say that if I'm never "heard" about anything I'll probably keep being unhappy about it.
When I think about what needs people are (subconsciously) trying to meet with dead-air conversations, I'd guess connection, community, acceptance, appreciation, emotional safety, empathy, reassurance, respect, understanding, fun, inspiration etc. probably do play into motivation, but that this type of conversation typically doesn't end up meeting anyone's needs. NVC says that we're much more likely to actually get these needs met if we're aware of them in the moment. So part of what I got from NVC is that regardless of what other people typically do, it's in my interest to be aware of what needs I'm trying to meet whenever I do anything, certainly including communicating with other people. So the "we only talk to get our needs met" point I was making is trivially true for people in general, but is perhaps better read as a recommendation—make it more than trivially true for yourself and some of the questions about "how do I say X with NVC" will resolve themselves, since the answer is that saying X won't actually meet your needs. I get the impression that you understand this point.