Oh one more thing: if you’ve seen PJ Eby’s “How to clean your desk video”, then that’s pretty much an NLP technique he uses. I think the term is “future-pacing”.
If you’re not sure whether the correct term is future-pacing, I think that rather than suggesting LW investigate NLP, perhaps you should do some more investigating of it. ;-)
(Hint: technically, you could maybe stretch the term to say I am future-pacing the feeling of enjoyment, but as generally applied in NLP, future-pacing is used to link a behavior to a context, and that is not at all how it’s being applied in the video.)
And, as long as I’m commenting here, I’ll say that I agree NLP has LW-worthwhile things in it; the linguistic meta-model, for example, is a key rationalist toolkit.
Unfortunately, even though NLP began as an effort to make psychotherapy more evidence-based and results-oriented, the field as a whole went Affective Death Spiral a long time ago (or some other sort of death spiral), and actually extracting wheat from the chaff is incredibly difficult.
I’ve spent countless hours reading, analyzing, watching videos… and the REAL meat of the subject is almost always in little offhand remarks made by the original developers of NLP, little hints about sequence and structure and direction. It’s pretty clear the founders know some really useful things… but are REALLY bad at communicating them. And their followers mostly communicate things that are easy to communicate, but not (comparatively speaking) that useful.
And for self-hacking, relatively little of the content-free NLP methods seem to work… at least for the more challenging sorts of personal problems I work on in myself and others. Dilts’ work on imprinted belief systems and the “logical levels” model are probably the parts of NLP I use most in my work, but even that’s more in theory than in practice. (That is, I expect Dilts would note that my methods operate on the entities described in his models, without being the same techniques as such. I don’t use physical timelines, for example.)
I’m reminded of a time I saw an NLP practitioner offer to work with volunteers from a crowd, and a friend of mine stepped up, and asked for help with a problem. I could tell what problem it was by the expression on his face, and it was something he’d spent months convincing himself was unsolvable. I wish I’d paid enough attention to have some idea of what the NLP practitioner tried, but it didn’t work.
Do you have ideas about what to do if there are months of repeated words about a problem being unsolvable?
I wish I’d paid enough attention to have some idea of what the NLP practitioner tried, but it didn’t work.
In principle, a true practitioner wouldn’t give up after just one thing that didn’t work. Bandler himself was all about, “if you test right away, you can find out whether something works, and if it doesn’t, try something else.” Hmmm… a bit like Quirrelmort in HP:MOR, now that I think of it. Actually, Bandler seems to share many other qualities with Quirrelmort, now that I’m thinking of it. ;-)
Do you have ideas about what to do if there are months of repeated words about a problem being unsolvable?
I don’t think I understand you. That question is like an equation with lots of terms missing. For example, where are these repeated words? Who is saying them, or are they written?
(One of the reasons I describe NLP’s linguistic metamodel as a key rationalist toolkit is because it’s a set of challenges that can be applied to statements or questions to identify what it is that you don’t know or don’t understand about what somebody has just said. Originally, in fact, all NLP was, was the idea that by examining the language people use, you could identify flawed assumptions in their thinking and help them to change it.)
Also, what to you think of Core Transformation?
That one of its key premises is correct: when we do things in order to feel certain basic states, we experience problems in the form of addictive, compulsive, or aversive behaviors. But if we act from a place of already having those desirable states, then we experience choice and preference and motivation instead.
A further premise is also correct: if you also disapprove of your needs, you’ll experience a divided self. But the assumption that this then creates “parts” or subpersonalities (Like HP:MOR’s inner house members), I think that is incorrect. We don’t really have such parts, they are simply a metaphorical way of describing something. It’s technically incorrect, and also unnecessary to actually changing things.
For a while I worked with a streamlined version of the Core Transformation process, but later abandoned it in favor of various further-simplified models that address reduced components of the same sort of problems, and which go more directly after the erroneous assumptions or rules that we have about when we allow ourselves to feel certain things.
The practitioner may have tried two or three things, but it was a volunteer from the crowd situation, so I suppose he was trying to cut his losses.
My friend kept repeating roughly the same arguments to me about why he couldn’t feel better about his situation. I rather suspect I’ve done something similar in regards to some of my problems.
In re Core Transformation: I’ve read the book more than once. It sounds very plausible, but when I try asking myself about my motivations, they form cycles rather than (as the book) a straight line to the basic motivations.
I tried going to a practitioner, and I’m now a lot more cynical about certifications. She was literally reading from a transcript of how to do Core Transformation, and no better at getting me out of cycles of motivations than I was.
Your idea that the basis of the problem that Core Transformation is people not letting themselves feel what they’re actually feeling makes sense.
My friend kept repeating roughly the same arguments to me about why he couldn’t feel better about his situation. I rather suspect I’ve done something similar in regards to some of my problems.
The nature of self-defeating behavior is to be self-sustaining. Or to put it another way, our problems usually live one meta-level above the place we insist they are. (Or perhaps one assumption-level below?)
IOW, the arguments we repeat about why we can’t do something are correct, if viewed from within the assumptions we’re making. The trick is that at least one of those assumptions must therefore be wrong, and you have to find out which ones. The original NLP metamodel is one such tool for identifying such assumptions, or at least pointing to where an assumption must exist in order for the argument to appear to make sense.
when I try asking myself about my motivations, they form cycles rather than (as the book) a straight line to the basic motivations.
There are at least a couple ways you could end up cycling, that I can think of. One is that you’re not actually connecting with your near-mode brain about the subject, and are thus ending up in abstractions. Another is that you’re not placing enough well-formedness constraint on your questions. At each level, you have to imagine that you already have ALL the things you wanted before.… which would make it kind of difficult to cycle back to wanting a previous thing.
In other words, the most likely cause (assuming you’re not just verbalizing in circles and not connecting with actual near-mode feelings and images and such), is that you’re not fully imagining having the things that you want, and experiencing what it would be like to already have them.
This is a stumbling block for a lot of techniques, not just Core Transformation. The key to overcoming it is to notice whether you have something preventing you from imagining “what it would be like”, like that you think it’s unrealistic, bad, or whatever. Noticing and handling these objections are the real meat of almost ANY mindhacking process, because they’re the “second meta-level” issues I alluded to above, that are otherwise so very hard to notice or identify.
If you don’t address these objections, but instead just plow through the technique (whether it’s CT or anything else), you’ll get inconsistent results, problems that seem to go away and then come back, etc.
(NLP sometimes refers to these things as “ecology”, but relatively little time is spent on the subject in entry-level training. It’s something that you need lots of examples of in order to really “get”, because the principles by themselves are like saying you can ride a bike by “pumping the pedals and maintaining your balance”. Knowing it and doing it just aren’t the same.)
I tried going to a practitioner, and I’m now a lot more cynical about certifications.
Sadly, NLP practitioner certification at best means that you learned some REALLY basic stuff and were able to do it when supervised, and while doing it with people who are receiving the same training at the same time.
That is, NLP certification drills are done by trainee groups, who thus already know what’s expected of them, which means nobody gets much experience of what it would be like to walk somebody through a technique who didn’t receive the same training!
Your idea that the basis of the problem that Core Transformation is people not letting themselves feel what they’re actually feeling makes sense.
Not actually what I said: it’s about not allowing ourselves to feel good unless certain conditions are met. Or more precisely, our brain’s rules about feelings are not reflexive: if you have a rule that says “feel bad when things don’t go well”, this does NOT imply that you will feel good when things do go well!
And, you will actually be better off having rules that tell you to feel good even when things don’t go well, because bad feelings are not very useful when it comes to motivating constructive action. They’re much better at telling us to avoid things than getting us to accomplish things.
(By the way, another common cause of self-defeating behavior being self-sustaining is that we tend to filter incoming concepts to match our existing frameworks. So, where my phrasing was ambiguous (“allow ourselves to feel certain things”), your brain may have pattern-matched that to “feel what we’re feeling”, even though that’s almost the opposite of what I intended to say. The “certain things” I was referring to were feelings like the Andreas’s notion of “core states”: things that most of us aren’t already feeling.)
The practitioner I went to was specifically certified in Core Transformation, not just NLP
I wouldn’t be surprised if they use the same training approach, though I don’t have any personal knowledge of that.
The one thing that’s most important to know as a helper-of-people with these techniques is how to not be stopped by anything, but few trainers actually teach that. More commonly, the training doesn’t even ask people to “write seven inches on how to go on when all hope is lost” (per HP:MoR), let alone practice doing it.
There is a brief overview of the concept here, but the original and IMO definitive work on the subject (it was Bandler’s masters thesis IIRC) is The Structure of Magic, Volume I. It’s not too hard to find a copy electronically if you can’t find one physically.
As the above-linked page says:
The meta model consists of categories of questions or heuristics which seek to challenge linguistic distortion, clarify generalization and recover deleted information which occurs in a speaker’s language.
In the book, IIRC, there was more of a discussion about how the maps in our heads are created by distorting, deleting, and generalizing information from the territory. The meta-model is an attempt to codify how these distortions, deletions, and generalizations are reflected in our language, and provide a set of tools to allow someone to reconnect their map with the territory, to identify where the map needs updating in relation to a problem.
If you’re not sure whether the correct term is future-pacing, I think that rather than suggesting LW investigate NLP, perhaps you should do some more investigating of it. ;-)
(Hint: technically, you could maybe stretch the term to say I am future-pacing the feeling of enjoyment, but as generally applied in NLP, future-pacing is used to link a behavior to a context, and that is not at all how it’s being applied in the video.)
And, as long as I’m commenting here, I’ll say that I agree NLP has LW-worthwhile things in it; the linguistic meta-model, for example, is a key rationalist toolkit.
Unfortunately, even though NLP began as an effort to make psychotherapy more evidence-based and results-oriented, the field as a whole went Affective Death Spiral a long time ago (or some other sort of death spiral), and actually extracting wheat from the chaff is incredibly difficult.
I’ve spent countless hours reading, analyzing, watching videos… and the REAL meat of the subject is almost always in little offhand remarks made by the original developers of NLP, little hints about sequence and structure and direction. It’s pretty clear the founders know some really useful things… but are REALLY bad at communicating them. And their followers mostly communicate things that are easy to communicate, but not (comparatively speaking) that useful.
And for self-hacking, relatively little of the content-free NLP methods seem to work… at least for the more challenging sorts of personal problems I work on in myself and others. Dilts’ work on imprinted belief systems and the “logical levels” model are probably the parts of NLP I use most in my work, but even that’s more in theory than in practice. (That is, I expect Dilts would note that my methods operate on the entities described in his models, without being the same techniques as such. I don’t use physical timelines, for example.)
I’m reminded of a time I saw an NLP practitioner offer to work with volunteers from a crowd, and a friend of mine stepped up, and asked for help with a problem. I could tell what problem it was by the expression on his face, and it was something he’d spent months convincing himself was unsolvable. I wish I’d paid enough attention to have some idea of what the NLP practitioner tried, but it didn’t work.
Do you have ideas about what to do if there are months of repeated words about a problem being unsolvable?
Also, what to you think of Core Transformation?
In principle, a true practitioner wouldn’t give up after just one thing that didn’t work. Bandler himself was all about, “if you test right away, you can find out whether something works, and if it doesn’t, try something else.” Hmmm… a bit like Quirrelmort in HP:MOR, now that I think of it. Actually, Bandler seems to share many other qualities with Quirrelmort, now that I’m thinking of it. ;-)
I don’t think I understand you. That question is like an equation with lots of terms missing. For example, where are these repeated words? Who is saying them, or are they written?
(One of the reasons I describe NLP’s linguistic metamodel as a key rationalist toolkit is because it’s a set of challenges that can be applied to statements or questions to identify what it is that you don’t know or don’t understand about what somebody has just said. Originally, in fact, all NLP was, was the idea that by examining the language people use, you could identify flawed assumptions in their thinking and help them to change it.)
That one of its key premises is correct: when we do things in order to feel certain basic states, we experience problems in the form of addictive, compulsive, or aversive behaviors. But if we act from a place of already having those desirable states, then we experience choice and preference and motivation instead.
A further premise is also correct: if you also disapprove of your needs, you’ll experience a divided self. But the assumption that this then creates “parts” or subpersonalities (Like HP:MOR’s inner house members), I think that is incorrect. We don’t really have such parts, they are simply a metaphorical way of describing something. It’s technically incorrect, and also unnecessary to actually changing things.
For a while I worked with a streamlined version of the Core Transformation process, but later abandoned it in favor of various further-simplified models that address reduced components of the same sort of problems, and which go more directly after the erroneous assumptions or rules that we have about when we allow ourselves to feel certain things.
The practitioner may have tried two or three things, but it was a volunteer from the crowd situation, so I suppose he was trying to cut his losses.
My friend kept repeating roughly the same arguments to me about why he couldn’t feel better about his situation. I rather suspect I’ve done something similar in regards to some of my problems.
In re Core Transformation: I’ve read the book more than once. It sounds very plausible, but when I try asking myself about my motivations, they form cycles rather than (as the book) a straight line to the basic motivations.
I tried going to a practitioner, and I’m now a lot more cynical about certifications. She was literally reading from a transcript of how to do Core Transformation, and no better at getting me out of cycles of motivations than I was.
Your idea that the basis of the problem that Core Transformation is people not letting themselves feel what they’re actually feeling makes sense.
The nature of self-defeating behavior is to be self-sustaining. Or to put it another way, our problems usually live one meta-level above the place we insist they are. (Or perhaps one assumption-level below?)
IOW, the arguments we repeat about why we can’t do something are correct, if viewed from within the assumptions we’re making. The trick is that at least one of those assumptions must therefore be wrong, and you have to find out which ones. The original NLP metamodel is one such tool for identifying such assumptions, or at least pointing to where an assumption must exist in order for the argument to appear to make sense.
There are at least a couple ways you could end up cycling, that I can think of. One is that you’re not actually connecting with your near-mode brain about the subject, and are thus ending up in abstractions. Another is that you’re not placing enough well-formedness constraint on your questions. At each level, you have to imagine that you already have ALL the things you wanted before.… which would make it kind of difficult to cycle back to wanting a previous thing.
In other words, the most likely cause (assuming you’re not just verbalizing in circles and not connecting with actual near-mode feelings and images and such), is that you’re not fully imagining having the things that you want, and experiencing what it would be like to already have them.
This is a stumbling block for a lot of techniques, not just Core Transformation. The key to overcoming it is to notice whether you have something preventing you from imagining “what it would be like”, like that you think it’s unrealistic, bad, or whatever. Noticing and handling these objections are the real meat of almost ANY mindhacking process, because they’re the “second meta-level” issues I alluded to above, that are otherwise so very hard to notice or identify.
If you don’t address these objections, but instead just plow through the technique (whether it’s CT or anything else), you’ll get inconsistent results, problems that seem to go away and then come back, etc.
(NLP sometimes refers to these things as “ecology”, but relatively little time is spent on the subject in entry-level training. It’s something that you need lots of examples of in order to really “get”, because the principles by themselves are like saying you can ride a bike by “pumping the pedals and maintaining your balance”. Knowing it and doing it just aren’t the same.)
Sadly, NLP practitioner certification at best means that you learned some REALLY basic stuff and were able to do it when supervised, and while doing it with people who are receiving the same training at the same time.
That is, NLP certification drills are done by trainee groups, who thus already know what’s expected of them, which means nobody gets much experience of what it would be like to walk somebody through a technique who didn’t receive the same training!
Not actually what I said: it’s about not allowing ourselves to feel good unless certain conditions are met. Or more precisely, our brain’s rules about feelings are not reflexive: if you have a rule that says “feel bad when things don’t go well”, this does NOT imply that you will feel good when things do go well!
And, you will actually be better off having rules that tell you to feel good even when things don’t go well, because bad feelings are not very useful when it comes to motivating constructive action. They’re much better at telling us to avoid things than getting us to accomplish things.
(By the way, another common cause of self-defeating behavior being self-sustaining is that we tend to filter incoming concepts to match our existing frameworks. So, where my phrasing was ambiguous (“allow ourselves to feel certain things”), your brain may have pattern-matched that to “feel what we’re feeling”, even though that’s almost the opposite of what I intended to say. The “certain things” I was referring to were feelings like the Andreas’s notion of “core states”: things that most of us aren’t already feeling.)
The practitioner I went to was specifically certified in Core Transformation, not just NLP.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they use the same training approach, though I don’t have any personal knowledge of that.
The one thing that’s most important to know as a helper-of-people with these techniques is how to not be stopped by anything, but few trainers actually teach that. More commonly, the training doesn’t even ask people to “write seven inches on how to go on when all hope is lost” (per HP:MoR), let alone practice doing it.
Is there a good book/resource in general for trying to learn the meta-model you mention?
There is a brief overview of the concept here, but the original and IMO definitive work on the subject (it was Bandler’s masters thesis IIRC) is The Structure of Magic, Volume I. It’s not too hard to find a copy electronically if you can’t find one physically.
As the above-linked page says:
In the book, IIRC, there was more of a discussion about how the maps in our heads are created by distorting, deleting, and generalizing information from the territory. The meta-model is an attempt to codify how these distortions, deletions, and generalizations are reflected in our language, and provide a set of tools to allow someone to reconnect their map with the territory, to identify where the map needs updating in relation to a problem.