Hey Kaj. I was actually looking for feedback in email, but this is good too. :) (I’ll update the article to clarify on that point.) Thanks for the info about your friend’s experience: the answer to their question is that the act of visualizing requires them to access implicit information from their memory from direct (if remembered) experience, vs. simply verbalizing cached facts. It is structurally similar to scanning one’s memory for past experiences, looking for something that matches a pattern of feeling or behavior. I’m only using the term “felt sense” because there’s no sense (no pun intended) in creating yet another name for something that is already described in other places. (Also, some people actually do access the turn information kinesthetically, i.e., by feeling their way through the recalled day.)
As to your transcript, I see you transitioned from the Quick Questions right to the Work, which is a good move in the event one objects to one’s desires. But I think perhaps you’ve missed something (two somethings, actually) about how the Work works.
So, when you got to: “what happens, when you believe that thought?”, you took the response you got as an objection from a part (mixing IFS in), rather than simply taking the response at face value. In other words, “What happens when I believe this thought? I feel like the reins are pulling me to my death”. You actually got the answer to your question! When you believe the thought that it’s impossible to do anything meaningful because you’ll get pulled, the consequence is just that: feeling like you’re being pulled to death.
The next question, “who would I be without that thought?” would then be helpful in targeting the specific belief, because objections to letting go of the belief directly imply the state of the world (or yourself) that your beliefs predict would result from you not believing it.
This might’ve avoided a lot of the going in circles you did from this point on in the transcript, and led you directly to the target schema with less… well, thrashing between ideas, for lack of a better word.
The reason I’ve moved towards using the Work as a prime investigative tool is that it lets you walk the belief network really fast compared to other methods. Getting your brain to object to getting rid of a belief forces it to reveal what the next belief up the branch is with far less wasted movement.
And as you can see, starting from a place where you already have a concrete objection (e.g. using a tool like the Quick Questions), you can move really rapidly to the real “meat” of an issue.
That being said, the Quick Questions are designed to solve logistical problems, more than emotional ones—aside from the emotional issue of focusing on the problems instead of on solutions. A Minute To Unlimit You is just a mental jujitsu move to disengage your brain’s planning system from “There’s a Problem” mode and put it back into “Seeking Solutions” mode.
Of course, that’s only one module of your brain’s motivation system, as the ebook mentions. There are four other modules (like the two that handle punishment and virtue-signalling) that can be involved in a motivation problem, but it’s usually easiest to begin with the Quick Questions to rule out a mode 1 mismatch first, even if the problems being predicted turn out to be coming from one of the other modules.
Follow-up: I continued working on this issue using the approach that you outlined here. Eventually I figured out that the sense of urgency wasn’t so much “I won’t have the time to get enough work done” but rather “I won’t have the time to get enough work done and then relax properly after that”. (There might have been some other schemas which were using the sense of urgency too, which got reconsolidated during the process.) After figuring that out, I haven’t had a major issue with it.
Since that was an issue that IFS etc. had failed to make a dent on for years, I then started throwing The Work/Coherence Therapy/my-model-of-your-model-as-interpreted-through-your-public-writing on a lot of other things too, and have made varying amounts of progress on at least twelve of them. Agree with you more on the weaknesses of IFS now.
Thank you! This was useful advice (and you were right, I hadn’t really understood those aspects of the Work).
That sense of urgency and anxiety that came up around the end had continued to re-trigger itself, so I tried the approach in your comment after reading it. Roughly, the belief seemed to be something like “without this anxiety, I will get stuck doing useless things”—which felt kinda true, but I was not super-convinced that the feeling was particularly helpful concerning that problem… still, I had no clear counterevidence, and lacking it I would have gone down an IFS route previously.
But then I went through the steps until I got to “who would I be if I didn’t believe that this feeling is necessary for me to stop doing useless things and for actually getting work done in time?”
… huh. A moment of confusion; felt like a novel possibility. Then felt like it would be a big relief… mostly. I think there was some reconsolidation. But also some unease, some objection I didn’t quite uncover.
While I didn’t manage to get a firm grip of the next objection, the shift was enough to make the anxiety temporarily subside—which by itself was more than I’d managed to do with all the Focusing and IFS that I’d been throwing at it for the last couple of years.
And for the last two days, the anxiety has felt different. Now it has actually been good at pushing me to work, rather than stopping me from getting anything done. Got quite a bit done, and also didn’t worry about what the optimal thing was.
I think it would still be better not to need anxiety as a driver in the first place, so I still want to dig into that soon, but these two days were already a big improvement over Monday. So thank you!
Hey Kaj. I was actually looking for feedback in email, but this is good too. :) (I’ll update the article to clarify on that point.) Thanks for the info about your friend’s experience: the answer to their question is that the act of visualizing requires them to access implicit information from their memory from direct (if remembered) experience, vs. simply verbalizing cached facts. It is structurally similar to scanning one’s memory for past experiences, looking for something that matches a pattern of feeling or behavior. I’m only using the term “felt sense” because there’s no sense (no pun intended) in creating yet another name for something that is already described in other places. (Also, some people actually do access the turn information kinesthetically, i.e., by feeling their way through the recalled day.)
As to your transcript, I see you transitioned from the Quick Questions right to the Work, which is a good move in the event one objects to one’s desires. But I think perhaps you’ve missed something (two somethings, actually) about how the Work works.
So, when you got to: “what happens, when you believe that thought?”, you took the response you got as an objection from a part (mixing IFS in), rather than simply taking the response at face value. In other words, “What happens when I believe this thought? I feel like the reins are pulling me to my death”. You actually got the answer to your question! When you believe the thought that it’s impossible to do anything meaningful because you’ll get pulled, the consequence is just that: feeling like you’re being pulled to death.
The next question, “who would I be without that thought?” would then be helpful in targeting the specific belief, because objections to letting go of the belief directly imply the state of the world (or yourself) that your beliefs predict would result from you not believing it.
This might’ve avoided a lot of the going in circles you did from this point on in the transcript, and led you directly to the target schema with less… well, thrashing between ideas, for lack of a better word.
The reason I’ve moved towards using the Work as a prime investigative tool is that it lets you walk the belief network really fast compared to other methods. Getting your brain to object to getting rid of a belief forces it to reveal what the next belief up the branch is with far less wasted movement.
And as you can see, starting from a place where you already have a concrete objection (e.g. using a tool like the Quick Questions), you can move really rapidly to the real “meat” of an issue.
That being said, the Quick Questions are designed to solve logistical problems, more than emotional ones—aside from the emotional issue of focusing on the problems instead of on solutions. A Minute To Unlimit You is just a mental jujitsu move to disengage your brain’s planning system from “There’s a Problem” mode and put it back into “Seeking Solutions” mode.
Of course, that’s only one module of your brain’s motivation system, as the ebook mentions. There are four other modules (like the two that handle punishment and virtue-signalling) that can be involved in a motivation problem, but it’s usually easiest to begin with the Quick Questions to rule out a mode 1 mismatch first, even if the problems being predicted turn out to be coming from one of the other modules.
Follow-up: I continued working on this issue using the approach that you outlined here. Eventually I figured out that the sense of urgency wasn’t so much “I won’t have the time to get enough work done” but rather “I won’t have the time to get enough work done and then relax properly after that”. (There might have been some other schemas which were using the sense of urgency too, which got reconsolidated during the process.) After figuring that out, I haven’t had a major issue with it.
Since that was an issue that IFS etc. had failed to make a dent on for years, I then started throwing The Work/Coherence Therapy/my-model-of-your-model-as-interpreted-through-your-public-writing on a lot of other things too, and have made varying amounts of progress on at least twelve of them. Agree with you more on the weaknesses of IFS now.
Thank you! This was useful advice (and you were right, I hadn’t really understood those aspects of the Work).
That sense of urgency and anxiety that came up around the end had continued to re-trigger itself, so I tried the approach in your comment after reading it. Roughly, the belief seemed to be something like “without this anxiety, I will get stuck doing useless things”—which felt kinda true, but I was not super-convinced that the feeling was particularly helpful concerning that problem… still, I had no clear counterevidence, and lacking it I would have gone down an IFS route previously.
But then I went through the steps until I got to “who would I be if I didn’t believe that this feeling is necessary for me to stop doing useless things and for actually getting work done in time?”
… huh. A moment of confusion; felt like a novel possibility. Then felt like it would be a big relief… mostly. I think there was some reconsolidation. But also some unease, some objection I didn’t quite uncover.
While I didn’t manage to get a firm grip of the next objection, the shift was enough to make the anxiety temporarily subside—which by itself was more than I’d managed to do with all the Focusing and IFS that I’d been throwing at it for the last couple of years.
And for the last two days, the anxiety has felt different. Now it has actually been good at pushing me to work, rather than stopping me from getting anything done. Got quite a bit done, and also didn’t worry about what the optimal thing was.
I think it would still be better not to need anxiety as a driver in the first place, so I still want to dig into that soon, but these two days were already a big improvement over Monday. So thank you!