So if you have a problem like that, I’d appreciate your feedback on the content. (Are the instructions clear? Were you able to apply the technique? What happened afterwards?) Thanks!
The instructions were clear to me; I thought the explanation of the felt sense was one of the best that I’ve seen. Though a friend of mine who I also showed the explanation to had this question: “Is counting the left turns just an example of a task which requires stopping and thinking, or an actual example of the felt sense? To me it’s a visual memory exercise during which I can just count the turns ‘aloud’, without any particular felt.”
I have a talk that I need to prepare, and I found myself having difficulties starting on it. In particular, there are several different things that I could be doing which the presentation might benefit from, but I’m having difficulty choosing which one to focus on. So I figured that this would be a good opportunity to try out your ebook.
I read your first question (before I read any of the text explaining the first question), answered it, and got a result that seemed promising. Then I felt like I should read the explanations for the two questions, so I read those, at which point I had lost the felt sense of the original answer. Fortunately I had written my answer down, so I could read it, recapture the felt sense, and proceed with the second question. (I skipped the troubleshooting section, figuring it would mostly be the kind of stuff I already knew.) I wrote down a “stack trace” starting from there (I usually don’t do mindhacking while writing down my progress, but maybe I should do more of it; it seemed beneficial by itself).
---
“What bad thing am I thinking about, or expecting will happen?”
I expect that I will start doing the wrong thing. There are lots of things I could be potentially pursuing or working but only a limited amount of time, so I might pick one that feels fun and easy to work on, but isn’t necessarily the most productive. But I also don’t want to pick the tedious-feeling one.
Also I’m afraid that even when I do pick one thing, I will remain uncertain of whether it was the best approach, so I can’t properly concentrate on it and will just keep switching tasks. That makes me want to focus on whatever feels the easiest. But again the easiest one isn’t necessarily the best, so I again feel worried about making the choice for the wrong reasons.
”What do I want instead?”
To be able to pick the right thing, and work on it with confidence until I have what I need.
An objection comes up: it’s impossible to know the right thing for certain (and thus to always pick the right thing).
Another objection: the “work on it with confidence until I have what I need” produces a mental image which is associated with drudgery; working on something that I don’t really care about because I’m so focused on it.
Let me try to apply the questions recursively to the objections. the second objection feels more serious (and is an old friend), so let’s start with that.
Objection: mental image of drudgery.
”What bad thing am I thinking about, or expecting will happen?”
I’m getting fear, a sense of mild panic. a feeling of being trapped. suffocating. not getting to do anything meaningful, while being forced to do things that I hate and which are draining life out of me. a literal sense of life going to waste, precious minutes that I could be spending on anything becoming forever lost. memories are coming up of various times which felt like that. a sense of urgency.
this feels like it needs a different approach than just the questions; I’ve already tried IFS on this before, but never really gotten anywhere. let met try The Work on this. for that I think I need to boil down my reactions to a more concise form. hmm.
[at this point I basically drifted away from just doing the two questions, so this transcript basically stops being feedback for the book at this point, but included here for the sake of completeness since I wrote it down anyway]
”Each second that I spend doing something I don’t want, is forever wasted.” does that fit to what I was getting before?
Kinda. But there’s something off about it; “doing something I don’t want” isn’t quite the right thing. Let’s try again...
It feels like there’s… an expectation that I myself will always make choices which cause me to do things that feel meaningless. It feels dangerous for me to commit to a course of action, because I will always commit to an action which is soul-draining. Huh.
Is that true? If I commit to something which is meaningful… then I will never stay on track. I will be… pulled away from it somehow. Memories of times when that has been the case. There’s a sense of… an almost physical sense of getting pulled to the side, whenever I try to do something which is genuinely meaningful.
can I verbalize that prediction? “It’s impossible for me to do anything meaningful. Each time that I try, I will be pulled to the side, away from the meaningful thing.”
Is that true?
It feels like it has always been true in the past. Is it necessarily true in the future? Logic says it could change, but my mind seems to predict that it will continue happening.
Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
No, I don’t think I can. Or I guess that if I lived my whole life, and reflected on the question on my deathbed, then I could know that it was true, if the pattern had continued up until then. But even then I would probably have logical doubts. And it seems kinda silly to expect that it would always happen. The more I think of it, the less likely it seems.
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
There’s that bodily sensation of being pulled again. A sense of struggling to go one way, and it being a constant fight. A resignation that things can’t be easy, that I can’t ever rest, a wish to just be free of all the things that keep pulling me aside. A sense of tension. Feels like there’s a set of reins around my shoulder, pulling me backwards, and I want to just yank at them enough that whoever-is-holding-them drops them and I’m free. I get a sense of a shape, of some ominous figure who is holding them. Looks like a cartoonish anthropomorphic Death.
… I feel like the reins are pulling me to my death. That’s what they are. Stealing minutes, hours of my life. I only have a limited time here, and it’s not enough that most of the universe’s lifetime will be spent with me non-existing; I’m not even allowed to properly exist here.
Should I move on to the next question? I have a sense that I haven’t quite understood this yet. But I also have a sense of urgency that I should be making progress, that I’ve spent quite a while brainhacking and that’s not producing any results yet, I should actually start working eventually.
I did an IFS move and asked the sense of urgency to move aside for a moment. It wants a guarantee that I will actually start working after this, and that the whole day won’t go waste from a work perspective. A reasonable worry. After this I will go on a walk, actually decide what I will work on, and then work on it. Can I stick to that? It’s not convinced that I can, and neither am I.
Wait, is this sense of urgency exactly the same issue I was just working on? Let me see.
It feels like it’s… something which is trying to help me stay on track? That doesn’t feel quite right. But it has a similar sense of almost physical pull.
It’s feeling very strong now. Sense of anxiety that’s making hard to focus on the actual beliefs and predictions in it. I get—as I’ve gotten many times—a sense of myself as a teenager, doing something on my computer when I was supposed to be doing something else. A school assignment?
Or maybe just something that I genuinely wanted to do… but getting stuck on instant messenger despite no external pressure, failing to do something that I had been looking forward to.
Huh. I had been previously been assuming that this pressure is something that tries to motivate me to do something else. But there’s an expectation that… the pressure will keep me in place, preventing me from doing anything?
Because it feels like, I have the pressure in that memory as well… building up, becoming stronger, keeping me more in place.
A particular memory. Complaining online that I wasn’t able to do the things I wanted during my vacation. Someone misunderstanding and trying to assure me by saying that it was vacation, I was free to do whatever I wanted. I had the desire to say that “but these were things that I wanted to do, and I didn’t get around doing them”, but never did.
I get a sense of this feeling significant. That I never did say that. Let me imagine saying that. What did I want to have happened in response?
The other person realizing their mistake. Asking me why that happened. Helping me figure it out, suggest solutions. Maybe know something about executive function issues, help me figure it out back when I was still a teenager.
Help me live a life where I wouldn’t have been as ashamed of my executive dysfunction issues as I was, and would have understood it to be normal...
Was this sense of pressure… actually a desire to get help? To be noticed? To be understood?
Let me go back to the visualization… yeah, I wanted understanding for my inability to accomplish what I wanted. And an earlier memory comes up, of when something similar happened and it *was* about a school assignment… and I felt ashamed. Or at least embarrassed.
Trying to give my younger selves compassion… it works to some extent. but that sense of urgency comes up again, making me want to rush this. I thought the sense of urgency was what I was working on right now? feels like there’s something about this that I’m still missing...
I go back to that teenage me in a chair again. I get an image of… NaNoWriMo? Specifically the year when I was working on my Verani story… of how I had charted out how the story should go but it just felt so dry to try to write it using that method, and I didn’t get anything good written.
It feeling dry, but me still needing to come up with words… only having a limited amount of time to do so. Feeling that the sense of creativity and enjoyment is actively blocked by the sense of urgency… that this just feels like sandpaper.
I wanted to enjoy writing fiction. But I couldn’t. I could never focus on it. And when I tried to use NaNoWriMo as a way to pressure myself into writing, that felt bad too… like a sense of drudgery.
Getting confused about where this is going or what I should do next, but… I guess this feels connected to that earlier fear, that if I commit to something, then I will just commit to something that feels meaningless? Like it did with Nano… and like it did with school and studies after I’d burned out. And other times...
What’s the belief here?
Maybe something like… “if I commit to something, then I will constantly keep wanting to do something else.” That’s similar to the “it is dangerous for me to commit to a course of action, because I will always commit to an action which is soul-draining” that I got earlier, but slightly different.
Is that true? Again, it has often been true. Hmm. Considering the answers that I get, it feels like this combines the “I can’t do anything meaningful” and “everything I commit to will be drudgery” answers from before: I can’t do anything that would feel meaningful, because I keep thinking about something else that needs to be done; and I can’t commit to anything boring-but-necessary either, because I keep thinking of more fun things.
So when I’m doing something tedious-but-necessary, I keep thinking of more meaningful things; when I’m doing something meaningful, I keep thinking about something tedious-but-necessary.
… feels like I’m a little off again. hmmh.
But okay, “if I ever commit to something, then I will constantly keep wanting to do something else” feels true. Maybe I’ll take that as a statement which I’ll keep it in my head for an extended UtEB-style integration, see how my mind reacts to that.
[at this point, I’d been at this for about an hour and a half, and was starting to feel tired. the feeling of urgency that I’d triggered felt difficult to just be with, and I was also starting to get a sense that my answers were starting to run around in circles. So I went out on a walk and to get some food; experience suggests that the best way to let the sense of urgency unwind is by not thinking about work for a while, so I haven’t gone back to trying to work on the presentation yet.]
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!
The instructions were clear to me; I thought the explanation of the felt sense was one of the best that I’ve seen. Though a friend of mine who I also showed the explanation to had this question: “Is counting the left turns just an example of a task which requires stopping and thinking, or an actual example of the felt sense? To me it’s a visual memory exercise during which I can just count the turns ‘aloud’, without any particular felt.”
I have a talk that I need to prepare, and I found myself having difficulties starting on it. In particular, there are several different things that I could be doing which the presentation might benefit from, but I’m having difficulty choosing which one to focus on. So I figured that this would be a good opportunity to try out your ebook.
I read your first question (before I read any of the text explaining the first question), answered it, and got a result that seemed promising. Then I felt like I should read the explanations for the two questions, so I read those, at which point I had lost the felt sense of the original answer. Fortunately I had written my answer down, so I could read it, recapture the felt sense, and proceed with the second question. (I skipped the troubleshooting section, figuring it would mostly be the kind of stuff I already knew.) I wrote down a “stack trace” starting from there (I usually don’t do mindhacking while writing down my progress, but maybe I should do more of it; it seemed beneficial by itself).
---
“What bad thing am I thinking about, or expecting will happen?”
I expect that I will start doing the wrong thing. There are lots of things I could be potentially pursuing or working but only a limited amount of time, so I might pick one that feels fun and easy to work on, but isn’t necessarily the most productive. But I also don’t want to pick the tedious-feeling one.
Also I’m afraid that even when I do pick one thing, I will remain uncertain of whether it was the best approach, so I can’t properly concentrate on it and will just keep switching tasks. That makes me want to focus on whatever feels the easiest. But again the easiest one isn’t necessarily the best, so I again feel worried about making the choice for the wrong reasons.
”What do I want instead?”
To be able to pick the right thing, and work on it with confidence until I have what I need.
An objection comes up: it’s impossible to know the right thing for certain (and thus to always pick the right thing).
Another objection: the “work on it with confidence until I have what I need” produces a mental image which is associated with drudgery; working on something that I don’t really care about because I’m so focused on it.
Let me try to apply the questions recursively to the objections. the second objection feels more serious (and is an old friend), so let’s start with that.
Objection: mental image of drudgery.
”What bad thing am I thinking about, or expecting will happen?”
I’m getting fear, a sense of mild panic. a feeling of being trapped. suffocating. not getting to do anything meaningful, while being forced to do things that I hate and which are draining life out of me. a literal sense of life going to waste, precious minutes that I could be spending on anything becoming forever lost. memories are coming up of various times which felt like that. a sense of urgency.
this feels like it needs a different approach than just the questions; I’ve already tried IFS on this before, but never really gotten anywhere. let met try The Work on this. for that I think I need to boil down my reactions to a more concise form. hmm.
[at this point I basically drifted away from just doing the two questions, so this transcript basically stops being feedback for the book at this point, but included here for the sake of completeness since I wrote it down anyway]
”Each second that I spend doing something I don’t want, is forever wasted.” does that fit to what I was getting before?
Kinda. But there’s something off about it; “doing something I don’t want” isn’t quite the right thing. Let’s try again...
It feels like there’s… an expectation that I myself will always make choices which cause me to do things that feel meaningless. It feels dangerous for me to commit to a course of action, because I will always commit to an action which is soul-draining. Huh.
Is that true? If I commit to something which is meaningful… then I will never stay on track. I will be… pulled away from it somehow. Memories of times when that has been the case. There’s a sense of… an almost physical sense of getting pulled to the side, whenever I try to do something which is genuinely meaningful.
can I verbalize that prediction? “It’s impossible for me to do anything meaningful. Each time that I try, I will be pulled to the side, away from the meaningful thing.”
Is that true?
It feels like it has always been true in the past. Is it necessarily true in the future? Logic says it could change, but my mind seems to predict that it will continue happening.
Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
No, I don’t think I can. Or I guess that if I lived my whole life, and reflected on the question on my deathbed, then I could know that it was true, if the pattern had continued up until then. But even then I would probably have logical doubts. And it seems kinda silly to expect that it would always happen. The more I think of it, the less likely it seems.
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
There’s that bodily sensation of being pulled again. A sense of struggling to go one way, and it being a constant fight. A resignation that things can’t be easy, that I can’t ever rest, a wish to just be free of all the things that keep pulling me aside. A sense of tension. Feels like there’s a set of reins around my shoulder, pulling me backwards, and I want to just yank at them enough that whoever-is-holding-them drops them and I’m free. I get a sense of a shape, of some ominous figure who is holding them. Looks like a cartoonish anthropomorphic Death.
… I feel like the reins are pulling me to my death. That’s what they are. Stealing minutes, hours of my life. I only have a limited time here, and it’s not enough that most of the universe’s lifetime will be spent with me non-existing; I’m not even allowed to properly exist here.
Should I move on to the next question? I have a sense that I haven’t quite understood this yet. But I also have a sense of urgency that I should be making progress, that I’ve spent quite a while brainhacking and that’s not producing any results yet, I should actually start working eventually.
I did an IFS move and asked the sense of urgency to move aside for a moment. It wants a guarantee that I will actually start working after this, and that the whole day won’t go waste from a work perspective. A reasonable worry. After this I will go on a walk, actually decide what I will work on, and then work on it. Can I stick to that? It’s not convinced that I can, and neither am I.
Wait, is this sense of urgency exactly the same issue I was just working on? Let me see.
It feels like it’s… something which is trying to help me stay on track? That doesn’t feel quite right. But it has a similar sense of almost physical pull.
It’s feeling very strong now. Sense of anxiety that’s making hard to focus on the actual beliefs and predictions in it. I get—as I’ve gotten many times—a sense of myself as a teenager, doing something on my computer when I was supposed to be doing something else. A school assignment?
Or maybe just something that I genuinely wanted to do… but getting stuck on instant messenger despite no external pressure, failing to do something that I had been looking forward to.
Huh. I had been previously been assuming that this pressure is something that tries to motivate me to do something else. But there’s an expectation that… the pressure will keep me in place, preventing me from doing anything?
Because it feels like, I have the pressure in that memory as well… building up, becoming stronger, keeping me more in place.
A particular memory. Complaining online that I wasn’t able to do the things I wanted during my vacation. Someone misunderstanding and trying to assure me by saying that it was vacation, I was free to do whatever I wanted. I had the desire to say that “but these were things that I wanted to do, and I didn’t get around doing them”, but never did.
I get a sense of this feeling significant. That I never did say that. Let me imagine saying that. What did I want to have happened in response?
The other person realizing their mistake. Asking me why that happened. Helping me figure it out, suggest solutions. Maybe know something about executive function issues, help me figure it out back when I was still a teenager.
Help me live a life where I wouldn’t have been as ashamed of my executive dysfunction issues as I was, and would have understood it to be normal...
Was this sense of pressure… actually a desire to get help? To be noticed? To be understood?
Let me go back to the visualization… yeah, I wanted understanding for my inability to accomplish what I wanted. And an earlier memory comes up, of when something similar happened and it *was* about a school assignment… and I felt ashamed. Or at least embarrassed.
Trying to give my younger selves compassion… it works to some extent. but that sense of urgency comes up again, making me want to rush this. I thought the sense of urgency was what I was working on right now? feels like there’s something about this that I’m still missing...
I go back to that teenage me in a chair again. I get an image of… NaNoWriMo? Specifically the year when I was working on my Verani story… of how I had charted out how the story should go but it just felt so dry to try to write it using that method, and I didn’t get anything good written.
It feeling dry, but me still needing to come up with words… only having a limited amount of time to do so. Feeling that the sense of creativity and enjoyment is actively blocked by the sense of urgency… that this just feels like sandpaper.
I wanted to enjoy writing fiction. But I couldn’t. I could never focus on it. And when I tried to use NaNoWriMo as a way to pressure myself into writing, that felt bad too… like a sense of drudgery.
Getting confused about where this is going or what I should do next, but… I guess this feels connected to that earlier fear, that if I commit to something, then I will just commit to something that feels meaningless? Like it did with Nano… and like it did with school and studies after I’d burned out. And other times...
What’s the belief here?
Maybe something like… “if I commit to something, then I will constantly keep wanting to do something else.” That’s similar to the “it is dangerous for me to commit to a course of action, because I will always commit to an action which is soul-draining” that I got earlier, but slightly different.
Is that true? Again, it has often been true. Hmm. Considering the answers that I get, it feels like this combines the “I can’t do anything meaningful” and “everything I commit to will be drudgery” answers from before: I can’t do anything that would feel meaningful, because I keep thinking about something else that needs to be done; and I can’t commit to anything boring-but-necessary either, because I keep thinking of more fun things.
So when I’m doing something tedious-but-necessary, I keep thinking of more meaningful things; when I’m doing something meaningful, I keep thinking about something tedious-but-necessary.
… feels like I’m a little off again. hmmh.
But okay, “if I ever commit to something, then I will constantly keep wanting to do something else” feels true. Maybe I’ll take that as a statement which I’ll keep it in my head for an extended UtEB-style integration, see how my mind reacts to that.
[at this point, I’d been at this for about an hour and a half, and was starting to feel tired. the feeling of urgency that I’d triggered felt difficult to just be with, and I was also starting to get a sense that my answers were starting to run around in circles. So I went out on a walk and to get some food; experience suggests that the best way to let the sense of urgency unwind is by not thinking about work for a while, so I haven’t gone back to trying to work on the presentation yet.]
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!