I learned belief reporting from a person who attended a Leverage workshop and haven’t had any direct face-to-face exposure to Leverage.
Belief reporting is a debugging technique. You have a personal issue you want to address. Then you look at related beliefs.
Leverage found that if someone sets an intention of “I will tell the truth” and then speaks out of a belief like “I’m a capable person” and they don’t believe that (at a deep level), they will have a physical sensation of resistance.
Afterwards, there’s an attempt to trace the belief to it’s roots. The person can then speak out various forms of “I’m not a capable person because X” and “I’m not a capable person because Y”. Then recursively the process gets applied to seek for the root. Often that allows uncovering that there’s some confusion at the base of the belief and then after having uncovered the confusion it’s possible to work the tree up again to get rid of the “I’m not a capable person” belief and switch it into “I’m a capable person”.
This often leads to discovering that one holds beliefs at a deep level that one’s system II considers silly but that still are the base of other beliefs and that affect our actions.
In my opinion, this sounds interesting as a confidential voluntary therapy, but Orwellian when:
Members who were on payroll were expected to undergo charting/debugging sessions with a supervisory “trainer”, and to “train” other members. The role of trainer is something like “manager + therapist”: that is, both “is evaluating your job performance” and “is doing therapy on you”.
So, your supervisor is debugging your beliefs, possibly related to your job performance, and you are supposed to not only tell the truth, but also “seek for the root”… and yet, in your opinion, this does not imply “having to confess violation of the rules or committed sins”?
What exactly happens when you start having doubts about the organization or the leader, and as a result your job performance drops, and then you are having the session with your manager? Would you admit, truthfully, “you know, recently I started having some doubts about whether we are really doing our best to improve the world, or just using the effective altruist community as a finshing pond for people who are idealistic and willing to sacrifice… and I guess these thoughts distract me from my tasks”, and then your therapist/manager is going to say… what?
Nothing written above suggests that doubt about central strategy would have been seen as sin, especially when it isn’t necessarily system II endorsed. It’s my understanding that talking about the theories of change through which Leverage is going to have an effect on the world was one of the main activities Leverage engaged in.
Besides the word sin is generally about taking actions that are in violation of norms of an organization. In the Scientology context it’s for example a sin to watch a documentary about Scientology on normal TV. In Christianity masturbation would be a sin.
Leverage doesn’t have a similar behavior codex that declares certain actions as sins that have to be confessed.
Role conflicts between being a manager and a therapist can easily produce problems but analysing them through a frame as it being about “confessing sins” is not an useful lense to think coherently about the involved problems.
What’s the content of belief reporting?
I learned belief reporting from a person who attended a Leverage workshop and haven’t had any direct face-to-face exposure to Leverage.
Belief reporting is a debugging technique. You have a personal issue you want to address. Then you look at related beliefs.
Leverage found that if someone sets an intention of “I will tell the truth” and then speaks out of a belief like “I’m a capable person” and they don’t believe that (at a deep level), they will have a physical sensation of resistance.
Afterwards, there’s an attempt to trace the belief to it’s roots. The person can then speak out various forms of “I’m not a capable person because X” and “I’m not a capable person because Y”. Then recursively the process gets applied to seek for the root. Often that allows uncovering that there’s some confusion at the base of the belief and then after having uncovered the confusion it’s possible to work the tree up again to get rid of the “I’m not a capable person” belief and switch it into “I’m a capable person”.
This often leads to discovering that one holds beliefs at a deep level that one’s system II considers silly but that still are the base of other beliefs and that affect our actions.
Thanks for the description!
In my opinion, this sounds interesting as a confidential voluntary therapy, but Orwellian when:
So, your supervisor is debugging your beliefs, possibly related to your job performance, and you are supposed to not only tell the truth, but also “seek for the root”… and yet, in your opinion, this does not imply “having to confess violation of the rules or committed sins”?
What exactly happens when you start having doubts about the organization or the leader, and as a result your job performance drops, and then you are having the session with your manager? Would you admit, truthfully, “you know, recently I started having some doubts about whether we are really doing our best to improve the world, or just using the effective altruist community as a finshing pond for people who are idealistic and willing to sacrifice… and I guess these thoughts distract me from my tasks”, and then your therapist/manager is going to say… what?
Nothing written above suggests that doubt about central strategy would have been seen as sin, especially when it isn’t necessarily system II endorsed. It’s my understanding that talking about the theories of change through which Leverage is going to have an effect on the world was one of the main activities Leverage engaged in.
Besides the word sin is generally about taking actions that are in violation of norms of an organization. In the Scientology context it’s for example a sin to watch a documentary about Scientology on normal TV. In Christianity masturbation would be a sin.
Leverage doesn’t have a similar behavior codex that declares certain actions as sins that have to be confessed.
Role conflicts between being a manager and a therapist can easily produce problems but analysing them through a frame as it being about “confessing sins” is not an useful lense to think coherently about the involved problems.
Interesting, thanks!