Yesterday there was a meetup in Vancouver, Canada. It was a general meetup, without a specific theme, or topic. However, as a CFAR alumnus, I want to start seminar sharing CFAR workshop modules with my fellow meetup attendees. I wasn’t starting this week. However, I was IMing with one of my friends from the meetup, prior to yesterday’s meetup, and they told me that they weren’t sure whether or not they wanted to o through the effort of creating Anki decks to help memorize material for their economics class. I identified this as a case where aversion factoring might be helpful.
Aversion factoring is a cognitive technique generated from the CFAR, inspired by psychological research into the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy for those with anxiety issues, which can be used in attempts to identify the different aspects, i.e., ‘factors’, of an aversion to an action. From there, one can pinpoint what thoughts, or feelings, are the greatest barrier to carrying out a task one is averse to, assess whether it’s worthwhile to re-calibrate that thought, or feeling. Afterwards, one can choose to re-calibrate the aversion, i.e., anxious cognition about something one is avoiding, using minor exposure therapy, or comfort zone expansion.
Anyway, even though yesterday’s meetup wasn’t formally about teaching a CFAR module, I figured it would be good practice, especially since one of my friends seemed in need regardless. So, I cracked open my CFAR workshop manual, which I hadn’t opened in several months, to somewhere in the middle, and got started. This led to mixed results.
First of all, I didn’t teach the technique as per my manual’s instructions, so that didn’t help. I wasn’t prepared, or practiced, at all beforehand, either. I instructed three people.
One person chose their aversion to talking to strangers. This person has issues with anxiety, like myself, so I could relate, but I didn’t know how to solve the problem. They didn’t believe that aversion factoring would help themself more than pep talks they already gives to themself and other means they use to reduce his anxiety, would. Another person also decided to observe their desire to talk to strangers more frequently, so that they might practice sales and social skills, but realized that they did this less frequently than they would like, not due to an aversion, per se, but rather a lack of will.
A third person felt that aversion factoring helped them quite a bit in identifying the source of their aversion, not feeling like making Anki decks. This friend of mine identified that they didn’t want to create Anki decks for a few reasons. They:
-were worried about wasting their time, trading off time for creating Anki decks which could be used for other work and hobbies.
-were worried about wasting their effort on transcribing the wrong material onto Anki decks.
-didn’t want to carry their laptop around everywhere, as might be necessary for the studying of Anki decks on the go.
-worried Anki decks might make them look weird, because no other students were using them.
etc.
We generated solutions to some of these. For others we weren’t sure about, like how much time, compared to other things, might actually be spent on creating Anki decks, we generated a hypothesis. My friend could try making Anki decks for a couple of Pomodoros, or hours, and see if they were satisfied with their progress. If not, they could conclude their aversion wasn’t totally off balance, and Anki decks indeed not being worth the trouble.
I believe this last person, who found aversion factoring useful, is above average when it comes to introspecting his own feelings, and putting them into words. So, he might have benefited from aversion factoring more than the average person would. However, this is also the friend who I hyped aversion factoring up to as very awesome, and useful, so this could have biased him, and/or me, subjectively valuing the method more than the other two participants who didn’t find it as useful that day.
I learned some things. First of all, I realized that the different pieces taught at the CFAR workshops are weird. They’re not all the same technique, but they aren’t wholly independent either. Since aversion factoring was taught in the middle of the CFAR workshop I attended, the manual was created in such a way that teaching aversion factoring was loaded with jargon and techniques we had learned earlier in the workshop. I realized I could not just teach all this extra stuff to my friends in the moment. So, the sequence in which I choose to instruct others in these methods in the future could be important.
Second of all, I realized how important it is for me to practice this material for myself, and to have better examples. I had examples from the CFAR manual, but when reading them to others, I found I wasn’t expressing myself as well as my CFAR instructor had. I hadn’t practiced aversion factoring since the workshop, so when I tried to draw upon my own experience, and familiarity, with the technique, to help others when they were confused, I was at a loss of words. All I could recall from my time at the workshop was the awesome feeling of realizing I was increasing my agency by making my own feelings and emotions less confused. However, I can’t beam a smile at someone to express to them what a given mind-hack is supposed to feel like from the inside, when they’re confused.
Finally, I realized another worthy reason to practice, or trial, these methods again (with my fellow CFAR workshop alumni), is that I’ll get a better sense of practicing the process, rather than just talking it at people. In this manner, perhaps I could notice, or anticipate, misconceptions, and better help my peers.
Yesterday there was a meetup in Vancouver, Canada. It was a general meetup, without a specific theme, or topic. However, as a CFAR alumnus, I want to start seminar sharing CFAR workshop modules with my fellow meetup attendees. I wasn’t starting this week. However, I was IMing with one of my friends from the meetup, prior to yesterday’s meetup, and they told me that they weren’t sure whether or not they wanted to o through the effort of creating Anki decks to help memorize material for their economics class. I identified this as a case where aversion factoring might be helpful.
Aversion factoring is a cognitive technique generated from the CFAR, inspired by psychological research into the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy for those with anxiety issues, which can be used in attempts to identify the different aspects, i.e., ‘factors’, of an aversion to an action. From there, one can pinpoint what thoughts, or feelings, are the greatest barrier to carrying out a task one is averse to, assess whether it’s worthwhile to re-calibrate that thought, or feeling. Afterwards, one can choose to re-calibrate the aversion, i.e., anxious cognition about something one is avoiding, using minor exposure therapy, or comfort zone expansion.
Anyway, even though yesterday’s meetup wasn’t formally about teaching a CFAR module, I figured it would be good practice, especially since one of my friends seemed in need regardless. So, I cracked open my CFAR workshop manual, which I hadn’t opened in several months, to somewhere in the middle, and got started. This led to mixed results.
First of all, I didn’t teach the technique as per my manual’s instructions, so that didn’t help. I wasn’t prepared, or practiced, at all beforehand, either. I instructed three people.
One person chose their aversion to talking to strangers. This person has issues with anxiety, like myself, so I could relate, but I didn’t know how to solve the problem. They didn’t believe that aversion factoring would help themself more than pep talks they already gives to themself and other means they use to reduce his anxiety, would. Another person also decided to observe their desire to talk to strangers more frequently, so that they might practice sales and social skills, but realized that they did this less frequently than they would like, not due to an aversion, per se, but rather a lack of will.
A third person felt that aversion factoring helped them quite a bit in identifying the source of their aversion, not feeling like making Anki decks. This friend of mine identified that they didn’t want to create Anki decks for a few reasons. They: -were worried about wasting their time, trading off time for creating Anki decks which could be used for other work and hobbies. -were worried about wasting their effort on transcribing the wrong material onto Anki decks. -didn’t want to carry their laptop around everywhere, as might be necessary for the studying of Anki decks on the go. -worried Anki decks might make them look weird, because no other students were using them. etc.
We generated solutions to some of these. For others we weren’t sure about, like how much time, compared to other things, might actually be spent on creating Anki decks, we generated a hypothesis. My friend could try making Anki decks for a couple of Pomodoros, or hours, and see if they were satisfied with their progress. If not, they could conclude their aversion wasn’t totally off balance, and Anki decks indeed not being worth the trouble.
I believe this last person, who found aversion factoring useful, is above average when it comes to introspecting his own feelings, and putting them into words. So, he might have benefited from aversion factoring more than the average person would. However, this is also the friend who I hyped aversion factoring up to as very awesome, and useful, so this could have biased him, and/or me, subjectively valuing the method more than the other two participants who didn’t find it as useful that day.
I learned some things. First of all, I realized that the different pieces taught at the CFAR workshops are weird. They’re not all the same technique, but they aren’t wholly independent either. Since aversion factoring was taught in the middle of the CFAR workshop I attended, the manual was created in such a way that teaching aversion factoring was loaded with jargon and techniques we had learned earlier in the workshop. I realized I could not just teach all this extra stuff to my friends in the moment. So, the sequence in which I choose to instruct others in these methods in the future could be important.
Second of all, I realized how important it is for me to practice this material for myself, and to have better examples. I had examples from the CFAR manual, but when reading them to others, I found I wasn’t expressing myself as well as my CFAR instructor had. I hadn’t practiced aversion factoring since the workshop, so when I tried to draw upon my own experience, and familiarity, with the technique, to help others when they were confused, I was at a loss of words. All I could recall from my time at the workshop was the awesome feeling of realizing I was increasing my agency by making my own feelings and emotions less confused. However, I can’t beam a smile at someone to express to them what a given mind-hack is supposed to feel like from the inside, when they’re confused.
Finally, I realized another worthy reason to practice, or trial, these methods again (with my fellow CFAR workshop alumni), is that I’ll get a better sense of practicing the process, rather than just talking it at people. In this manner, perhaps I could notice, or anticipate, misconceptions, and better help my peers.