It does not take luck to find someone who can help you stare into the abyss. Anyone can do it.
It’s pretty simple: Get a life coach.
That is, helping people identify, face, and reason through difficult decisions is a core part of what life coaches do. And about all the questions that Ben cobbled together at the end (maybe not “best argument for” — I don’t like that one) can be found in a single place: coaching training. All are commonly used by coaches in routine work.
And there are a lot more tools than the handful than the ones Ben found. These questions are examples of a handful of techniques: eliciting alternatives, countering short-term emotion and status-quo bias, checking congruence with dentity. (Many of these have catchy names like “visioning” or less-catchy names like “identity coaching,” but I can’t find my coach manual right now which has them listed.)
* Noticing flinching or discongruent emotions (“I heard your voice slow when you mentioned your partner, and I’m wondering if there’s something behind it”)
* Finding unaddressed issues (“Tell me about your last hour. What caused you stress?”)
* Helping you elicit and rank your values, and then check the congruence of each choice with your values * Helping you access your intuition (“Close your eyes and breathe. Now, one day you wake up and everything’s changed / put yourself into the shoes of yourself in 10 years and tell me the first thing you see ”)
* Many techniques to address negative emotions around such a decision (“If you abandon this path, what does it mean about you? Now suppose a friend did it; what would you think about them?”)
* Many techniques to actually make the decision (“If you made this change, what could go wrong? Now, let’s take the first thing you said. Tell me 3 ways you could get more information about how likely that is to happen?”)
This also implies that, if you want to be able to do it to yourself, you can pick up a coaching book (“Co-Active Coaching” is my favorite, but I’ve also heard recommended “The Coaching Habit”) and try it, although I think it takes a lot of practice doing it on others before you can reliably turn it inward, as it is quite difficult to simultaneously focus on the concrete problem (what the coachee does) and on evaluating and guiding the thinking and feeling (what the coach does).
There have been a number of posts like this about questions to help guide rationalists through tough decisions or emotions. I think the rationality community has a lot to learn from coaching, which in some ways is all about helping people elevate their rationality to solve problems in their own life. I gave a talk on it in 2016; maybe I should write something on it.
Context: I completed coach training in 2017. The vast majority of my work is no longer in “pure” life coaching, but the skills influence me in daily life.
It does not take luck to find someone who can help you stare into the abyss. Anyone can do it.
It’s pretty simple: Get a life coach.
That is, helping people identify, face, and reason through difficult decisions is a core part of what life coaches do. And about all the questions that Ben cobbled together at the end (maybe not “best argument for” — I don’t like that one) can be found in a single place: coaching training. All are commonly used by coaches in routine work.
And there are a lot more tools than the handful than the ones Ben found. These questions are examples of a handful of techniques: eliciting alternatives, countering short-term emotion and status-quo bias, checking congruence with dentity. (Many of these have catchy names like “visioning” or less-catchy names like “identity coaching,” but I can’t find my coach manual right now which has them listed.)
* Noticing flinching or discongruent emotions (“I heard your voice slow when you mentioned your partner, and I’m wondering if there’s something behind it”)
* Finding unaddressed issues (“Tell me about your last hour. What caused you stress?”)
* Helping you elicit and rank your values, and then check the congruence of each choice with your values
* Helping you access your intuition (“Close your eyes and breathe. Now, one day you wake up and everything’s changed / put yourself into the shoes of yourself in 10 years and tell me the first thing you see ”)
* Many techniques to address negative emotions around such a decision (“If you abandon this path, what does it mean about you? Now suppose a friend did it; what would you think about them?”)
* Many techniques to actually make the decision (“If you made this change, what could go wrong? Now, let’s take the first thing you said. Tell me 3 ways you could get more information about how likely that is to happen?”)
This also implies that, if you want to be able to do it to yourself, you can pick up a coaching book (“Co-Active Coaching” is my favorite, but I’ve also heard recommended “The Coaching Habit”) and try it, although I think it takes a lot of practice doing it on others before you can reliably turn it inward, as it is quite difficult to simultaneously focus on the concrete problem (what the coachee does) and on evaluating and guiding the thinking and feeling (what the coach does).
There have been a number of posts like this about questions to help guide rationalists through tough decisions or emotions. I think the rationality community has a lot to learn from coaching, which in some ways is all about helping people elevate their rationality to solve problems in their own life. I gave a talk on it in 2016; maybe I should write something on it.
Context: I completed coach training in 2017. The vast majority of my work is no longer in “pure” life coaching, but the skills influence me in daily life.