Comment on Your inner Google

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 21:24:25 GMT

My friend kept repeating roughly the same arguments to me about why he couldn't feel better about his situation. I rather suspect I've done something similar in regards to some of my problems.

The nature of self-defeating behavior is to be self-sustaining. Or to put it another way, our problems usually live one meta-level above the place we insist they are. (Or perhaps one assumption-level below?)

IOW, the arguments we repeat about why we can't do something are correct, if viewed from within the assumptions we're making. The trick is that at least one of those assumptions must therefore be wrong, and you have to find out which ones. The original NLP metamodel is one such tool for identifying such assumptions, or at least pointing to where an assumption must exist in order for the argument to appear to make sense.

when I try asking myself about my motivations, they form cycles rather than (as the book) a straight line to the basic motivations.

There are at least a couple ways you could end up cycling, that I can think of. One is that you're not actually connecting with your near-mode brain about the subject, and are thus ending up in abstractions. Another is that you're not placing enough well-formedness constraint on your questions. At each level, you have to imagine that you already have ALL the things you wanted before.... which would make it kind of difficult to cycle back to wanting a previous thing.

In other words, the most likely cause (assuming you're not just verbalizing in circles and not connecting with actual near-mode feelings and images and such), is that you're not fully imagining having the things that you want, and experiencing what it would be like to already have them.

This is a stumbling block for a lot of techniques, not just Core Transformation. The key to overcoming it is to notice whether you have something preventing you from imagining "what it would be like", like that you think it's unrealistic, bad, or whatever. Noticing and handling these objections are the real meat of almost ANY mindhacking process, because they're the "second meta-level" issues I alluded to above, that are otherwise so very hard to notice or identify.

If you don't address these objections, but instead just plow through the technique (whether it's CT or anything else), you'll get inconsistent results, problems that seem to go away and then come back, etc.

(NLP sometimes refers to these things as "ecology", but relatively little time is spent on the subject in entry-level training. It's something that you need lots of examples of in order to really "get", because the principles by themselves are like saying you can ride a bike by "pumping the pedals and maintaining your balance". Knowing it and doing it just aren't the same.)

I tried going to a practitioner, and I'm now a lot more cynical about certifications.

Sadly, NLP practitioner certification at best means that you learned some REALLY basic stuff and were able to do it when supervised, and while doing it with people who are receiving the same training at the same time.

That is, NLP certification drills are done by trainee groups, who thus already know what's expected of them, which means nobody gets much experience of what it would be like to walk somebody through a technique who didn't receive the same training!

Your idea that the basis of the problem that Core Transformation is people not letting themselves feel what they're actually feeling makes sense.

Not actually what I said: it's about not allowing ourselves to feel good unless certain conditions are met. Or more precisely, our brain's rules about feelings are not reflexive: if you have a rule that says "feel bad when things don't go well", this does NOT imply that you will feel good when things do go well!

And, you will actually be better off having rules that tell you to feel good even when things don't go well, because bad feelings are not very useful when it comes to motivating constructive action. They're much better at telling us to avoid things than getting us to accomplish things.

(By the way, another common cause of self-defeating behavior being self-sustaining is that we tend to filter incoming concepts to match our existing frameworks. So, where my phrasing was ambiguous ("allow ourselves to feel certain things"), your brain may have pattern-matched that to "feel what we're feeling", even though that's almost the opposite of what I intended to say. The "certain things" I was referring to were feelings like the Andreas's notion of "core states": things that most of us aren't already feeling.)

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