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My generalizations aren't, for the most part, in my blog posts, nor in most of my for-pay material, actually. Abstractions don't help most people take action. The only really important "theory" on my blog is The Multiple Self, which was where I first realized that I was being stupid to assume that my conscious mind had ANY direct control over my actions, given how late consciousness appeared from an evolutionary perspective.
Most of the other generalizations my work sits on top of can be found in General Semantics and NLP, anyway... they just don't help much in their raw form.
But here is a useful generalization: if you test autonomous responses, you can create techniques that work. If you're not testing, or not making use of your autonomous, involuntary responses (both mental and physical), you're utterly wasting your time.
More than half of my early blog posts are wastes of time, in precisely that sense. They were written long before I learned how to shut up and test, as it were.
Heck no. I've really only specialized in chronic procrastination and personality sculpting. Fighting akrasia was a label that people here applied to my work. I don't really believe in akrasia, anyway -- a better description would be anosognosia of the will. (That is, we explain our behavior as akrasia or failure of will, because we don't understand that our will isn't singular. And we do it for the same reason we see gods in the forest -- our built-in projections of mind and intention. When applied to self, they produce prediction errors.)
I've discovered very little, actually. Most of what I've done has also been invented by other people (as I've sometimes discovered when somebody says, "hey, your stuff is kind of like author X"). All I've really done is systematize some things so that they're more teachable and repeatable, and try to replace mystical explanations with mechanical ones.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that all I've really done is take a very narrow subset of NLP and CBT that can be self-applied (by most people) with self-testing and don't require physical presence to be taught, and throw in a few heuristics about what to look for and what to apply them to.
For you to test something basic, like a submodalities of motivation exercise from an NLP book, would take you maybe 15 minutes... only slightly longer than it took you to squirt ice water in your ear. ;-)
Now, personally, I'm not sure if such an exercise would work for you. I've never been really good at doing submodality work on myself, though I'm okay at guiding others through it. But you need to understand that having trouble accessing something like your submodalities on your own, doesn't mean they aren't there.
What I'm getting at is that individual idiosyncracies only affect what techniques you'll be able to usefully self-apply; not what techniques will actually work. There are NLP techniques I still can't currently self-apply, and have to have someone else walk me through in order to do them, because I can't think about the technique and do the steps at the same time. That doesn't mean the technique "only works for some people" -- clearly I have the hardware the technique operates on, I just have limited fluency in accessing that particular hardware.
Similarly, there are techniques in my repertoire that some of my clients can't self-apply; I have to walk them through, or they have to use a recording or some sort of external aid. Some of these issues go away with practice, some don't.
The major insights I've had regarding self-help material is not that "some things work for some people and others don't" -- it's that:
Some people can learn a particular technique from a particular book, and others can't,
Some people can do a particular technique on their own, and others can't (although they may be able to learn to), and
Self-help books usually barely whisper some of the critical mental and physical distinctions needed to make a particular technique workable, while most people have too many existing preconceptions shouting in their head, for any of those whispers to be heard.
The #1 most important thing in doing virtually any self-help technique worthy of the name is being able to pay attention to your unconscious, automatic responses, without adding voluntary thought or anosognosiac explanations on top of them. And in my experience, it's the hardest thing to learn to do on your own; and as far as I can tell, nobody (not even me) has made a systematic attempt to teach it. (So far, I just point it out to people when they're doing the wrong kind of thinking.)
But if you can pay attention to your responses, and you are disciplined about testing those responses, you can invent your own techniques. That's what I did, for a while, and then I started going back and re-reading self-help books, using the idea of testing my autonomous responses to validate which ones worked, and the skill of paying attention to autonomous responses in order to apply them in the first place.
And what I've found, for the most part, is that virtually all self-help techniques work for something, if used correctly. It's the "used correctly" that varies immensely from person to person.
Even some techniques that I thought were utterly stupid (e.g. EFT and Sedona) can be made to work, and I learned some interesting things from them. Mostly what I've noticed, though, is that the people teaching them have a tendency to leave out (or say only in a whisper), certain things that you need to make them work, or they fail to explain the common failure modes.
(The common failure modes are very similar, btw, across a wide variety of techniques; mostly they amount to trying to do things by willpower or conscious analysis that can only be accomplished by waiting for an autonomous un-willed response.)
Anywho... if you want to find universal models, I recommend you skip my blog and go straight to the source: your own brain. Start observing the responses you don't control -- the almost-subliminal flashes of memory and sensation that occur in response to pondered questions or the thought of taking a particular action. Experiment for yourself, and find out whether these responses are repeatable in response to the same stimuli, and what techniques actually produce changes in those responses, and your resulting behavior.
...and that was too abstract. As a writer, I'd recommend - though YMMV - that you try interlacing an abstract explanation like this one with a specific, concrete technique. I know nothing of NLP, so you needed to explain "submodalities of motivation" or at least link it (Google doesn't show how any such thing could be helpful). You're assuming knowledge of things I've never heard of, and would probably be allergic to most standard expositions of (I can't stand standard self-help writing style).
You don't seem to have a strong instinct for realizing what the other person already knows or doesn't know, but then most people appear to me to lack this instinct, which I suppose indicates that I possess a talent in this area. Unfortunately, that also means I have no idea how to advise people who lack that talent. You'd have to ask someone who started out without talent and developed skill.
Yeah, that's what I'm doing in the rewrite of Thinking Things Done that I'm working on right now. Chapter 2 will start with the "thoughts into action" technique in my video, and use it as a demonstration of several specific principles about how thinking-for-action differs from ordinary "thinking". (In my previous arrangement, I had several chapters of theory before getting to the technique in chapter 6, but this way I think I'll actually be able to maintain a lot better theory-to-practice ratio throughout.)
What you would do is think about something you're motivated to do, and something you "could" do, but are not motivated to do. (As opposed to being motivated to avoid or NOT do.)
Then, you observe what your autonomous representation of these actions are, and compare the representations. Do you see pictures? Hear sounds? Where are they located, what size, moving vs. still, etc. (WIkipedia's "Submodality" page has a list of typical qualities of these kinds.)
After you've identified the differences between the two, you can try changing your representation of the thing you're not particularly motivated by so that it matches the representation of the thing you are motivated by -- move it to the same place, same size, brightness, etc. etc. -- and observe whether you now feelmotivated to do that thing. You can also experiment with changing the various qualities, and noticing what effect it has on your felt-response to the idea.
This is not a permanent change -- there are other things you have to do to make it stick or to contextualize it appropriately. And you may have to tweak some things to do it at all; it helps to use more than two examples, I've found, even though submodality elicitation always seems to get taught with just two. Many people also have trouble paying attention to their images; I worked with someone yesterday who was much better focusing consciously on their sounds, and then their images changed in response to changing the sound qualities (including direction, volume, and location).
Anyway, while not permanent, it represents a simple demonstration of NLP's practical rendition of an idea that I believe originated with General Semantics: that is, our behavior is determined by our internal representation of concepts. It just so happens that NLP shows the driving representations aren't primarily verbal.
Which makes sense, evolutionarily. After all, we had to be able to decide things and act on those decisions long before we had language.
The hardest part of learning to do any NLP or similar technique is simply learning to "shut up" one's ongoing verbal analysis and argumentation long enough to actually pay attention to what the rest of your brain is doing... which is why a lot of the original NLP creators tend to speak very disparagingly of the conscious mind. (e.g. "Any conscious verbal statement of the client is to be treated as unsubstantiated rumor until and unless it is confirmed by an unconscious non-verbal response.")
But I'm digressing a bit. Submodalities are a basic building block of a wide variety of NLP techniques, and they're only one of NLP's building blocks. There are also plenty of ways to change submodalities without direct manipulation; I personally specialize in using questions that cause people to indirectly change their submodalities, on the basis that we change them indirectly all the time, and for a lot of people, that leads to less conscious interference... presumably because the verbal mind at least gets to ask the questions then. Whereas, direct submodality interventions leave the verbal mind free to critique itself and/or the process, making it impossible to actually pay attention, at least for me most of the times I've tried direct-manipulation techniques. Strangely, though, if I have someone else there to talk me through it, I can usually do them... answering someone else's real-time question seems to commit my attention better.
I understand, believe me. My allergy was more to doing things than to reading about them, though. I discarded techniques because I didn't like the theories.
Problem is, everybody discards techniques because they don't like the theories or the writing styles -- which is why there are so many hundreds upon hundreds of books that describe what are basically the same techniques, in slightly different styles. (Of course they're the same -- our brains are the same.)
Yes. I've realized this year that I suck at this and other teaching-related skills, which is why I've been studying instructional development and why I've also started over on my book; it was halfway finished, but early feedback showed it wasn't reaching my goals for knowledge transfer OR motivating people to act on the knowledge that was transferred.
Yeah, that sounds really suspicious, actually. See, there's this thing called the "placebo effect". How do you know which of your willpower tricks work only because you expect them to work? Or should I not ask that?
It seems to me that for this kind of self-treatment it doesn't really matter if it's a placebo effect or not. It's even a little unclear if the distinction is meaningful. Isn't the main question whether it works or not? If the benefits are largely a placebo effect then it would be useful to pare down the techniques to 'the simplest thing that fools me enough to work, with the minimum of mumbo-jumbo' but the important thing is the working.
If you want to carry out a scientific study on how and why the techniques work then untangling the placebo effect is more important but if there are benefits to be gained from a not-completely-understood process then it seems worth at least considering taking them, while being aware of possible negative consequences.
The placebo effect is a term that refers to psychological reactions intruding on studies intended to measure non-psychological effects. When both the thing being tested and its outcome are purely psychological to begin with, then the term "placebo effect" is either meaningless or a misleading term for all uncontrolled variables. If you want to accuse a psychological study of failing to control for an important variable, you have to name that variable, and "placebo effect" is not specific enough.
Actually, it's a trope of the Mind Hacker's Guild that "if you're not surprised, you probably didn't change anything". So expectation is not required, only sufficient suspension of disbelief to actually carry out a process. (As I said, I've tested techniques I thought were downright stupid, and found that as long as I actually did them, and emphasized unconscious non-verbal components over analytical/verbal ones, I was able to get results.)
Now, in order to get almost any technique to work, you have to assume that it's possible for it to, at least in principle, in much the same way that you aren't going to find a way to get FAI to work unless you assume that it's possible, at least in principle. Otherwise, you'll give up way too soon to get results.
Within all usable techniques, there are certain steps that might be called "entry criteria". For example, in my thoughts-into-action video, I describe the "mmm test", which is an entry criterion for engaging the particular kind of motivation demonstrated. You have to pass the test for the technique to work. If you don't, then there's no point bothering with the rest; it's simply not going to work.
Similarly, for many NLP techniques, the entry criterion is being able to identify driver submodalities for some characteristic. If you don't achieve that criterion, the rest of the technique is irrelevant. Meanwhile, your failure to achieve the entry criterion does not mean the technique is broken; it simply means you haven't learned to achieve that criterion unassisted. (Some criteria are easier to achieve than others, especially unassisted.)
This might sound suspiciously like moving the blame from teacher to student. But to use a martial arts analogy, you can't successfully perform a combination move, if you can't yet perform the individual moves within the combination. This doesn't mean the combo is useless, it means you haven't learned the prerequisites.
Here's what happens, though, when people try to learn techniques without feedback about the entry criteria: either they accidentally or inconsistently stumble through the criterion, or they mistakenly believe they've reached it, when they've actually misunderstood the criterion. The former people get results, the latter people don't.
(i.e., if you already "get" punching and kicking, you'll master combinations more quickly, but if you're punching and kicking wrong, it doesn't matter if you can do the combination of those wrong punches and kicks.)
You can test all this and see for yourself: watch my video and compare what happens when you do and don't achieve criterion. You can also try teaching it to other people, with and without the criterion test, and see whether it works or not.
You could interpret entry criteria as meaning that "some things work for some people", but I think this is an error. If you do that, you won't try hard enough to find different ways to teach.
Hildegard's hypnotizability research was off-base because it assumed that "hypnotism" was a fixed sequence of exactly-repeatable steps, i.e., that if you tape-record an induction and play it back to a bunch of people, it's an acceptable test of "hypnotizability".
In practice, just like everything else, hypnotism is an interactive process with entry criteria. A good hypnotist varies their behavior -- timing, rhythm, tone, choice of words or images, etc. -- based on the subject's real-time responses. They use externally-visible entry criteria to test the subject's depth and responses, before engaging in suggestions, etc.
I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well. What I'm saying is, Things That Work have testable criteria and include parts that require looking for ways to achieve those criteria, where the ways of achieving the criteria vary from one person to another, but the net effect of getting to the criterion is that you can do something that's universal or very nearly so.
Achieving those criteria is also an objective matter, even if the perception of those criteria is subjective. That is, you should be able to objectively determine whether something feels a certain way, even if nobody else can observe it on the outside.
(Part of formal NLP training for therapists, however, involves learning to observe the exterior signals of these feelings, so that you're not dependent on a client's skills in subjective introspection. I don't use that in my work, though, because I work long distance without the aid of remote video.)
Anywho... what I'm trying to say is, you will be able to tell whether you're experiencing a placebo effect or not, because to achieve entry criterion for a technique, you will have to try some things, and some of them will not work. Your own observation of what personally works or does not work, will provide you with adequate demonstration that it is not just a placebo effect, unless you just so happen to be (un)lucky enough to stumble on the right thing at the very first try. ;-)