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IFS Practice Group this Sunday: Observe the Non-Unitary Mind in Action
Nonviolent Communication 101: What to Say when People Get Upset
Imagine this: You’re with your girlfriend and she’s starting to get upset. She’s complaining about something—you’re not sure why she’s so upset or what she wants from you. You try to explain yourself, you try to help, but it’s not working. Now she’s crying, or worse, she’s stormed out or withdrawn. And now you’re frustrated too—what were you supposed to do!
Three years ago, I wouldn’t have known what to do either. I was pretty good at caring about people most of the time, and pretty good at understanding what people were saying most of the time, but then every once and a while, someone would get upset, then I would say the wrong thing, then I was upset too! I would get frustrated and helpless and not be able to dig myself out of the hole…
The single biggest thing that allowed me learn to navigate conversations that have turned into emotional minefields was learning Nonviolent Communication on Shannon’s recommendation.
I’m pretty good at this stuff these days :–). A year and a half ago, I stopped a big argument on Caltrain just by doing what the NVC book said. True story! To read it, click here.
The most crucial component of NVC is empathy—learning how to listen to people with compassion when they’re upset—no matter what they’re saying!
Here’s what’s great about NVC:
- The basics—where you break up what people are saying into observations, feelings, needs, and requests, are pretty easy to learn. You won’t get them 100% right on your first try, but it won’t take more than a few hours to be getting them 50% right, which makes a huge difference.
- When you’re doing it right, it won’t feel like you’re giving up anything, or discounting your own point of view. You’ll be listening without agreeing OR disagreeing, in a way that makes the other person feel MUCH better. The time to compare viewpoints is after you’re both happier, not when you’re frustrated and upset.
- It will feel awesome to know how to do this. It’s a huge relief when you have a plan for what to do in emotionally difficult situations. Aaron Tucker, a good friend I’ve talked to about NVC, described it as training wheels. You get to figure out what to do and be sure you won’t screw up much in the process.
And once you know NVC, you’ll just relate to the world in a different way. Imagine how freeing it would be to have conversations with romantic partners, friends, and your boss secure in the knowledge that if the other person gets upset you’ll know what to do.
There is a great book about Nonviolent Communication, and I highly recommend that everyone read it. However, to be able to do it when it happens, you have to practice. You need to be able to feel it in your bones.
This Sunday you can do just that!
We’ll have:
- A brief explanation of the basic model, with handouts about each component of the process. (Very brief, to leave as much room as possible for learning by doing!)
- Demos and skits, where you get to watch us in action doing things the wrong way and then the right way, so your brain will learn to make the most important distinctions.
- A bit of practice focused around the most common ways NVC can go wrong. Turns out, the point of learning NVC isn’t to judge other people for not using it and talking wrong or to sound like a chat bot. Who knew??
Come this Sunday and bring a friend too, because a friend who can empathize is a good thing to have.
For the full info, check out the event on Facebook.
Join Us this Monday for “Against New Year’s Resolutions”
On January 1, 2011, Patri posted this comment to his LiveJournal (and Less Wrong):
I worry that new year’s resolutions are a Schelling point for failed self-improvement that, by using a fundamentally flawed approach, tend to fail and then discourage people from future attempts at positive change.
Can we try to switch to the meme of “Annual retreat & reflect about one’s life, goals, and habits”, rather than these so frequently failed “resolutions”, whose very name implies that the solution is more “resolve”, and thus the problem is insufficient “resolve”, rather than insufficient experimentation, knowledge about habit formation, realism about achievable change, or any of the other numerous actual reasons?
I mean, it’s 2010, and we know we lose weight through hacks, not the application of more willpower – same goes for anything else.
Wise words indeed!
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the success rate of New Year’s Resolutions:
Recent research shows that while 52% of participants in a resolution study were confident of success with their goals, only 12% actually achieved their goals. A separate study in 2007 by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol showed that 78% of those who set New Year resolutions fail.
Does that fit with your experience? Do you find yourself making resolutions and setting goalsat the beginning of each New Year and then not keeping them? I know I have!
What’s more, I can’t even honesty say I was all that disappointed with myself—probably because I don’t think I ever expected to keep my goals in the first place. It almost seemed likekeeping my New Year’s Resolution would be violating a social norm.
One year when in college, realizing the New Year’s Resolutions were broken, I decided (resolved???) to make a resolution I would keep. I wanted to be the sort of person who kept my resolutions. And I did it! That year my resolution was to wear nicer socks… I threw out my old socks, bought new socks, and kept my resolution.
So, it worked… kind of. I managed to keep my resolution my scaling it back to something I could do once and forget about, but I also ended up sacrificing scope and relevance on the altar of achievability—a less than ideal solution.
If you’re feeling discouraged with New Year’s resolutions, making them fully expecting to break them by February, or if you’ve given up on making resolutions entirely, join us in our not-so-passive protest of New Year’s resolutions where we walk you through completing a New Year’s Annual Review where we eschew resolutions, reflect on what really matters to us, set goals, and make detailed plans of action for achieving them.
Let’s look at what Wikipedia has to say about what you can do to keep your New Year’s Resolutions:
Those who succeed have 5 traits in common.[5] Men achieved their goal 22% more often when they engaged in goal setting, (a system where small measurable goals are being set; such as, a pound a week, instead of saying “lose weight”), while women succeeded 10% more when they made their goals public and got support from their friends.[6]
First off, if you’re female, research says it will automatically help you achieve your goals if you set them publicly in a supportive group. And if you’re a guy, we have that covered too! We’ll be breaking goals down into an action plan with concrete, measurable steps and setting a timeline for accomplishing each necessary component.
Here’s the agenda:
- Get in touch with your Life Goals. We’ll point you towards the major areas of life and get you inspired to consider what makes life fulfilling for you.
- Review last year. What worked and what didn’t? What surprised you? You’ll be more successful at making an action plan for next year when you keep in mind the actual context of your life.
- Set 3-5 year goals. To get you in the mindset of strategy, not tactics, you’ll work backwards from your Life Goals and be thinking at least several years in the future before you dig in and map out this year.
- Decide on goals for the New Year. This step is the meat of the exercise, where you pick projects to concentrate on for the next 12 months, prioritize them, break them down into steps, and give yourself deadlines.
- Pick a statement of intention for the year. Here’s where you get to give yourself an overarching theme like, “Year of Vision and Independence” or “Year of Learning and Exploration”.
(Patri used a slightly different process, but if you want to check out his writeup of his review, look here).
Remember, you almost certainly overestimate what you can accomplish in a day and underestimate what you can accomplish in a year! In order to choose your course, you have to chart your course. Forget resolutions and do your future self a favor by reflecting on big goals and making a strategy to achieve them.
Put it on your calendar now:
When: Monday, January 8, 2012, 7:00-9:30pm
Where: 850 Williams Way, Apt 4. Mountain View, CA
Look for the garage door with the big turtle on it, go up the stairs around the corner to the left, and come right in!
Suggested donation is $25-40.
Nutrition 101: Cut through the Confusion and Optimize Your Diet
The next installment in the Sunday Seminar series from Positive Vector is a big one that every human being has a personal stake in: diet and nutrition.
Come join us on from 2:00-5:00pm on Sunday, December 11th at 850 Williams Way, Apt 4., Mountain View, CA.
One of the most consistently made points in the morass of diet research is that the way most Americans eat is ridiculously unhealthy. I feel overwhelmed even trying to find good links for that statement, because it’s made from a ton of different angles.
Here are a few of my favorite tidbits of confusion:
- Bad fiber. But they told us fiber was good for us!
- Good bad cholesterol. But they told us LDL was bad for us!!
- Good transfats. But they told us transfats were particularly bad!!!
- Headlines that look like this: Guess what? Eggs are good for you again
WTF.
Part of the problem is for the last hundred or so years, and particularly since 1977 and the first “Dietary Goals for the United States”, nutrition is political. And politics is the mindkiller.
But then…diet advice that’s completely wrong is the body killer.
By now you’ve probably all heard of the increasingly popular paleo diet.
Or is going paleo the exact opposite of a fad diet, since it claims to be eating what humans have eaten for tens of thousands of years? But then, tens of thousands of years ago, no one was eating dairy, so why are so many paleo dieters eating so much butter?
Get the answers to all these questions and more next Sunday at our diet seminar, led by William Ryan.
Will Ryan, driven to optimize his own health, dove headfirst into the diet research, armed with a passion for analyzing and making sense of complex systems, and came out the other end. His early diet experiments took off about thirty pounds of fat, but he didn’t stop there! He kept tweaking and researching, and lost about thirty pounds of fat in a few months for a second time. Putting on ten pounds of muscle in only a few weeks (details to be explained in a future presentation), he rounded out the optimization of his physical body.
Since then, he’s consulted with dozens of individually people on changing their diet, and has invited by the Thiel foundation to speak to the first class of 20-under-20 fellows on diet and rational self improvement.
Here’s what he has on the program:
- How we got here from there: He’ll take us through a guided tour of nutrition research, how the “conventional wisdom” about what to eat has changed over time and expose some of the biggest myths you’ve been taught about food.
- Data we can trust: Why anthropology and biochemistry can help us answer the crucial questions about how to feed ourselves.
- Healthy traditional cultures: It turns out there’s a whole cluster of health problems that populations eating traditional diets just don’t get. The traditional diets are superficially fairly different from each other—some of the peoples eat mostly meat, some eat mostly veggies, some eat lots of fish, others don’t have any—but we can look at what common factors all the healthy diets have in common.
- How to think about the body: A further look into the etiology of that cluster of health problems we call the Diseases of Civilization.
- The good, the bad, and the ugly of food: Where Will puts it all together and gives advice about which foods to avoid and which to enjoy.
- Practical low-hanging fruit: Not ready to completely overhaul your diet? That’s okay too. He’ll outline a handful of easy and useful changes you can make to become healthier and more energetic starting immediately.
- Q&A: We’ll leave plenty of time to answer any questions not covered in the presentation component.
We only get one body to last our entire lives—you want to be very thoughtful about what you put inside it! Give us three hours, and we’ll give you a clear idea of how to eat right to feel good now and avoid disease later. Hope to see lots of you there!
Suggested donation is $20-30.
If you would like to be informed about future Sunday seminars, sign up for our mailing list!
Positive Vector Presents Kenneth Folk’s Dyad Noting: The Can’t-Get-It-Wrong Meditation Technique
The fourth installment in our weekly Sunday seminar series is a class on dyad noting, a meditation technique developed by Kenneth Folk.
I’m sure you already know that there’s a ton of research about the benefits of meditation. Meditation helps people make better decisions in the ultimatum game. Meditation boots performance and reduces stress. Meditation changes the way your brain works.
I could keep citing studies, but I’ll spare you because I’m guessing you already feel guilty about not meditating more.
I can remember quite clearly telling myself over and over that I wanted to meditate more, and not being sure how to get started. I remember feeling overwhelmed at the different types of meditation and, more than anything else, being afraid that I was going to do it wrong. Meditation seemed mysterious and arcane, and I was scared that I would end up wasting my time sitting around daydreaming, or resisting my thoughts, or making contemplative expressions and having absolutely no idea what was going on in my head.
If you’ve ever shared concerns about not knowing how to meditate, you’re worrying about the right thing! According to Kenneth Folk, a professional meditation teacher who has been meditating himself since the 80’s, it’s very common for beginning meditators to be doing it wrong. People will sit down to meditate, and become lost in thought for almost the entire time. You have to train your brain to get it to note sensations, and the key to getting the hang of a skill quickly is exactly what’s missing in most meditative practices: feedback.
Dyad noting is the solution. The basic premise is very simple: instead of identifying sensations and noting them silently to yourself, you identify them and note them out loud to another human being. Every time you note a sensation out loud you can be completely sure that you are…noting a sensation! Simple, and useful.
This Sunday, we’ll teach you:
- the vocabulary of basic noting (Why “My co-worker is an idiot” isn’t a good note, and why “imaging thought” is)
- how to handle pacing (What to do when it’s your turn to note and you’re not sure what to say!)
- Mahamudra noting (How your noting practice can lead you to transmute any negative-affect sensations you observe)
And here’s what you’ll leave with:
- A dead-simple meditation technique to observe what’s going on inside that you can do with a friend, or even alone!
- A second meditation technique that gives you a basic framework for taking negative thoughts and sensations and transforming without resisting.
- You will have practiced meditation for two hours! So far the most reliable strategy I’ve found for getting myself to meditate more has been scheduling time and committing to do it.
This Sunday’s seminar is presented by our new personal-growth company, Positive Vector, and led by our team, William Ryan, Divia Melwani, Adam Widmer, and Shannon Friedman.
Suggested donation is $20-30. Order tickets via Eventbrite.
If you would like to be informed about future Sunday seminars, sign up for our mailing list!
Reminder: IFS Training Tomorrow November 27th
Folks look at some of the changes I’ve made in my life and have a tendency to comment, “Oh, that’s Adam. He just modifies quickly. I’m not sure I could do that.”
There is nothing special about me. I’ve been fortunate to find a lot of amazing tools to help me change. Anyone can use the same techniques to get similar results. There was a time when I was a devout introvert. I was also miserable. The traits associated with happiness were obvious after a little observation and research, but actually internalizing them was a huge challenge. Even after several years of painful experimenting it was difficult to see the profound change I wanted. Within months of practicing IFS I began to experience remarkably rapid growth towards things like enjoyable extroversion. My life now reflects the science of being happy. This tool can be applied to almost any change you want to make.
Come join Shannon Friedman and me, Adam Widmer, to learn more about how to use the Internal Family Systems model in your own life tomorrow, Sunday, November 27th at 2pm at our HQ in Mountain View. Check out our post on the last meeting for more information.
Send me an email to RSVP: adam.widmer@positivevector.com
Come this Sunday and Lean How to Beat Procrastination by Cultivating Positive Motivation
This Sunday, Skullcrusher Household is presenting a three-hour class on beating procrastination by cultivating positive motivation.
When: 2:00-5:00pm
Where:
850 Williams Way, Apt 4.
Mountain View, CA 94040
When you get here, you’ll see a blue garage door with a turtle on it. Go up the stairs to the left, pass the monkey-pony monster by the door, and come right in!
Last week at our IFS practice group we had a full-house of attendees, and there was one issue that was especially popular. Quite a few of the people who came independently picked it to address. It’s the same problem that has come up the most often with the clients I’ve worked with individually. Want to guess what it is?
Procrastination.
You know how it goes. You know what you’re supposed to do. What you should do. What you’d be the happiest if you did. Maybe you can imagine yourself doing it, making forward progress, and moving towards the outcomes you care about in your life. Or maybe you have an idea of the result you want, but you find yourself getting stuck when you try to sit down to start. It all still seems murky, and you can’t quite see how it would go.
Practicing regular procrastination is like having your very own choose-your-own-least-favorite-emotion adventure:
Frustration: You don’t understand why you can’t just do it. You know you want to do the thing—it’s important. You can hear yourself making excuses, feel yourself getting tired and bored, and none of it is helping!
Fear: It’s scary not to get work done. Maybe you’re worried about the consequences at your job (or school), or maybe you see that opportunities are passing you by. You’re starting to worry that it’ll be this way forever—that you’ll never be able to apply yourself to anything again.
Guilt: You feel like you’re letting other people down, and maybe you are. As the time passes you wish that you could go back and make it so you’d been working, but you haven’t been. You feel a painful pull when you realize that you’ve been breaking promises to yourself again and again.
Shame: “What’s wrong with me for acting like this?” You get a sick sense of dread when you think about someone finding out what you’ve actually been spending your time on. What would they think? What sort of person would act like that?
Maybe you’re feeling all of them. I know I have.
Because procrastination is widespread, the internet and bookstores are littered with advice about what to do. Make lists and don’t bother prioritizing, prioritize ruthlessly, set a timer, formalize the problem as this thing called akrasia, model it, and understand its nature, procrastinate more strategically, or just do it. There’s good material out there. And I would be willing to bet that diving headfirst into the literature about procrastination is usually just another way to procrastinate.
Overcoming procrastination is a big topic, and we can’t cover it all in one class, so we’re tackling one foundational chunk that you absolutely need to achieve your goal and have fun while doing it.
Cultivating Positive Motivation
Once you know that doing something is important, it’s tempting to frame the problem of getting yourself to do it in terms of self-discipline. But knowing that something is important is one thing. Being excited about it, drawn to it, thinking about how you can’t wait to work on it… that’s a different beast. You’re not looking to crank up your self-discipline, you’re looking to actually want, on a gut level—not in some abstract sense—to work on your project.
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it’s only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.
–Paul Graham
You want intrinsic motivation. That’s what works and lasts.
So, this Sunday, we’re going to lead you through a series of three exercises that will identify and multiply your own positive intrinsic motivation.
1. Future Self Guided Visualization
A cool hack for communicating with our best guess about how we’ll be when we’re older and wiser. And once you’re there, talking to your image of future self, you can get clearer on what it is you really care about having and why it’s important to you. I think of it as learning to talk to my CEV. This exercise will be led by Shannon Friedman.
2. Subgoal Creation
Once you’ve clarified your values, it’s time to retackle the project you’ve picked and break it down into actionable steps with realistic deadlines. Defining the right subgoals and choosing the right deadlines is somewhat of an art, so we’ll guide you through the process. This exercise will be led by Will Ryan.
3. Concretizing the Outcome
To get started and build momentum, use specific small steps and short-term deadlines. To keep your brain churning away at a project over time, you need a clear mental representation of your goal state backed by emotional power. We’ll show you how to ensure that your focus is in the right place. This exercise will be led by Divia Melwani.
Suggested donation is $20-30.
RSVP to divia.melwani@positivevector.com.
P.S. Since our last class, we have added a new instructor (roommate and collaborator), Adam Widmer, to our team. Until this past Monday, he was leading a weekly meetup in New York about rational self-improvement. He is a professional IFS practicioner. He’ll be there on Sunday, so you’ll get to meet him when you come!
IFS Practice Group this Sunday (Nov 5): Make Friends with the Voices in Your Head
The exact time is this Saturday, November 5th from 3:00pm-6:00pm.
You should join us if:
- You find yourself thinking, “Part of me wants X, but part of me wants Y”
- You feel stuck because it seems as though you’re being pulled in multiple directions at the same time
- You’re sure about what you should do, but you “just can’t” get yourself to act
- You see yourself acting out the same destructive pattern over and over again (i.e. lying awake at night worrying intsead of going to sleep)
- You want to overcome emotional blocks to becoming the sort of person you want to be (see item #4 from Alicorn’s polyhacking post)
Suffering happens when you you’re fighting with yourself. For a more detailed description, I’d recommend Kaj’s Less Wrong post, Suffering as attentional allocation conflict. And that means that by turning your attention to each voice in turn and hearing it out, so that it’s fully and clearly communicated what it needs you to know, you can reliably resolve suffering.
I can’t fix all your internal conflicts in one afternoon—though I keep reading, learning, and practicing to get better and faster because I have A Sense That More is Possible—but I can promise some movement for you on an area where you currently feel stuck. You may not have it all worked out, but you will have a sense that something inside you has relaxed or loosened, and that you have increased clarity.
I know you’re all excellent at intellectual understanding and analysis, but research has shown that the greastest change comes when people are in a high experiencing level state. Read this excerpt to see what I mean:
It’s almost like … it kind of feels like … sitting here looking through a photo album. And, like each picture of me in there is one of my achievements. And, I think [inaud] because I wasn’t achieving for me. I was always achieving for … someone else so they’d think I was good enough. It’s like it feels right to me to say … that … I don’t know quite how to say it … It’s like the feeling is there, but l can’t quite put words on it. It feels right somehow to say it’s like I’ve chosen this man as my challenge … knowing that I’d be defeated. That this person wouldn’t respond to me in the same way. So that I could kind of buy right back into the photo album being flipped through. I didn’t have what it took (T: Uhhum) to get what I wanted. Which is kind of…
Anyone who has meditated knows how mind-altering observing yourself (thoughts, feelings, sense of self) can be, and with my own personal growth work I have come to trust Bill Harris’s assertion that:
You can do something destructive to yourself (feelings, beliefs, values, behaviors, etc.) over and over as long as you do it unconsciously (without continuous conscious awareness). But once you begin to do the non-resourceful feeling, behavior, belief, value, etc. consciously, it will begin to fall away. You just cannot do something that is not good for you and also do it consciously.
Give me three hours of your time, and I’ll get you into a high experiencing level state, exactly where you need to be to introspect in a way that produces immediate behavioral change in yourself.
On Saturday, I will give everyone walkthrough handouts about how to lead an IFS process, and I’ll circulate, stepping in whenever anyone gets stuck.]
If you want more details about IFS works so you can make see how it will work for you and, check out this description from Jay Earley, author of Self Therapy.
It matters to me to give everyone who attends the best experience, so once you know that you’re coming, please email me and let me know whether you’re coming to mostly work on your own issues and get movement there, or whether you want to learn how to use IFS skills on your own too. Knowing what your motivations are will help me meet your needs.
RSVP to divia.melwani@positivevector.com
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