Let's Turn It Into An Art Form!

It just dawned on me... in all my attempts at dealing with my own emotions, all the personal-development stuff I've tried, with whatever success... one thing was missing all that time.

Just look at it. Picture me dealing with some "difficult emotion", whatever it is.

The buddhist doctrine will tell me that it just "is what it is", and then to focus on my breath and meditate.

The NLPers will say that I have to break it down into its various sensory qualities, then create a new feeling from scratch, anchor that, yadda yadda yadda.

Tony Robbins will tell me I have not yet succeeded in making "feeling better" a MUST, that I should shift my pose and focus on the right things. Father Barron will want me to rejoin the catholic *cough*cult*cough* church, and Steven Pylarinos will make another video.

The psychoanalyst will try to find the root cause for a few years, the christian will find my lack of faith disturbing and tell me to pray nonetheless, Marshall Rosenberg will offer four stages (not three! not five!), the advaitin will say that there's nothing to learn anyway...

And they all have exactly one thing in common: They offer me one (or maybe two or three) recipes, based on a few ideological premises that are to be accepted. When you cut to the chase, there is One True Way, and by necessity the others are false, or at least not the best way.

There is a certain... fearful timidity to that approach. As if my inner life was like an ancient chinese vase about to fall and break into a thousand pieces!

Do you, my dear reader, share my impression that the best things in life generally tend to make you feel free, spontaneous and creative?

If so, why don't we start being creative about our own emotional development? There is this troubling feeling. I can yell at it to go away. I can consciously choose to identify with it. I can name it, externalize it, picture it as a color. I can breathe into it. I can dance around the room, or at least visualize myself doing so. I can try and add warmth to it, or else push it away and make it appear smaller and in black-and-white. I can focus on my breath. I can come up with a few fun affirmations...

I have all those things to try, and then some.

Doesn't that feel tremendously more empowering than sticking to one method devised by some clever guru? Even if that guru be the christ, or the buddha himself...

Let's reclaim our own relationship with ourselves! Let's turn our self-appreciation into an art form, our self-love into an eternal dance, a fire of passion, creativity, unabashed recklessness. Some things will make us feel divine for a short time, some things will help us in the long term, and some attempts will blow up in our face like a big old jack-in-the-box. Let's learn from our experiences, mistakes and successes, and let's share our insights.

I'm not a broken vase. I am my own art project.

Move To The Rhythm!

Recently, I read a book on trauma therapy. It said, among many other useful and intriguing things, that they endorse methods of meditation or therapy that are centered in the body: such as qi gong, yoga, etc.

Now what is the common factor of all those methods?

They get you to take deep slow breaths, they get you to move in a certain smooth way, they get you to focus on your breath, and they get you to synchronize your movements to your breath. (*)

So quite possibly, this simple trick - move to the rhythm of your breath - is therapeutic in and of itself. I can attest that it feels good, regardless of whether you do the prescribed motions of, say, qi gong, or whether you just move about in that way. I wonder, how about doing your daily chores in such a way?

Anyway, it's part of my daily routine now, and it feels great.

I say, hooray for reductionism!

And Happy New Year!





(*) To be fair, I can't remember whether I read that in said book, or whether this is my own huge revelation.

"How To Change Your Beliefs And Identity"

Dear Stefan Pylarinos,

in our recent conversation on your youtube video about "How To Change Your Beliefs And Identity", you claimed that you can give me "hundreds of examples of people that have made amazing changes." From context, I infer that you are talking about people who have made changes following your own method which you detail in your videos and on your website.

Talking about your website, you claim there that you have a "7-Step Proven Method To Creating The Life Of Your Dreams" and that you know and can teach people "How To Change Any Negative Behaviour Or Emotion Instantly".

Regarding those claims, I have a challenge that I am sure you will enjoy to meet. After all, what's in it for you is nothing short of the best publicity you can ever hope to get: independently verified, irrefutable proof of your claims. You can find this challenge at the end of this blog posting, under the heading "The Challenge".

Before we start, I would like to make one thing abundantly clear: I do not doubt your sincerity. I am perfectly sure that you believe what you say, and that you are convinced that you're doing a tremendous amount of good for other people. The same goes for many other life coaches out there. To what degree that assessment is correct, of course, is an entirely different question.

A Few Remarks About Skepticism And Beliefs

Let's talk a bit about your latest contribution to our youtube conversation, and let me clarify a few things. Here is your text:

I have some feedback, if you're open to it. You have a very disempowering way of looking at things. You very much have a pessimistic or skeptical view of life coaches in my opinion, which is all fear based - it's a fear of being disappointed, or that change can't happen that fast. As long as you believe this, how is it going to help your life? How does believing what you just said going to empower you in any way? I can give you hundreds of examples of people that have made amazing changes.

First off, please stop calling this feedback. It violates pretty much every rule of feedback I ever learned in all the communication courses I took: It generalizes my remarks about self-help and life coaches to my overall worldview, it personalizes matters, it attempts to turn the factual problem I raised into my own personal issue, and most amusingly, it is an attempt at reading my mind. You don't know anything about my personal fears or disappointments, because I never talked to you about that. If you've taken any NLP course at all, you know that mind-reading is one of the main ways of distorting your internal representation of the world. It is also a good way of unnecessarily escalating a conflict, and in the case of a life coach, it is entirely unprofessional and unacceptable.

In short, I guess I might have struck a nerve there, ain't I?

Fast Change

Let's talk about "fast change" first, since it is a repeated topic here on my blog. (Probably even ad nauseam, sometimes, I'm afraid...) Do I believe that change can't happen "that fast"? (How fast is "that fast", anyway? Well, you claim instantaneous radical change on your webpage, so let's go with that.)

Well, I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of very fast changes.

What I can say is that I have never witnessed any such change. What I can also say is that I probably should have witnessed at least a few, given that I have a sheet of paper in my drawer that says "NLP practitioner" in nice golden letters, that I have another certificate identifying me as a mediator, and I've looked into various "transformative" practices ranging from christianity to kabbalah to buddhism over the years. In my NLP class, there were about 30 peple, and we spent a lot of time with each other over the course of about 18 months. And yet, none of those 30 people ever reported any significant, mind-blowing, instant changes, even though NLP claims to be the most effective method ever, and the institute is probably the largest and most renowned NLP institute in my country. Are we to surmise that they all had those drastic mind-boggling revelations, but somehow all of them just kept their mouth shut about it? Perhaps they talked with each other and somehow kept me out of the loop? Possible. But not very convincing, if you ask me.

As I said, I don't even claim that instant, radical change can never ever happen. I'm sure it does. In fact, it happened to me, and I blogged about it here and here. I do think, however, that probably no-one has ever devised a fool-proof, 100% method of achieving it. If that were not so, how do you explain thousands upon thousands of self-help books and methods, all claiming total effectiveness, often contradicting each other? Don't start with "not everything is for everyone". The moment you admit that, you have essentially admitted that your specific method is not proven, not 100%.

In short, if anyone has a "100% proven method for achieving instant, radical and lasting change", where the heck do they hide their Nobel Prize, and why do they hide it in the first place? Looking around, this is the most sought-after knowledge since the goddarn frakkin' dawn of humanity. If you claim that you have a method like that, be prepared to back that up with evidence. This is a very, very, VERY extraordinary claim, almost as extraordinary as the claim of being able to walk on water or raise the dead. Evidence for this should be MASSIVE if you want it to be believable.

Change is chaotic and unpredictable, in my experience. We can learn how to ride the avalanche, how to steer it to a degree, and that's about all we can do.

Skepticism

You write that I have a "pessimistic or skeptical view of life coaches". You are spot on: In fact, I do, and it is backed by my own experience. Looking at the name of my blog, what else do you expect?

I don't claim that they're all completely bogus, and I do think that a lot of them actually have something useful to say. But I also think that most of them overgeneralize their own experience, have read a few books here and there, and create some brilliant positive, good-sounding, overly optimistic ideology from that, and then sell this as absolute truth. I also think that this is a devastatingly destructive way of going about things that ultimately hurts the customers way more than it benefits them.

But all that is just my own very personal rambling, and skepticism is not about that. Skepticism is about requiring evidence. You made a claim, you show us the evidence, we examine it. Simple, really, isn't it?

The Usefulness Of Beliefs

You asked me (rhetorically, I guess), "How does believing what you just said going to empower you in any way?"

I take from that that you have a very utilitarian view of beliefs. In fact, it is the view taught in NLP and next to all self-help and life coaching. I bought into that view myself, for a while.

Here's the catch: It is not TRULY utilitarian. It consistently overlooks the fact that beliefs, ultimately, are tools for survival. And they can't well function as that if they are not in some way realistic. Yes, beliefs can be disempowering, and we can rephrase and reframe a good many of our beliefs in better ways so as to better empower ourselves and others. But I have also found that I can not make myself believe something that I know to be objectively false. Have you ever tried to make yourself believe that you ate ice cream for breakfast, when you really ate toast? Go on and do it, I challenge you. I predict that you will fail. Your brain will simply reject it as not consistent with your experience.

How will my belief about life coaches empower me? By avoiding to fall for bullshit claims that don't actually work in reality. By avoiding to invest time and money in methods that fail to deliver.

And yes, I did try that stunt with the ice-cream, thanks for asking.

The Challenge

Okay, here's your challenge. As an honest entrepeneur, a decent human being and a great life coach, I'm sure you'll be happy to meet the following criteria:

1. Hundreds of Examples

Regarding the hundreds of examples of people that have made amazing changes, I am looking forward to having all of those reply to this posting. Specifically, I require that the following criteria be met:

1. Every entry has to come from a different person.
2. Every single one of them has to be properly authenticated, so we can make sure that none of them are faked. I am flexible about the method of authentication; however, I'm sure our audience and your prospective customers will have a keen and skeptical eye on any method you come up with.
3. In order to reflect permanent change, the radical instantaneous experience has to have taken place more than 6 months ago.
4. The report has to be detailed and sufficiently void of vague language.
5. The person has to attest that the change they achieved was actually the change that they planned to achieve before the experience.
6. Your influence on and involvement with the change have to be obvious in the report.
7. The challenge is met if there are at least 200 ("hundreds") such entries within the next month. For starters, I'll be happy to provisionally declare the challenge met if we have 50 entries within one week.

2. 7-Step Proven Method

Regarding your "7-Step Proven Method To Creating The Life Of Your Dreams", kindly answer the following questions:

1. Without revealing any trade secrets, what is the main psychological method that you base your method on?
2. What renowned institution performed the scientific tests necessary to devise the proof you claim?
3. What methods of psychological and sociological measurement were employed?
4. Were the tests double-blind?
5. Were the tests quantitative or qualitative?
6. How many subjects were tested?
7. What measures were taken to avoid, or at least account for, confirmation and selection bias?

I am looking forward to literally hundreds of replies...

With kind regards,

Betlamed

The "As-If Method"

So, I believe that the supernatural is either nonexistent or incomprehensible, and I try to only believe propositions that are logically consistent and for which there is evidence.

Of course, this leads to a problem.

We know that the human mind is quite a bit irrational. We know that self-fulfilling prophecies are a real phenomenon. It is pretty much a given that there are quite a few irrational beliefs flowing around in that big fishbowl that I call my head.

Let's call this the "problem of meta-rationality". The essential question is, how to deal rationally with irrationality? Is it more rational, for example, to assess my own potentials in life realistically? If I remember it right, several studies suggest that healthy humans overestimate their own influence on their situation. If you don't do that, you're depressive.

So, is it better to believe that I am a bit better than I probably am, knowing that this might indeed make me a better human being in the long run? How to deal with a belief that is obviously counterfactual, or just unfalsifiable, but it simply makes me feel better? After all, I'm convinced that feeling good is a good thing, not only for the person who feels that way, because a mind flooded with good feelings will probably not have any intentions of starting a war or something.

I think there is a way out. I call it the "as-if method".

I think it is perfectly valid to choose to interpret the world in a certain way, even if there is no proof that things actually are that way.

I find this to be much more honest, much more realistic, much more consistent than just assuming that all my irrational, unfalsifiable beliefs are true.

"I choose to interpret the world as if god existed." -- Yes sure, why not? "I choose to interpret the world as if it consisted of nothing but love." -- Yeah, cool, go ahead! "I choose to interpret the world as if everyone was my enemy." -- Well, if you absolutely think that this is what you want, yay, more power to you!

Personally, I choose to interpret the world as if my breath was a strong flow of colorful, hot energy flowing from my lower abdomen all through my body, up into my head, and back again.

The question whether it is true becomes irrelevant at this point (most probably it's not). I find this to be deliciously pleasurable, empowering and beneficial.

Truth matters to me. A lot. The other value that I think is equally important is happiness and peace for as many people as possible. What if both values can not be achieved at the same time? By choosing my interpretation, I can have both. It's the never-shrinking, everlasting cake. Finally.

Psychotherapy and Metaphysics

A scientist friend of mine recently complained about psychologists and their inclination towards weasel responses. "...and how does that make you feel?" being, probably, the most stereotypical of those.

I think there are two main aspects to this issue.

One is that virtually all schools of psychotherapy are really just codifications of their founders' personal opinions. Those are based on more or less an amount of clinical experience, good intuition, and knowledge of human nature.

Since those schools strive to explain the whole of human behavior, require years of training, and are closely related to people's innermost emotional turbulences, they tend to evolve into quasi-religious metaphysical structures, a.k.a., worldviews.

To put it simply: There is no superego. It's just a construct that Freud came up with when he attempted to explain why people suffer from emotional ailments.

I think this is ridiculously obvious. Per se, it isn't bad either. It shouldn't actually bear mentioning -- except that, more often than not, I have the impression that therapists tend to overlook that fact. When people forget about the metaphysical, constructed nature of their methods' presuppositions, and treat them as fact, problems arise.

On the other hand, we do not seem to have anything better to offer, right now. Judging from my own experience, I submit that psychotherapy -- if it is at all effective -- mostly boils down to unconditional empathy, a safe place to talk about one's issues and face all emotions that might pop up, without being judged or put down. Well, and sometimes a friendly kick in the ass when you're about to shy away from that facing-it-all process. (Of course, I'm not talking about psychiatry here -- that's a whole different can of worms.)

On top of that, there may be a few fancy tricks, such as gestalt therapy's "empty chair", but I tend to consider them supportive acts rather than substantial to the process.

As far as therapy can deliver the aforementioned empathy and a safe place, and the price is somewhat reasonable, I do not have too much of a problem.

But I certainly think that it is important to keep in mind that all the fancy concepts behind the various methods -- TA's "parent/child ego-states", Fritz Perls' "gestalt", Freud's "id/ego/superego" -- are merely concepts that can help you talk about stuff, but at the same time, they may limit your thinking when you start taking them too seriously.