Archive for 2011

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This Too Shall Pass: Extending Scope in Time

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Mike Bundrant is an NLP trainer I’m currently learning a lot from. Here is a simple little exercise from Mike that allows you to get an experience of “this too shall pass” (or the Buddhist notion of impermanence) when in an anxious or other unpleasant state, thus decreasing its intensity significantly:

I found this to be a nice application of extending what Steve Andreas calls “scope in time” (from his Six Blind Elephants, vol 1) to get a larger perspective. One of the ways we create meaning from an event that then generates an emotional response is how we represent the experience in terms of time.

I just tried out this exercise from Mike in the video above and added another piece that worked well for me that I wanted to share. I visualized my timeline out in front of me, seeing it out there and seeing that past Duff in a movie frame having an unpleasant emotional experience over there. I made sure to zoom out far enough so that I could see the times with corresponding movies before and after when he was experiencing a more neutral or pleasant experience.

After just two examples from the past I could already get the sense of this new learning beginning to generalize. Try it out for yourself, see how it helps you get a larger perspective, and add your thoughts in the comments below (a free Intense Debate or WordPress.com account is required to post due to large volume of comment spam).

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Posted in Technology of the Self | 1 Comment »

Beyond Critique

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Critique is of vital importance to self-development. Our vision at Beyond Growth was to make a space for intelligent critique of the frequently shallow ideas and manipulative marketing in personal development culture to expand the field. In the past two years of writing we have featured articles on many topics, but overwhelmingly the most popular articles were our critiques of self-help gurus.

While I think it is a valuable thing to root out corruption and critique shallow ideology, it has never been my intention to be the self-help police, nor is that the focus of this group blog project. (Other people do it better anyway.) As a philosophically minded person, I am more interested in general principles, in seeing the pattern.

In particular, I see several problems with focusing too much on a critique of individuals: (more…)

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Posted in Beyond Growth Project | 3 Comments »

Free Coaching Offer for 9/11 PTSD Flashbacks

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

9-11 terrorist attacks NYC PTSD relief

I’m looking to work with 5 people who were in New York on 9/11/2011 and experience traumatic flashbacks related to the events on or after that day.

Each person will be given one free (normally $100) video Skype or phone coaching session. During your session, I will guide you through a technique that has been effective in resolving Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) flashbacks for many people. Sessions will be up to 75 minutes long, but may end early if we’re done earlier.

Sessions will be recorded, and some or all recordings will be posted online along with a description of the technique and the steps as an educational resource. Participants will not need to mention the content of their past experiences as this is a process-based intervention.

The technique is called the Visual-Kinesthetic Dissociation Protocol and has been effective in the resolution of phobias and traumatic flashbacks for many individuals, including in New York City immediately after 9/11 and for war veterans.

I have facilitated this technique (and many others) successfully many times with clients and have received training through NLP Comprehensive and Andreas NLP Trainings, probably the best sources for learning these techniques.

While the risks involved are low as this is a very gentle process, there are no guarantees and this does not replace other psychological or medical treatment. Please consult with your existing therapist or doctor before taking part in this to make sure it is compatible with any other things you have been doing. Available only until 9/30/2011 for the first 5 people.

Click here to schedule your
free 75-minute coaching session!

Or you can email or call me to schedule:

Duff McDuffee
andrewmcduffee [at] gmail [dot] com
303-800-4385 (note: I don’t receive text messages)
Skype: duffmcduffee

Please share this post with anyone whom you think might benefit. Thanks!

(Note: we are having trouble with thousands of spam comments so all comments are moderated right now. If your comment doesn’t show up right away, send me an email and  I’ll see if I can find it in the moderation cue to approve it. Thanks!)

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Posted in personal development | No Comments »

Transforming the Psychopath and Narcissist Within

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

Babies are neither born innocent creatures nor sinful ones, but both, or perhaps neither. Any honest parent will agree upon observing their child go from hugging and kissing a sibling to slapping them unprovoked in seconds. Certainly by the age of two children are both sweet little angels and skillful manipulators, hence the “terrible twos.” It’s surprising to me that such romantic notions still exist about children’s innocence since this view can be so easily removed by babysitting a couple toddlers for a few hours.

Kids’ board games often emphasize the enjoyment found in other people’s misery. Take the game Sorry! in which one pretends to be sorry when landing on an opponent’s piece, thus sending it back to the start and gaining a competitive advantage. Sorry! encapsulates a universal human experience—delight in causing another misery coupled with pretending to not feel such delight. This experience is so common that the apology in the game of Sorry! is obvious in its insincerity to the point of sarcasm. It’s a “sorry! (ha ha)” that recognizes one’s gain at another’s loss. (more…)

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Posted in personal development | 22 Comments »

The Rise of Digital Hipsterism

Monday, July 25th, 2011

I attended a small liberal arts college that had a strong hippy bent.  I would often encounter freshman or sophomore guys at parties who wanted to tell me all about the ‘revolution’ that they were were a part of or planning.   It seemed that they read the first half of the communist manifesto, attached it to some kind of organic farming bent, and then watched the film “Zeitgeist.”  Not long after they discovering “Zeitgeist” they could be found running around at parties trying to change the world, blindly threatening violence against the “status quo” with protests and false threats of violence against corporations and religion. After running into a few of these guys I started calling them “college revolutionaries.”  Having read a substantial bit of Marx, Gramsci, and so on, I often argued that it was time to hit the books instead of the riot gear.  Unsurprisingly, they often tried to fight me physically instead of verbally.

This anger isn’t restricted to liberal college students who read half of a blood stained Marx essay, it can be seen all over the United States since the so-called ‘economic collapse’ of 2008.  The quarter life crisis has become the norm, and millions of college students graduate every year to dead-end jobs and little hope of long term success.  This has sparked nihilistic twenty-something cultures of coffee fueled inquiries into novelty and an embodied sense of postmodern murkiness.  Digital hipsterati have proclaimed themselves liberated of the status quo and free to pen the neo-manifesto’s of the cybernetic age without concern for whose work they bastardizing or the rhetorical traps in which they are ensnared.  I will term these self aggrandizing rebranded self-help digital hipsters ‘dipsters’ throughout this essay. (more…)

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Posted in social criticism | 80 Comments »

Complex Conscientiousness

Monday, July 18th, 2011

Conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits. It means something like being self-disciplined, painstaking and careful, thorough, organized, hard working, goal-oriented, reliable, deliberate. It also means acting according to one’s conscience. In simpler times this was a key element of what people meant by one’s character, but in excess looks like perfectionism, stuck-upness, rigidity, and an inability to “let loose.”

Conscientiousness is single biggest factor promoting longevity according to the Longevity Project. This is probably because conscientious people are more likely to follow certain rules like “don’t smoke cigarettes,” “exercise for 30 minutes 3-5 times a week,” and “eat your vegetables.” These rules are simple, easy to remember, and don’t conflict with each other. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but lately in just about every field imaginable, there is so much information available that it is difficult to keep up with all the rules, let alone sort out the numerous conflicts! (more…)

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Posted in personal development | 11 Comments »

Minimalism vs. Frugalism

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Minimalism is primarily an aesthetic, hence why minimalists generally like Macs and iPhones due to their simple and elegant beauty. Minimalists’ decisions about how simple to be often seem arbitrary because they are based on aesthetic concerns, not practical ones — but minimalists often confuse the two. For instance, many people rave about how usable the iPhone is, but in fact it is a mixed bag — what it is, is beautiful. But Apple makes many design decisions to choose beauty over usability, which is why iTunes is so confusing and hard to use for example. Living with less than 100 things is another example — what constitutes a “thing” is arbitrary, “100″ is arbitrary (but a nice round number), digital “things” not counting as things is arbitrary, etc. It’s more about a feeling that is generated from the aesthetic in a specific person who likes that aesthetic than about saving money, conserving resources, not being owned by one’s stuff, focusing on what’s most important, etc. which are also concerns but are subject to the overall aesthetic. So when Leo Baubata says “stop buying the unnecessary,” what he really means is “don’t buy ugly things or too many things such that your minimalist aesthetic is ruined.” For what is truly unnecessary to the minimalist is that which ruins the simple aesthetic.

Frugalism on the other hand is about getting more out of life by maximizing value for one’s dollars over time, since life is time and time is money. (more…)

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Posted in personal development | 23 Comments »

Meaninglessness and Fitness

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

In our modern society of convenience, our bodies are arbitrary and rarely require moving, or we must move in repetitive patterns. As a result, most of us experience fitness as meaningless. The treadmill or stationary bike is the ultimate symbol for this, as is lifting something heavy and putting it down again. Exercise in a society of convenience where we experience our bodies as an alienated “other” thereby becomes another to-do on an endless list.

Functional fitness puts some meaning back into the structure of our fitness programs by working with the mechanics of our human structure. But functional fitness is often still arbitrary — why become fit? Function for what? Answering “anything” is still too abstract. (more…)

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Posted in Positive Thinking | 12 Comments »

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