Just today Guardian columnist and self-help critical author Oliver Burkeman wrote an interesting piece for Fast Company, entitled Why Setting Goals Could Wreck Your Life. He points out that the oft referenced “1953 Yale Goals study” which allegedly concluded “the 3 percent of graduates with written goals had amassed greater financial wealth than the other 97 percent combined” is an urban legend.

That’s right–the study never existed. Nobody can find any reference to it existing.

It bears repeating again: there was no 1953 Yale goals study. This is a myth, period.

“But I heard Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, and Brian Tracy all reference it! It must exist.”

Nope. It doesn’t. Here’s a statement from Yale.

Question: Where can I find the Yale study from 1953 about goal-setting?
Answer: It has been determined that no “goals study” of the Class of 1953 actually occurred. In recent years, we have received a number of requests for information on a reported study based on a survey administered to the Class of 1953 in their senior year and a follow-up study conducted ten years later. This study has been described as how one’s goals at graduation related to success and annual incomes achieved during the period. The secretary of the Class of 1953, who had served in that capacity for many years, did not know of the sudy, nor did any of the fellow class members he questioned. In addition, a number of Yale administrators were consulted and the records of various offices were examined in an effort to document the reported study. There was no relevant record, nor did anyone recall the purported study of the Class of 1953, or any other class.

Nor was there any such study at Harvard or any other Ivy League school. A lie repeated often enough is still not true, and in the Age of Information is easily refuted by doing a bit of Googling.

That said, psychology has been seriously involved in studying goals for over 50 years. I have just begun to dive into the literature, and it is fairly complex. One of the key elements I have taken away thus far is the distinction between a goal intention and an implementation intention (see this excellent meta-analysis “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes,” Gollwitzer and Sheeran 2006).

A goal intention is “I intend to reach Z!” It is literally just a stated intention of one’s outcome. An implementation intention is the where, when, and how one intends to reach one’s stated outcome, phrased as an if-then plan like “If I’m in goal-relevant context Y, I will initiate goal-directed behavior X!”

One example used in the literature is this: say I intend to be more physically active during the day in order to lose weight. The goal intention is “I intend to lose weight.” But an implementation intention is not clear yet. So let’s say I choose walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. So the implementation intention is thus “If I’m standing in front of an elevator, I will take the stairs instead!”

Got it? Good. So here’s the not-so-surprising finding from the research: when people just set a goal implementation, they are not as likely to achieve the goal as compared to when people also set an implementation intention. In other words, making a specific plan increases one’s chances at success more than just stating a specific goal.

It makes sense, but like many psychology findings that seem obvious, you are probably not implementing this finding as fully as you could, and probably even have sometimes thought that just setting a goal intention was enough when it clearly didn’t work.

For instance I currently have an overly long beard due to laziness. As I was driving I thought to myself, “I need to cut my beard.” That is the beginnings of a goal intention. But then I caught myself, because I had set this goal intention many times in the past few weeks and done nothing about it. So I took a moment to create an implementation intention, specifying the how, what, and where: “I intend to cut off my beard. If it’s Saturday (tomorrow) and I’m about to take my morning shower, I will get the clippers and razor out and chop off my beard and shave.” Then I added a bit of mental rehearsal and linked the visual cue of seeing what I see as I go into the bathroom with a visual image of myself chopping off my beard. All this took about 2 minutes time to do, but now I have a very specific plan.

So will goals help or hinder your life achievement? The answer is that they will most likely dramatically increase your life achievement–especially if you add implementation intentions.

Burkeman points out an important aspect of setting and working to achieve goals however in his article, which is that of committing to one goal and plan and having unintended side-effects from doing so. Does that mean goals could wreck my life? Maybe, but it’s probably not goals themselves (in the broad sense in which psychologists use the term). It may even be lack of having enough goals that is the problem.

For instance, Burkeman says, “Applied to the personal realm, it might mean, for example, achieving the financial wealth you dreamed of at the expense of your personal relationships: attaining your goals at the expense of ruining your life.” I think that’s a particularly good example. This excellent summary of some positive psychology literature having to do with money and happiness lends support to the notions that to be optimally happy, “Being richer will not necessarily make you happier,” “Avoid conspicuous consumption,” “Spend on others, especially people you are close to [vs. yourself only],” and “Don’t think too much about money. It will impair your savoring ability. It’s also bad for your family life,” among other things.

Saying you shouldn’t set written goals and implementation intentions is not exactly correct though. You may indeed have wealth and career goals, but these should be prosocial and secondary to relationship and yes, virtue-based goals if you want to optimize happiness. Anything else is irrational.

The problem of unintended consequences may also be due not only to setting anti-happiness goals but to not setting enough goals, or incomplete goals. If you don’t include your relationships in your goal intentions, then it is quite possible to ignore relationships in favor of pursuing wealth, especially if feedback is ignored (e.g. complaints from your partner or children that you are distant, don’t spend enough time together, etc.).

Integrating feedback and setting and adjusting goals based on feedback may be able to offset problems with unintended consequences (but I’m not aware of any research for or against this statement at this time, only anecdotal evidence–though my knowledge of the literature is that of an interested amateur at best). In addition, the literature of implementation intentions shows that having one specific plan does not backfire, even though we might think that it could through being rigid (see Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). It’s also important to note (again from Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006) that implementation intentions are effective across a variety of goal domains, not just laboratory tasks as Burkeman critiques (“In most artificial studies of goal setting, participants are faced with a single task or simple set of tasks”). That’s the beauty of meta-analytic studies–they give a big picture overview, which in this case shows that implementation intentions are effective across multiple types of goals.

In any case, I have more hope than ever that this problem of unintended consequences can and/or will be (if it isn’t already) studied and indeed solved by the psychological scientific community. What I think we need is less speculation and more non-scientists diving into the research and trying to find out what those academics have already discovered.

My current view is that goals are inherent to how human beings function and thus aren’t going away any time soon. Our goals should be oriented towards pro-social and virtuous ends (which will also optimize happiness as a side-effect), be accompanied by if-then plans (including for when things go wrong), integrate relevant feedback, and be sufficiently flexible. Perhaps it is easier said than done however, which is why I continue to comb the psychology and neuroscience literature as well as develop practical methods that can hopefully help people to increase their chances at successful goal achievement, without wrecking their life.

If you want to learn to use implementation intentions, I recommend you set this goal intention and meta-implementation intention right now:

Goal intention: I intend to use implementation intentions to reach my goals!
Implementation intention: If I set a goal intention, I will also think of a specific implementation intention that specifies the where, when, and how I will act to achieve my goal!

UPDATE 11/10/2012
Implementation intentions work!

A huge number of personal development books and blogs are dedicated to the principle of leverage, also known as efficiency, the 80/20 rule, productivity, etc. But the thing is, many people use a “less is more” strategy far too early in the game.

In this great article “Is less really more?” I found via @andyfossett on Twitter, movement, strength, and conditioning coach Clifton Harski challenges the notion in exercise that less is always more.

He brings up three main points:

1. Efficiency for its own sake is often boring, and fun activities are often inefficient precisely because you are doing them for their own sake, not for some outcome.

2. As Harski puts it, “80% is a B-. Those 20% that people ignore, take you from ‘ok’ to ‘good’. They are not unimportant.” In other words, you can squeak by with a highly efficient program, but won’t get to good or excellent by simply being ruthlessly efficient.

3. “Less is more” recommendations originate from people already doing more–in particular, lots and lots more than you are likely to be doing unless you are at the professional level in that area.

We can think of this not just in terms of fitness programs but much more generally using the “law of diminishing returns.”

We can summarize this principle as this:

First more is more, until more is less. When more is less, then less is more. That’s the rule, more or less.

First More is More

If you are doing almost nothing, then first you need to get in the game. This is true whether the area is fitness, nutrition, business, learning in a particular field, etc. In all fields, newbies make rapid progress because in systems, more is more at first.

Newcomers to strength training make linear gains, putting up more weight every week if not every session.
People who go on diets to lose weight find that the first few pounds are the easiest to lose (and the last 10 to 15 the hardest).
More marketing for a business that has never done marketing leads to more customers, often in a linear dollars to customers kind of way.
Someone getting organized and “productive” for the first time can easily become 2-3x more productive just by making a to-do list or working on a Pomodoro schedule.

But inevitably, the law of diminishing returns sets in.

…Until More is Less

Then what happens is that for the same extra effort, fewer results come.

Strength gains were going up by 5lbs on each lift per session, then 5lbs per week, now nothing for weeks.
The first 30 pounds melted away, now you’re always hungry and you’re losing weight only at a rate of 1/2 lb every two weeks.
You keep spending money on marketing efforts which used to have a big payoff but now they barely even bring in what they used to.
You’ve gotten basically organized and productive with to-do lists and priorities, but you keep surfing productivity blogs and organizing files with no real productivity gains from these activities.

Only then do we get…

When More is Less, then Less is More

When we hit this arena of diminishing returns, some people double-down and waste resources. Other people give up entirely. Whereas the most effective strategy now becomes “more is less”–to focus on the most important elements and become efficient.

When a person or organization in this context focuses on putting energy towards priority tasks, then expending fewer resources (“less”) brings about more productivity, as measured by the ratio of inputs to outputs. Therefore less is more in this context.

But critical to this discussion is that less is NOT more until it is, until inputs have been maximized, until you are doing sufficient volume in the gym or really putting yourself out there in your marketing, etc. And even then, you might purposely choose inefficiency for reasons of fun, for artistic expression, or to develop excellence in a chosen area.

This incredibly buff 60-year-old guy has a workout that many people would call very inefficient:

He does 700 pushups, 10 sets of pullups, and 10 sets of dips, five days a week. It’s hard to argue with his results though, and he looks like he enjoys it. Can a person get fit and muscular on less than that? Absolutely. It’s all up to you how what you want to do with your life.

“The world is your mirror” is a popular phrase in self-help culture. In reality the world is not a reflective glass surface. So this is a metaphor that means something like, “instead of blaming others, examine your own thoughts and behaviors and how you are contributing to the problem.”

This can be a very helpful strategy in many contexts. For instance, if you have the same kinds of problems in intimate relationships with partner after partner, finding yet another partner (“The One”) without determining your role in the situation is not likely to be a good approach. A better strategy is to introspect and change your behavior first. For instance you might ask yourself, “how do I manage to choose the same kind of partner again and again? How can I improve myself in this situation instead of blaming the other person? In what ways am I contributing to creating this problem?” This approach is commonly referred to as taking responsibility and is a sign of maturity.

The phrase “the world is your mirror” can also be used to avoid blame or responsibility. For instance if you confront a person about their harmful behavior and they deny causing harm, saying it’s your fault because “the world is your mirror,” they are implying that you must have created the situation somehow and that you should introspect and change your behavior instead of confronting them about theirs. This is commonly referred to as denial and is a sign of immaturity.

Some people always turn things back onto themselves and never confront anyone else. I did this for many years. This is commonly referred to as being a doormat and is a sign of a lack of assertiveness.

Too Much of a Good Thing

I’ve observed that in personal development culture, all too often people take a good idea and push it way too far. While it can be helpful to examine one’s own map of reality and habitual behaviors for areas of improvement, believing that the world actually is your mirror can trap you in a narcissistic hall of mirrors. Everywhere seeing only your own reflection, a person can become completely alienated in their own reality, unable to see anything but themselves. (Some Beyond Growth readers may recall that I’ve covered this before.)

Here’s a quotation that illustrates this sort of thing (source):

“All of your relationships are inside of you. There’s no relationship out there. There is only the reflection of what you are doing inside yourself and how you’re dealing with relationships inside of you, not out there. It may look as if a relationship is you with another person or with other people, but it is always you within you, and relationships are one of the greatest mirrors you can have for yourself-your patterns, your beliefs, your conditioned responses.”

-John-Roger

First off, this quotation begins with a direct falsehood. Relationships between people are between real people, not merely ideas. We have ideas about our relating and ideas about other people, but the relating and people are actually real and not reducible to our ideas about them. While I’ve found that improving relationships with various parts of myself has improved my relationships with other people, it does not follow from doing so that I don’t really relate with other people or that other people are really just projections of my consciousness.

To give an example, in second grade I had a crush on a girl for the first time. Since I never approached this girl and shared with her about my feelings, my idea of our relationship became very distorted compared to the actual relating we did. Our actual relating consisted of being in some of the same classes, but did not go much beyond that. My fantasy of our relationship on the other hand involved a mutual romantic interest. If my relationships were only inside of me, I couldn’t even make this comparison between the idea of our relating and our actual relating.

This narcissistic reductionism traps us in a hall of mirrors, the exact opposite of the purpose for saying the metaphor “the world is your mirror.” The whole point is to see that we are driven by our maps of reality but that the map is not the territory. Our ideas about the world are not the world. If our ideas about reality were equivalent to reality, then there would be no need to introspect because it would be impossible to update them to be more accurate and useful.

The world is not our mirror–the world is the world. The truth is we can never completely know the world, and the world was not created for our introspection or our personal growth. Introspection and personal growth are choices we make in response to life situations, and can be very helpful at times. But we should not confuse our choices for some Ultimate Truth. If I love others only because I believe they are truly part of me or were sent here to teach me about me, that’s not love at all, but selfishness disguised as love.

Other People are Other People

The one distinction that has most improved my intimate relationships more than anything else is to treat the other person as an other, as precisely not me. Other people have their own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, reasons for doing things, personality styles, and personal histories. Other people make their own decisions, which means I cannot force anyone to love me, or want to be in a relationship with me. I also cannot force anyone to change. This means giving up on any attempt to manipulate someone to be more like how I’d want an “ideal” partner to be. I can make requests, but the other person can just as easily deny my requests. Most of the time when people deny my requests, they provide me with information that I wasn’t aware of, reasons why the request I was making doesn’t fit for them. When I consider the other to be other, I am more open to actually listening to this information, even though it is often difficult, precisely because I cannot know it a priori.

Many times when people are in arguments they will say things like, “I just don’t understand why he did that.” But rarely do they say next, “…and I’d like to know, so I’m going to go and ask him.” But since other people are not reflections of me, I can’t know until I ask. Even more disturbing is that they might also not know, for as human beings we are also strangers to ourselves, no matter how much introspection we’ve done or how many personal development workshops we’ve attended. Our inner workings are forever mysterious, changing, and never quite completely fit our ideas about them.

Here’s an exercise for you that I’ve found interesting:

1. Close your eyes and allow an image of a tree to come to mind. Notice all the details about it–the shape, the size, etc.

2. Now go outside and compare your image of a tree to a few actual trees. Notice what’s different from your image compared to the real trees you see. Focus especially on subtle details that are different or that you didn’t expect.

3. Now think about some quality of a person you know that you consider to be true and unchanging. For instance perhaps you think of a friend as quick to become angry.

4. When you are actually interacting with that person, look for what’s different from your idea about this person and the quality you thought was true and unchanging. Again, focus on subtle details that are different from how you imagined this person to be.

Hi Beyond Growth Readers! My name is Araba, and I’m an anthropology graduate student at UC Berkeley who is conducting research on personal development programs, identity, and narratives of self-help in the U.S. I’m currently looking for personal development program participants who are interested in taking 30 to 60 minutes out of their day to reflect on their experiences with me.

Whether your participation in a personal development program has led to subtle changes or radical transformations in how you think about and frame your life experiences, I am interested in hearing your story. If you live the in the Bay Area, I would be happy to meet up for coffee or lunch to talk. For non-Bay Area residents, I will be conducting interviews over Skype. Please email me at araba [at] berkeley [dot] edu if you would like to participate or have any questions about what will be covered during the interview. Thanks!

-Araba

Please contact Araba to help with the research project if you are interested.

Per the Body Ecology diet, I’ve begun consuming coconut water kefir before meals and cultured vegetables after meals–both sources of probiotics. This was difficult for me to remember to do, and also the cultured veggies don’t taste all that great so that aspect was also difficult. Also both cost money, especially since I buy them at the store instead of making my own.

I have a history of digestive health issues and probiotics apparently help with that, but how much should I take and how frequently? What am I even going for here and how can I measure whether my efforts are working or not?

Thinking more about it now, my health goals are the following, in order of priority:

• Maintain digestive health (especially no stomach pain and good “movements”).
• Maintain balanced moods.
• Maintain current weight at least (especially don’t lose more than 5 lbs since that has been a problem for me).
• Gain lean muscle mass.
• Maintain good immunity (at most one or two mild colds a year currently).
• Improve sleep quality and eliminate need for more than 9 hours daily (I sleep too much).

Probiotics may affect several of these goals, but probably primarily the digestive health. My moods are imbalanced mostly by a) not eating frequently enough, b) eating too much sugar or drinking caffeine, c) not getting enough sleep–all of which are currently in balance. Gaining lean muscle mass mostly requires that I eat more and work out with more volume. Immunity is related to intestinal flora, so that also is a potential outcome. My sleep quality and shorter need is unlikely to improve from more probiotics, but I’d take it if it works.

So how can I measure improvement in something like “maintaining digestive health?” I could track days where I experience stomach pain as well as intensity and duration versus days I don’t. Those are very infrequent nowadays, so I’d need to keep a log because I wouldn’t remember. I don’t think I want to create a spreadsheet of my bowel movements and post it online all Quantified Self style, but some private tracking of this data set could also help determine whether my efforts were working or not. I could also track immunity in terms of frequency and intensity of illness.

I’m still not completely sure though how I can determine which quantities, frequency, and even types of probiotics are optimal for me without some sort of data crunching and experimentation with variables, but I guess my alternative is to spend time, money, and effort at something that I have no way of determining whether it is bringing me more of what I want (or give up on my outcomes altogether).

Exercise is more straight forward in some ways because it is easy to quantify. In strength training, you know you are improving if you can lift the same weight for more repetitions or a heavier weight for the same reps. But even here, you must define your outcome–is “lifting more weight” your outcome, or is it something else like “decreasing body fat percentage,” “less back pain,” or even “enjoying learning new movement skills”? Only you can determine your outcome.

It’s important to know if your personal development efforts are working, otherwise you become a “health hobbyist” or a “personal development junkie,” spending time and money on trying things for their own sake. If that’s your outcome, then enjoy! But if you’re dieting or working out or taking a communication course for a purpose, then know your purpose and figure out what measurements you need to track to know whether it’s working or not.

Due to overwhelming amounts of comment spam, comments are regretfully turned off. You can direct your feedback to info [at] beyondgrowth.net.

Yes, I’m saying “we” because I’m admitting that I have a problem. But I think I may also have recently stumbled upon an important part of the solution.

Two things that maintain chronicity in psychological or behavioral problems are a) lack of specificity and b) lack of taking responsibility or seeing what’s in your control. Self-deception has been found to require vague language, while an “external locus of control” frames the situation as something we can’t do anything about, therefore it’s not our fault and not our responsibility.

To begin to regain control, one can see past actions clearly using specific language, and then label them as choices. For instance a person could say to themselves, “I chose to browse Facebook for 3 hours this morning.” Simply by labeling an action as a choice to yourself, you can immediately regain an “internal locus of control.” (Note that this might not be a good idea to go around telling others about your choices, especially if they determine your employment status, but being honest with yourself is an important step in changing your behavior in a way they would approve of as well.)

You are always doing something.

Every moment of every day you are being productive, even if you take 20 minutes to just sit on the couch and do “nothing,” that is a something perhaps called “sitting on the couch letting my mind wander.” You are always producing some result. The question isn’t whether you are doing something or not doing something, but whether you are doing what you want that is serving your needs and moving you closer to your outcomes.

The thing is, we all have multiple wants and needs. Nobody only wants to work or to play, to focus or to wander. At some times we have lots of energy and at other times we are tired. This is normal.

We can imagine these conflicting wants and needs as a board room with multiple people around a big conference table, all trying to make a decision together. How is this group going to make decisions? One way is by consensus, where everybody goes around and says what they want and what they think is best to do, and all parties keep hashing it out until they can all agree on a single course of action. This kind of negotiation leads to group cohesion but can take a long time in some groups, especially if each member is worried that their department’s needs won’t be met. Other groups bring it to a vote. And still other groups make decisions by having a single appointed party be the decision maker who gets all the information they think they need from the various members and then makes the decision. Any of these decision making styles can work well depending on the group and the context.

What chronic procrastinators do though is more like a boss who fails to call the meeting, and therefore doesn’t even make clear decisions, thus dodging responsibility for making any bad decisions and blaming it on others lower down. “Hey, I’m not in control here–those guys screwed it all up. It’s not my fault!” The chronic procrastinator similarly blames lower drives, or even his or her brain for being the one in charge, thus framing the situation as being a victim to forces outside of my control. Even by saying “I procrastinated” instead of “I watched YouTube videos featuring incredibly cute puppies for 90 minutes” is a way of being vague to avoid accepting the consequences of one’s actions.

I decide what I do, even when I don’t.

The first step therefore is to get sufficient available information and take responsibility for decisions, even the decision to allow something or someone else to make the decisions.

You don’t have to be 100% in control of everything to do this (you won’t ever be anyway), you don’t have to have 100% of the information, and you don’t have to only make decisions that all parts of you like in the moment. You just recognize what information and control you actually do have, acknowledge it, and recognize that “if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”

A chronic procrastinator can begin to transform into a decision-maker who is in control of their life by keeping an inventory of his or her time, saying, “I decided to do that. I fully accept the consequences of my decision.” Instead of saying, “I did nothing all day,” you might say, “I played video games for two and a half hours, then checked Facebook and Twitter for about 40 minutes, then read several blogs for 90 minutes. Then I did about 10 minutes of work on my report.”

Note this language is non-judgmental. Most procrastinators when they are specific about what they actually did are highly judgmental, saying things like “I wasted away 3 hours on Reddit like a freaking idiot. God, what’s wrong with me?!?” Keep your language objective and neutral, purely descriptive. You can also describe how you feel about your decisions. Again, keep it descriptive. For instance, “I decided to play Skyrim for 12 hours today. I feel physically exhausted, my eyes hurt, my body is stiff. I feel worried about my project that is due Monday, and notice that when I think about that, my heart rate becomes elevated.” This clear, specific, objective language provides you with the information to make more intelligent decisions. Thus talking to yourself in this way makes you smarter than someone who talks to themselves in vague language.

Other popular methods for tracking what you actually physically do are to keep a time log (write down what you did during each 15, 30, or 60 minute interval) or to use the pomodoro technique or other “time boxing” methods.

Seeing the consequences of your decisions

So once you get clear about what you actually are doing with your time and see your actions as decisions, what then? Most people when they consider doing something that bring short term gain for long term pain only think about the initial good feelings. They might say to themselves, “man, I’d so much rather be checking Facebook right now,” or just make a mental picture (often so fast they don’t even notice) of how good it would feel to do so.

What they almost never do is make a mental movie that starts with doing the thing that creates the good feelings and plays out all the way to the unpleasant consequences before deciding. Instead they just play a captivating movie inside that motivates them to do the thing that feels good in the moment. Then they might compare that movie to what they are doing right now and choose the action that feels better. That’s what we call a poor decision-making strategy!

Later they look back with feelings of guilt and regret. But then since the action happened in the past, there’s nothing they can do about it now, yet they feel terrible and want to feel better or avoid feeling bad, so they may indulge again in the thing that feels good now. This is what we call a feedback loop, or a downward spiral.

Hey, could you use this information to motivate yourself differently and make better decisions? You betcha. It could even reverse the loop, creating an upward spiral. While you can’t do anything about the past, you can learn to make better decisions by making mental movies that play out until the logical consequences, thus getting a more accurate feeling about how you’ll feel in the future. This solves the whole problem about hyperbolic discounting and present bias by making the future real now. It’s also what people who don’t procrastinate do automatically.

Here’s how you do it:

Think about a behavior that feels good in the moment but has long-term consequences that you don’t want. Close your eyes and make a mental movie starting with the choice to do the short-term behavior and play a movie that goes out long enough to link that choice up with the natural consequence—that is, until you feel the pain now of what would happen if you made that decision (instead of feeling pain in the form of guilt and regret later when it’s too late to do anything about it). Then think about an alternative behavior that has more desired long-term consequences and make a second mental movie. Again play the movie out all the way until the natural consequences so you can feel what that would feel like if you made that decision. Compare the movies side by side and choose which one you want. You can make as many such movies as you want given however many decisions you want to consider.

That’s it in a nutshell. If you think you’re terrible at visualizing, you’re probably not (everyone dreams vividly every night whether they remember it consciously or not), and in any case it doesn’t really matter because just pretending to visualize usually works just as effectively. So just try “acting as if” you can see it, or even write out the consequences in sensory specific detail as if writing a novel, then read over the stories and decide which one you want.

For best results, practice in advance, when it’s easy. Don’t wait for the moment of temptation when it’s hard. Practice again and again and again until you realize this new decision making strategy is better and you choose it every time.

This is but one strategy that is useful for overcoming chronic procrastination. Although can’t say I’m totally reformed yet, I’ve made huge strides myself in making better decisions (and I was the WORST!), so I believe that you can do it too. I also provide personal change consulting for those who want professional support in making such changes, so feel free to get in touch with me if you’re interested.

Many of these ideas were inspired by the work of Andrew T. Austin, especially his models of chronicity and his perspectives on anxiety and weight loss. I highly recommend you check out his work or attend one of his trainings.

Most people live in boxes. It is easy to measure lumber and sheet rock and metal and wood for flooring, etc. in height, length, and width. This makes boxy houses easier to construct than rounded, wavy, or triangular domiciles.

Buckminster Fuller was an outside-the-box thinker. He invented many things including the geodesic dome, a kind of archetypal anti-box. Many people thought that in the future we’d all live in dome-shaped houses, but alas domes aren’t all that nice to live in. They frequently leak. Sounds easily travel from one side to the other of a dome, making for little privacy. And domes are difficult to furnish in a box-shaped world—nothing quite seems to fit. Indeed, few of Fuller’s inventions fit our boxy world either. Nobody drives a Dymaxion car.

Boxes can be limiting however. What we can easily measure, predict, and control can also control the possibilities we conceive of. You can’t describe the movement of planets with just height, length, and width, even if you add in time. The cosmos is curvy. So boxy thinking never quite describes reality accurately.

Some boxes are very spacious, complex, and beautiful—so much so that we don’t recognize their sharp angles and boxy nature at first. To think outside of a box we have to open at least one side to let fresh air in. This makes things more wide open, unbounded, yet conditional, context-sensitive.

It’s not necessarily always better to be unboxed and uncontained, but life in a box lacks the freshness of a summer’s breeze.

Recommended Reading
The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen J. Langer
The Ecological Thought by Timothy Morton

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

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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.

Another common human experience is to delight in causing others misery and then feeling guilt in response to one’s delight. Some sensitive modern kids feel bad when playing Sorry! with their parents or friends. They will first say “sorry” in the sarcastic way, but then quickly switch to a more sincere-sounding “sorry” and an explanation of how it is “only a game” or “you’ll probably win next time,” thus all players will eventually get to feel the pleasure of causing others’ pain!

Some parents and teachers also attempt to move away from such competitive zero-sum games that emphasize joy in winning at the expense of another’s agony of defeat. One commonly criticized way of doing so is to keep the rules of game the same, say softball, but to reward all participants for something. For instance a poorly behaved player with low skills may receive an award for “most improved.” As a middle-schooler I was an uncoordinated softball player and distinctly remember winning an award at the end of the season for “most bubble gum chewed.” I’m not sure which is worse—simply being an uncoordinated loser, or being singled out from all players on the team for one’s quantity of gum-chewing…even more so because my friend won the award for “best bubble blower”—I wasn’t even good enough at blowing bubbles with my gum, something that we frequently competed over.

No doubt the adult coaches found themselves in a similar dilemma as the sensitive child playing Sorry! with their parents. On the one hand I was a terrible player (in part due to a rapid growth spurt), was mostly made fun of and bullied by the other kids, and had major authority issues to boot, so I spent most of my time chewing the gum that was always available when we played. But on the other hand I was a likeable enough kid and the adults wanted to be nice and supportive so that all the kids would thrive. The attempt to be nice and focus on something positive in each player was in conflict with the irritation the adults no doubt felt with me and the fact that I was by far the worst player on the team. I can imagine that they took pleasure in presenting me with their facetious award for “most bubble gum chewed” in a similar way that someone feels pleasure when saying “sorry” in the board game of the same name. But since it was technically an “award,” they could assuage their guilt in the pleasure they took in giving me the insulting award.

Rewarding all kids for participating and saying things like “everyone’s a winner” is frequently cited as causing narcissism and inflated self-concept in children. I certainly was not fooled into thinking I was a great softball player or a valuable member of the team upon receiving my award for gum consumption. However, I do remember feeling surprised by receiving something, some acknowledgement of my existence from adults, even if it was a joke at my expense. While I sucked at sports and social interaction, at least I was good at gum chewing! At the time it was difficult for me to see anything positive about myself at all besides a talent in math, which mostly got me made fun of and beat up. The fact that some adults were willing to see something positive about me—even if faked—was genuinely helpful.

On the one hand, competitive zero-sum games like Sorry! or even softball encourage taking delight in causing misery, but on the other hand they allow this universal human experience a safe and relatively harmless outlet. Delight in causing harm to others is the basis for what makes someone a psychopath, but it’s a matter of “to what extent.” If you’ve read Beyond Growth in the past, for many months I was negatively fascinated (i.e. disgusted and compelled) with psychopaths and narcissists and wrote numerous articles about this topic. It is obvious in hindsight that this repetition compulsion was due to having internalized abuse from some young psychopaths/narcissists in my own past combined with not dealing with my own psychopath or narcissist within.

Core Transformation has been the most helpful technique I’ve encountered in not only getting to know such inner parts of my experience, but also actually transforming them. It’s not good enough in my opinion to simply get to know parts of me that delight in causing harm, for I absolutely do not want to abuse others in the way I was abused. But it is also not enough to simply call others psychopaths and narcissists and not recognize the pleasure I experience in having power over or harming others. Just as saying “I’m not a racist but…” is nearly always a lie, so in the same way is saying “so-and-so is a psychopath” and not acknowledging one’s own pleasure in another’s pain. For example, I and many others have taken pleasure in seeing James Arthur Ray convicted of homicide. Some have gone further and and secretly (or not so secretly) taken pleasure in imagining him to be subject to the abuse of prison rape (as many comments online have joked about). We should be careful not to confuse justice with vengeance.

Recently I’ve begun exploring more parts of myself with Core Transformation that delight in the misery of others. It’s a dark and disturbing thing to look at, very difficult to face within myself as I’ve always had an identity of being a “good person.” One part of me had something like the following desires (each one more important than the previous):

• to control others
• to make or force people to do what I want
• to have all my desires fulfilled
• Peace

Obviously going about it in this order is a problem for multiple reasons. One is the harm involved in controlling and forcing others to do what I want, which even if that worked wouldn’t necessarily fulfill all my desires, and desires are endless thus fulfilling them isn’t such a good strategy for reaching peace. Much better is to just live from a state of being of Peace, and by doing so I don’t have to fulfill all my desires, controlling others doesn’t make sense and in fact compassion for others spontaneously arises (and sadness that I desired to control others).

Granted, I didn’t live out this part of me in a gross and harmful fashion like James Arthur Ray at his deadly sweat lodge. But even so, these dark desires are part of our human experience too—they do not only belong to those “other” people who are psychopaths and narcissists, racists and bigots. We are all these things to some extent (and yes, extent matters), so we can all do better by really diving deep into understanding the root causes of these experiences and desires, thus transforming the psychopath and narcissist within. Note too that the outcome “to have all my desires fulfilled” is a common theme both in personal development marketing and amongst narcissists!

So should we stop playing zero-sum games like Sorry! and softball? I don’t think so. Competitive games bring out what’s already there, the psychopathic anti-social aspects of ourselves. But it’s also true that competitive games have cooperative aspects, both within a team and even between opponents, bringing out the best of each player. It doesn’t hurt to also play some cooperative, non-zero-sum games too like painting, building something together, playing music, discussing literature or movies, etc. But these cooperative games can become competitive at times too as in music auditions. Ultimately if we are to be whole human beings, we must embrace all the aspects of ourselves and our shared humanity.

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!

Take nutrition. It used to be simple: drink your 8 glasses of water a day, eat your veggies, don’t smoke cigarettes, moderate or abstain from alcohol, exercise a little every day (pushups, pullups, situps) and walk or play sports, etc. Nowadays we’ve got raw vegans vs. paleo diets, gluten free vs. whole grains, diets based around cultured vegetables and kefirs and other “probiotics,” alkaline diets, low carb protein power diets, studies showing alcohol is good for you, studies showing sugar causes obesity not fat which was previously thought, studies proving eggs were bad but now good again unless you have certain pre-existing conditions in which…and that’s just nutrition!

As we get more and more information about how things really work, we get more and more complex rule sets emerging. Many of us don’t want to do the same exercise as people did 100 years ago, we want the latest and greatest, personalized to our bodies, our goals, our sport-specific requirements, and our pre-existing injuries. Either that or we skip exercise altogether because it appears to be so incredibly complex, or we have recurring injuries that exercise seems to make worse.

For most people it is difficult enough to follow a simple program like “do 3 sets of pushups, pullups, situps, and squats each morning.” But what if I can’t do pullups because I’m too heavy for my strength? What if pushups aggravate a shoulder injury? What if squats hurt my knees? What if situps hurt my neck? Should I really exercise the same muscles every day? And aren’t these movements all very linear? What about twisting movements and balance exercises and cardio and my tight hamstrings and…. What then?

Then we must add additional rules—rehab programs, specific adaptations, additional exercises, more complex movements, stretching, foam rolling and trigger point massage—all of which either must be outsourced to a professional (a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a massage therapist, etc.) or the individual must not only learn these multiple modalities and their rules, but also create or follow an additional program with additional variables if they wish to answer these additional questions.

Once upon a time, we didn’t have all these options. We didn’t know what we were missing. We didn’t know we could live without a high-density black foam roller and a pair of toe shoes and ignorantly (but not blissfully) engaged in static stretching before going out for a run in a pair of New Balances (and no GPS connected iPhone mapping our progress either!). Once upon a time we ate eggs and bacon and oatmeal for breakfast with black coffee and then we discovered eggs are high in cholesterol and bacon will give you a heart attack and oatmeal is full of gluten so we switched to Cheerios which then we discovered are devoid of nutrition so we had green smoothies with soymilk and agave nectar but 5 years later discovered we were allergic to soy which was once considered a superfood and agave is high in fructose which is apparently toxic and the real cause of the obesity epidemic so now eat amaranth and chia seeds with stevia powder but are afraid we are eating too much of the same thing and killing the enzymes by cooking it and chia seeds are just so hard to find organic that we’re thinking of switching to organic quinoa flakes and flax meal. We still haven’t figured out lunch. And we’re still drinking the coffee, but now it has antioxidants apparently. Maybe we’ll just skip lunch, do some intermittent fasting (for economic justice?).

The world has become very complex (or was it always that way), and thus conscientiousness has also become more complex. In order to keep up with all the rules for self-development, for health and for getting ahead in an ever more complex world, we learn to follow ever more complex rule sets. Those that succeed appear like capitalist supermen (and women)—able to cope with the bewildering madness of modern global society, and enthusiastic that you can too. When we encounter these übermench we doubt not only our own ability but our own sanity. Perhaps the world isn’t insane, perhaps we are for not taking advantage of all these shiny new opportunities. Should we attempt to master the ever more complex rules? Do we have a choice? Yes, we shall give it one more try, starting tomorrow. But if it doesn’t work this time, let’s buy an RV and drive up into the mountains someplace where cell phones and wifi don’t reach, where we can be simple again, simple and free. But no such place exists anymore, does it?