skillful Dionysian techniques have a progression

1. solve your problem with technique. technique as solution
2. use technique to connect to higher forces beyond yourself. technique as offering.
3. higher forces guide you; strict techniques only when disconnected. technique as conduit
4.walls between you and higher force dissolve; technique unnecessary one reason technique's fail is we don't scale them with our ability

e.g. we start to connect to higher forces, but treat the technique as a solution rather than offering

or we're guided by higher forces, but still treat it as offering, rather than conduit

one frame on the apollonian/dionysian split

dionysians goes deep into their desires and resistances and surrender so completely that they find something beyond them

apollonians use willpower to cultivate the beyond directly and use it to purify their desires and resistances👇 both can be done badly

unskillful dionysians don't go deep enough. they stick on surface desires/resistances. fall into laziness/hedonism

unskillful apollonians fail to strive for truth/beauty. the higher force is society/parents/peers. instead of freedom they become a slave

imo most healers are too narrowly focused

if you start with what tyler suggests (just connecting people with resources at) it will shift people who already had the inner resources they need, but most will just never use the resources even though they know they'll help! 🧵👇

https://twitter.com/TylerAlterman/status/1765037443533672687

similar to people who only teach cognitive emotional strategies and habit work - people will have tools that they KNOW work but then at some point just drop them and never pick them up again

a suprising thing i've found as i begin to study and integrate skillful coercive motivation is the centrality of belief in providence and faith of this way of motivating yourself

🧵👇

https://twitter.com/mattgoldenberg/status/1760426195831972256

here are some central examples. the first from war of art, the second from the tools, the third from david goggins. these aren't cherry picked (this is a whole section of war of art and a whole chapter of the tools)

If you think that "feeling things in the body" or "somatic awareness" or "intuition" are not real things, try looking at these pics. Do you have a visceral reaction to them?

It turns out you have these visceral reactions all the time! You just need to learn to tune into them.



And they're not content free! In the pics above, you have lots of experiences that tell you what sort of thing will happen after this pic is taken, and you don't like it. So your visceral intuition is warning you about that.

Thread of somatic moves you can do when you have tension, trapped energy, or numbness/blankness in a area 🧵 Try holding your awareness on the area.

I used to chase "peak states" all the time, thinking that's what it meant to be my best self. I thought I had to be super-confident, really happy, incredibly motivated. But for myself, I quickly realized that I couldn't sustain that level of intensity all the time. Sometimes it would feel fake, like I was papering over a wound. And I'd crash, when the emotions I was suppressing came back to the surface.

One of my favorite planning tools is from the Center for Applied Rationality, and it's called Murphyjitsu. Murphyjitsu provides a way to find the ways you ALREADY subconsciously expect your plans to fail. Here's how it works: Murphyjitsu is a tool that helps you identify and address potential problems or obstacles in your plans before they happen.

I think I've cracked the code to crafting excellent prompts for chatGPT and other GPT-3 based AIs. It's called the "Winter Coat technique" and I've used it to get amazing results from the current gen LLMs. Here's how it works: The key to crafting excellent prompts is to provide enough context for the AI to understand the task at hand, but not so much that it limits the AI's creativity or ability to generate original responses.

In the 1970s, psychologist James Prochaska and colleagues set out to understand how people change their behavior and overcome addictions. Through their research, they discovered people who change successfully the very first time go through something called the Stages of Change. The Stages of Change Framework is a model that outlines the different stages a person goes through when trying to make a change in their life. It was originally developed to help people overcome addiction, but it can be applied to a wide range of behaviors and habits.

One of my most frequently used modalities for imaginal transformation is Andrew T. Austin's Metaphors of Movement. It's an incredibly powerful modality that lets you turn imaginal landscapes (imagery, dreams, etc) into transformation. Here's a 🧵 on how it works 👇 Note that what I'll be sharing here is how I use MoM, which diverges quite a bit from Andrew Austin's use of it, but nonetheless the key insights all come from MoM.

1/ Recently, I was talking to my sister about existential risk from artificial intelligence. She had listened to some interviews of @willmacaskill, but was turned off probabilistic arguments like "if there's a .1 chance of extinction, we should prioritize" - it felt too abstract. 2/ Instead of starting from a probabilistic argument, I started by pointing out that AI is already running social reality to a large degree, through social media feed algorithms. A change in social media algorithms can change who gets elected, how happy people feel, and more.

For the past 12 years, I've been a coach. An important skill I've learned is how to "hold space" to create safety and comfort.

As I started teaching coaching, I learned that 80% of holding space is just 2 skills, that for most people can be taught fairly quickly 👇 The first skill is simply to be in love with the other person. Just keep coming back to love - make it a habit, make it a home base. If you're confused by them, love your confusion, then love them. If you're annoyed, love your annoyance, then love them.

These days, to make a fundamental change like this, I use a process I call the LIFE Method. Have used it to help clients with everything ranging from fundraising for a startup to believing they're lovable to becoming more comfortable with sex.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ClaritySofy/status/1557932927257694208

I've used it to help myself break through meditation blocks, earn money, and become more trustworthy. This method isn't perfect. Even if it was, my understanding of coaching usually lags ~2 years behind my practice of it. Still, this is the best process I know for lasting change.

I used to be chronically and habitually late to things. Now I'm "known" for being on time and respecting time in my community. This was a conscious and almost instantaneous shift I made using Perceptual Control Theory (PCT). Here's a 🧵 on how I did it👇. First, a quick primer on PCT (although @Malcolm_Ocean could probably give a better one). PCT states that our behaviors are responses to "error" signals in the brain. For instance, our brain might say it's too dark to see, so it throws up an error, and we go to turnn a light.

One of the techniques I teach for Procrastination is called "Motivational Contrasting" - overlaying how you feel now with how you'll feel once you complete the task, and using that to motivate yourself. It motivates most people who use it, but also makes some people feel awful. For a while, I couldn't really figure out what the difference was between the people who felt awful, to the people who felt great. It seemed like both were using the same strategy, and getting similar behaviors, but wildly different emotions.

In The Amazing Development of Men, @alison_teaches posits that there are common stages that people tend to go through as they build their career and make their journey to adulthood. When you're very young, you're what she calls a Page. You want to be a knight, and go on adventures, but you know you're not quite ready yet. So you get as much danger and exploration in as you can while still not venturing too far.

The Lefkoe Belief Process is a tool for integrating limiting beliefs and traumatic memories. It's my personal mission to get LBP "into the water supply" of TPOT, like e.g. Focusing, IFS, Metta. Here's how it works: 1. Notice a pattern you have that you don't fully endorse - it doesn't feel integrated, or leads to bad outcomes.

One of the most life changing self-improvement tools I've ever used is the Experiential Array. With it, I've been able to overcome my procrastination, develop partnerships, consistently stay in touch with people I care about - all once sources of incredible pain in my life. The experiential array belongs to a class of tools called "Cognitive Task Analysis" - that is, learning to extract the way experts think and behave - making explicit knowledge that would normally be considered tacit.

A couple years ago I interviewed YouTuber @robertskmiles about his accountability system, which had made his output more consistent than anything else he tried. Since then, I've been consistently testing and updating the system based on new interviews. Here's a 🧵on how it works! First a caveat: I didn't used to be a big fan of "productivity systems" like this - if I changed my productivity system without doing the internal work, it often led to resistance and burnout. But it turns out they're a huge complement to an already aligned mind-body system.

You find succeeding hard because you're defining success using other people's metrics. If you play a zero-sum game against 7.7 Billion people, you're gonna have a rough time.

If you instead define success by YOUR values, you can use "value arbitrage" to quickly achieve success. The most succesful people I know have created a game of 1. They know their values, so their win condition isn't mass-manufactured on 7 billion instruction booklets.

By finding the things they value, their own idiosyncrasies, they build a life that no one else is competing for.