How We Change (And Ten Reasons You Don't) Flashcards
(34 cards)
Main idea
There are unconscious thoughts and forces keeping us from changing
Success rates of quitting addiction via treatment vs not treatment
Those who changed on their own actually stayed changed longer
Shame vs guilt
Guilt is a feeling you get when you did something wrong, or perceived you did something wrong. Shame is a feeling that your whole self is wrong,
Is shame a good motivator?
It’s actually a motivation killer
How to decrease shame
Don’t feel alone in the activity. Talk to other people about how you do the activity (e.g surfing the internet) and they’ll talk to you about it too and you’ll all feel more connected. This is why AA starts with everyone saying “I’m an alcoholic”
The both and relationship to change
Resistance to change is a PART of change
What is the most important idea to help you change, of those listed in this book?
Adoption of the belief that you don’t actually need change. Get the belief that staying the same is ok. And that the desire to stay the same is from the part of yourself that is good
The desire for sameness is in your life for good reasons . It’s from your self love.
Lewin
Father of modern social psychology and influential figure in organizational psychology
What does much of Lewin’s research revolve around?
The tension between where we are and where we want to be and how this tension affects our motivation to achieve that goal
What is important in understanding Lewin’s ideas behind motivation?
Understanding the idea of a “gestalt”
Gestalt etymology
Means “shape” in German. Indicating something complete, identifiable, and comprehensive
Give an example of a gestalt
When your mind enters a room and sees four cylinders and a slab on top, it thinks “chair”, not “four cylinders and a slab”
Gestalt theorists study how the mind sees things in gestalts, or wholes, as opposed to the parts.
Your mind’s concept of “you” itself is a gestalt
What happens as a result of our mind always trying to create a “whole”?
It doesn’t like discrepancies in our lives, some discrepancy between two or more things that we feel should fit together [some discrepancy between or more things that we feel shouldn’t have a discrepancy? Some output of a loss function for some network? (And the output can be multidimensional where each dimension each is emotion? (Or inputs for a consciousness center of the brain that will then process those values and render an emotion? [is rendering the right analogy??]) and these emotion values propagate thru other networks to tweak those networks’ hyper parameters and or runtime parameters (parameters that will tweak the behavior and compute style of the networks during runtime))
Some psychologists believe what about emotions?
That they are caused by differences between what we expect and what we experience and that those emotions last until the difference dissapears. When the psyche encounters these differences it wants to interstate them into some whole, to reduce the tension they create [im assuming the way the psyche does this is thru motivation for action or inaction+rationalization]
Paradox of human nature with relation to gestalt theory
Our psyche hates discrepancies and tries to remedy them. But what do we do? We set goals (which creates more discrepancies (particularly between where we are and where we want to be))
(These new discrepancies give us motivation to change) ( I wonder if by already believing we are at the end state if the mind will effortlessly change our actions to make us in agreement between actions and perceived state, Ala Tony Robbins visualization or psychocybernetics
What is another way to resolve this tension ( the tension caused by not yet achieving a goal?)?
Giving up
The strongest enabling factors and the strongest restraining factors often reside where?
in the underlying very unique, very personal goals.
What does Ellenhorn mean by the “meaning of our goals”?
He means the answer to “Why do you want to achieve this goal?” The goal might be “make a bacon burger”, but the goal behind the goal might be to “impress this girl I’ve been dating and that I like, but that I’m insecure about”. The goal behind the goal will cause you to perhaps nervously do things to make the bacon burger well, and say and do things that will make you seem even more secure to your date. Your motivation levels (as determined by the enabling and restraining factors) to achieve the goal will depend greatly on the goal behind the goal.
What is unique about achieving personal change goals as opposed to other goals (e.g. remembering orders at a cafe, or making a bacon burger)?
There are specific forces that are always part of Lewin’s force field model when undergoing personal change.
Those are hope and ____. Different and more powerful than the other forces
Lewin’s force field model
the model that there are driving forces pushing Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, but that there are also Restraining Forces pushing against you as you walk from Where You Are to Where you Want to be.
When you hope, you:
Assign a positive value to having the hope realized and a negative value to not having it realized
The foundational laws of personal change
Anxiety, hope, and fear
Law 1
The dizziness of freedom and its restraint
Law 2 of personal change
The driving force of hope
