Dialogue with Sane forum Forumites

Are you talking about the Fairburn guy who used orphanages as "training" centres? There is theory and there is prac. I will look him up too.

Yes there is a lovely synergy happening in the forum.

I am overwhelmed by my experience of engagement on the forum ... yes people's stories and their experiences can be very raw ... it is a huge privilege to share, especially when they are at their most vulnerable.

Wow this thread is exploding! I am going to have to start quoting what I am responding to so that it makes sense.

Did you just write that from the top of your head ?

Yes and no. I did just write it out free form but it is something I was very well taught during my NLP years, and which I have trained others in a couple of times - so I am not new to explaining it.

ThAt wonderful Peter Bullimore a MI advocate from England says you don't need family,

I haven't heard of him. Seeing as I am all wide awake at 4am I might have to give hima google. I think family is important, or rather your 'tribe', who you belong to and identify with, and that this is not best determined by genetics or proximity! In other words, the family you choose.

I am giggling here in Perth ...... Your chickens are your children !! Of course !
Arlo is my baby .....

Yup, the chooks and cats are my family, and the closest I will ever come to having kids (unless I get goats).

Is your Dad selfish ? Getting in touch with his sister who he's hated, asking his children for money ....... Hmmmm

Dad is (or rather was) definitely very selfish - putting his own wants above the needs of others in a myriad of ways, usually because it doesn't occur to him that he is doing so. As I said, I called him on it just once and he has been scrupulous about not doing it since. It is his nature to want more than he can afford, and to allow people to bail him out or provide for him.

How does someone like me ...... Forgot to read my GPs instructions and messed up my meds for three weeks ..... Full time carer for Mr h. Do this without .... Doing last 2 paragraphs ?
It's a very creative approach this is why I like it so much
Do I need someone like my h. To do it with me ?

So the last two paragraphs were:

To be successful it is more effective to make sure that what you are moving towards is something you personally truly want, somethiong you feel really congruent about, something that you feel compelled by, and that the move towards goal works with your move away from goal, and that you don't get too rigid about how to get from A to B.... or rather P to D (next post is aboput that).

Oh I almost forgot - move against, also known as the "Eff you!" factor. That's the one where you are highly motivated to prove someone or something wrong, to push back against on a limitation that has been imposed. It's a little related to being competetive and can be a powerful motivator!

And you are asking how can someone like you put the rest into effect without the last two bits?

So firstly I would say if you don't have a strong 'Move Against' just ignore that one, I was only mentioning it as for some people it is highly effective so it is worth knowing about it as an option (I have a strong 'move against' - love have someone to show up or prove wrong).

For the bit about making sure you have a congruent and compelling 'Move Towards' - my question would be 'Why would you not have this?' In my experience it is well worth the effort that it takes to developp a good congruent move towards, and that it is something you develop or discover - it may not be sitting there out in the open, sometimes you have to do a little work to discover it. A great place to start is to look at your values, the things that are important to you, your core beliefs and see if they give you any clues.

As for how to do the rest...

I start by looking at my starting point goal - what is it I am wanting to be motivated about? Is it move towards or move away from? Is the result I am aiming for a Well Formed Outcome (here is a great article form someon I have trained with that goes into excellent detail about Well Formed Outcomes) which are sort of the NLP eqivalent to SMART goals. You can also put it into SMART goal form if you like.

Getting someone to help you work it out can be very helpful - and there are a lot of books and websites about goal setting/finding your passion etc that might be helpful, or it can be something to talk about with a life coach or counsellor or friend or your husband. And I always find writing things out helps me to work things out.

Well formed Outcomes form a part of the Present to Desired State Model which was the P to D bit that I was going to go into next for @Mazarita

So I will post that here too (I swiped this from Neurosemantics.com, but it is an accurate representation of the model I learend and have used many times)

********

1) State the goal in positive terms.

Describe the Present Situation and compare it with the desired future goal.

• Where are you now?
• Where do you want to be?
• What do you want?
• State it in the positive (what you want to achieve).
• What are you going toward?

2) Specify the goal in Sensory Based Terms.

• What will you see, hear, feel, etc., when you have it?
• What steps or stages are involved in reaching this goal?
• Engage all of your senses in this description process to employ more of your brain and nervous system.
• Have you broken down your goal into small enough chunks so that each is do-able?
• What are the sizes of the behavioral chunks? Could the size possibly overwhelm you?

3) Specify the goal in a way that you find compelling.

Is the goal compelling? Does it pull on you? Make it a compelling future representation that’s dissociated (When you see your goal make sure you see yourself having obtained your goal.).

4) Run a Quality Control check on your Goal to make sure it is for you in all areas of your life.

• Is the desired goal right for you in all circumstances of your life?
• Is your goal appropriate in all your personal relationships?
• What will having your goal give you that you do not now have?
• What will having your goal cause you to lose?
• Is your goal achievable?
• Does it respect your health, relationships, etc?

Run a quality check to make sure that your goal fits every part. Ask, “Are there any parts of me that objects to actualizing this desired goal?” If so, address those unconscious frames of mind.

Pay attention to how your whole self responds to the question in terms of images, sounds, words, and sensations within you.

5) Self-initiated and maintained.

Is the goal something that you can initiate yourself and maintain?

Test your goal by asking if it is something that you have within your power or ability to do.

• Is it within your control?

Your goal must be something that you can initiate and maintain. It must not be something dependent on other people. Make sure that your goal reflects things that you can directly affect.

• Is it self initiated and maintained?

6) State the Context of the goal.

• Where, when, how, with whom, etc. will you get this goal?
• Is the goal appropriately contextualized?

Test your goal by applying it to a context: when, where, with who, etc. to make sure that it is going to be fitting and appropriate. Readjust your goal to make sure that it fits.

7) State the Resources needed to achieve the goal.

• What resources will you need in order to get this goal?
• Who will you have to become?
• Who else has achieved this goal?
• Have you ever had or done this before?
• Do you know anyone who has?
• What prevents you from moving toward it and attaining it now?

😎 Evidence Procedure.

• How will you know that your goal has been realized?
• What will let you know that you have attained that desired state?

@Appleblossom

It is funny how different things are motivating to different people, or to the same person at different times.

I LOVE numbers and trackable metrics. Either a cause of or an old holdover form my ED days I suspect. I can't count kjs or weigh or measure myself without major triggering, but I CAN count steps, reps weights, times, heart rate blood pressure, range of motion etc and find it highly motivating. That's the real challenge, finding what works for the individual.

I agree that goal setting for the sake of goal setting can be quite empty - again we live in a world of click bait headlines and promises of happiness in just seven steps and pushing the idea of having a Passion or LIfe Purpose and setting goals all the time to get there has been a growing theme over the last 10-15 years.

It is something I have struggles with for a long time. When I was 12 or 13 I had a profound religious experience where I was 'given my life purpose' and I just knew from then on what I was for.... then about 10 years ago I had another profound religious experience where I learned that my mission was done, completed and that the rest of my life was 'for me'.

I have never felt so profoundly lost and directionless as then! I had absolutley no reason to go on, not because I was sad or miserable or suffering or struggling - I just literally had NOTHING in my concept of the future and was briefly suicidal ()got an NLP intervention form a friend that helped). I also lost the last traces of my spritual connection in that last communication. I did quite a bit of 'seeking' over the last ten years trying to rekindle it, I continued to go through the motions for a while, but have never got it back and eventually abandoned all practice as it was feeling very empty. I do miss it.

While I was able to adjust to living without a Life Purpose I have found it very frustrating that there is such a cultural focus on this and on having a Passion (or maybe I am just hyper-sensetive to it) as it has made me feel a bit of a failure. Though in about the last year or two I have been more accepting of the 'isness' as a friend of mine would say.

@Mazarita (you poor thing, I did warn you about the can of worms!)

OK, so we have covered - Towards/Way from motivation, Well Formedness Conditions for Outcomes, the Present to Desired State model and touched on SMART goals.

These are the groundwork for giving your goal the best chance of being achievable but there are I think 4 other things that have a profound impact.

The first is around Congruence and the presence of Secondary Gain. Essentially this is about what is keeping you in the Present situation and preventing the move to the Desired situation, and I am not talking about the obstacles in your way that you are already aware of.

This is about the stuff going on unconsciously. Even the least desirable, most destructive behaviours have some purpose or intent underlying them, something that they are trying to achieve for you; so planning to trade them in for a new behaviour can cause an unconscious resistance out of a desire to preserve the 'intent' of the action, or the Secondary Gain.

As an example - getting anxious and avoiding social gatherings may have an underlying intent of protecting me from rejection or embarassment, so just decising that I want to be more social is going to meet a lot of internal resistance. It will be a lot more successful if I preserve the intent by accounting for it and factoring it in. Come up with other ways that meet the same intent, build up resources that support the intent, BEFORE trying to implement the new action plan.

There are four questions you can ask yourself that may help you to spot the source of resistance, they may seem repetitive but it is important to go through all four properly and not see the last two as just the opposite of the first two.

1. What will happen if I do make this change ?
2. What will happen if I do not make this change ?
3. What won't happen if I do make this change ?
4. What won't happen if I do not make this change ?

and as a bonus I like to ask myself fpr each of the answers "and what will that mean about me?"

The second is about Resources - we all have all kinds of resources both internal and external at our disposal - but sometimes we can't see everything we have access to, or sometimes the resource needs building up or an adjustment or tweak to make it work for us. One of things about NLP is the building and access of more resources to help eachive outcomes. It is pretty hard to open a can with a hammer, developing your access to your resources can be like finding out that you have a can opener, or noticing that it is a ring-pull can on the other end.

We see it a lot on the forums, when people are down they find it very hard to see any positives or strengths in themselves, but they are apparent to others from the outside.

There are all kinds of ways to build up and improve access to your resources, not only NLP - every therapeutic model and self help book ever written was someone's way of building access to resources! Places like this, friends, professionals, courses, practice, training, meditation - you name it, if it helps you then it is a resource.

And in this last chapter I will cover the last two things fairly briefly because I have EXCELLENT books to recommend.

The first thing is Will Power - which is just one of the resources that you can use in pursuit of goals.

All of the stuff I have poseted so far is about forming goals and directions that will reduce the need for willpower. It takes much less will power to do something achievable, that you want to do, that works for your values, that is clearly defined and so forth than it does to achieve something huge, vauge, that you dislike and which goes against your prinicpals!

There is a great book called The Will Power Instinct - by Kelly Magonigal which talks heaps about what will power is how it works and so forth.

The most important take-away that I got from it was that Will Power is a finite resource, and if you use up your WillPower on task A, there is going to be less left for task B.

This really hit home for me as I know that I daily use an incredible amount of Will Power to overcome my social anxiety and get to work, and sundry other things. It is no wonder that after all that drain on my WillPower I don't always have enough left for less important tasks, or why my secondary goals fall by the wayside at times of increased stress and exertion.

The last thing: is sort of three things, and these are the things will also greatly reduce you need for willpower.

The first is called Chunking for Success - this is about making sure you are biting off only as much as you can chew at each step (to mix metaphors). If you set the goal to be a world class painter, but have never held a brush you are missing all kinds of steps along the way and are setting yourself up for years of unrewarding toil. If however you set a small achiveable intermediary goal - like making sure you have the tools on hand and a spaceto use them, then you are chunking for success and will get the little dopamine reward when you achieve that step, which will ALSO make the next step more accessable. This also helps to create momentum by getting you int he habit of working on small manageable steps towards your goal...

Which brings us to the next thing Habits! Establish new habits can take a bit of will power, but once the habit is firmly entrenched they become WillPower free processes that you just automatically do without conscious thought or effort - leaving you with more willpower for other things. The more you turn the steps to your goals into habits, the less willpower achieveing the goal will take. There is an excellent book called The Power of Habit - by Charles Duhigg which explores the ways in which habits work, how to create them, break them, stack them and generally get them working for you. Habit Stacking by James Clear has some useful stuff in conjunction with The Power of Habit, and there are a number of books and articles about Micro/Mini habits that also help the process of getting your habits to shoulder the load instead of relying on Will Power alone.

Lastly, and related to the above - creating a No Fail Environment, which basically means arranging, (in so far as possible) your immediate environment to support your desireable habits and goals, again so that Will Power ceases to be the main support that you rely on.

This will depend a lot on your circumstances and your goals but a calssic example for me is going to the gym or going jogging when I get up. If I lay my gym gear, out the night before so that it is what I put on when I wake up, instead of having to get changed, I am much more successful. I am much more likely to cook dinner if I don't snack after work, and much LESS likely to snack after work if I pack a good lunch - so by packing a good lunch I am creating an evironment which stacks the odds in my favour of also making a good dinner.

For anyone who has read all of this I heartily congratulate you on your preserverence!!

Dear @chookmojo. Thank you for the time and thought in your replies to my question. There is a lot to chew on and hopefully digest. As @Appleblossom seems to suggest in one of her posts, these days I'm also interested in accepting a degree of purposelessness in life, though I recognise that on a practical day-to-day level goals may be necessary. My goals at the moment are pretty much at the level of: get myself out of bed, dressed, medicated, breakfasted, exercised and domesticated to a basic level and hopefully get out of the flat, have some laughs during the day wherever possible. This represents a big improvement for me on the past several years and I don't usually achieve these basic goals every day yet. The goal I have added to that relates to addictions - my first counselling appointment about that is coming up this Friday. Most of my goals are more about 'move away' scenarios at the moment. I too don't mind a bit of competition but sometimes can get crushed by losing so it can be a double-edged sword. I can't see much I believe in enough to move towards at the moment other than maybe more friendship in my life, better support network (both receiving and giving) and a sometime return to artistic inspiration and activity perhaps.

While we are on the long posts, this one will be my longest post on the forum so far.

In response to @PeppiPatty's earlier question about my childhood, I took hours last night to write about it. I almost wasn't going to post it. I have already told it in various ways many times throughout my life. But in the interests of sharing with you all here, this is my childhood as it comes back to me at this point in time...

It is mostly imbued now with overall impressions. Of sudden violence and noise, witnessing fights and being hit by parents. Out of fury or frustration. But not all the time. And no-one else there, no siblings. Mum lost my younger brother in childbirth and wasn't able to have more kids after that. She wanted a big Catholic family. Dad hated religion. They suffered badly over my brother's death. First we lived in the country. Then years of impoverished blankness in the inner city. Mum struggling alone when Dad wasn't with us, because they'd fought and separated as they did again and again. Then mum juggling work and looking after me. She was poorly paid and often did shift work. Depressed and then manic, out of need, desperation. Fishing for 2 cent pieces under cushions and crevices in couches. Repo men wanting fridges. And me always running to fetch the ashtray. When Dad was gone I missed him like crazy. I cried a lot. Dad was bright and playful when not morose or drunk and aggravated. A very nervy man, athletic and musical and handsome. I knew he loved me. Mum was strict and very bossy but loved me too I knew. I loved them both and hated being parted from them. If either of them cried I cried too. Dad came and went many times. He wrote me letters and sent me rocks and photos when he was roaming around working in mines or on rural stations. Then he'd come back and we were all ecstatic with love for a brief time. Horse racing every Saturday on the radio, Mum and Dad betting, obsessed. Betting, always betting. On weeknights as well as weekends it became. It frustrated me to see them losing almost all the time. And Dad in and out of jobs, really too ill to be working, beaten down. And always financial stress just to pay rent and essentials. Eating a lot of breakfast cereal. Many alcohol-fuelled fights on Saturday nights. Mum mostly didn't drink but got wildly angry and hit back. Me thinking they were going to destroy each other. Police sometimes. Bad dreams and night fears. And trying half heartedly or less to work out ways to play by myself, with dolls, reading old encyclopedias, exploring record collection, trying to interest myself in astronomy, hitting balls against walls, dancing around alone in the loungeroom, trying to teach myself musical instruments, thinking, observing, hardly speaking. Feeling special for good grades and creative talents. A favorite of teachers. Outcast in peer groups. Occasional close friends, some casual companions. Mostly a loner. Biting fingernails, always anxious. Sickly, often absent, quietly truant, trying to disappear in cracks. A daydreamer amongst nuns and church choirs. Watching a lot of TV and old movies. Photos show me smiling with my shoulders pulled back too far because Mum told me to to it for posture. Trying too hard to be a good girl so nobody would hurt me. As a teen got pudgy and depressed and blank, a lifeless time of just enduring. Probably had anorexia when I was about 15, I hardly ate anything, got excessively slim and still thought I was fat and ugly. And then the fight with Mum just before I turned 17 and me running away. I pretty much lost my virginity 3 days later in a sudden metamorphosis from ugly, awkward schoolgirl to shy stilletoed kitten. Under the influence of a couple of other older girls. And something changed my life around this time, being suddenly cast in the chorus of an amateur theatre musical. That gave me a passion where before I'd felt such half hearted lonely feelings inside myself. But I still feel half hearted or even less and somehow lonely. Is that just the life condition? And I wonder does it help to remember childhood? Sometimes I feel at peace with it.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far!