How We Change (And Ten Reasons You Don't)

Question 1

Main idea

Answer 1

There are unconscious thoughts and forces keeping us from changing

Question 2

Success rates of quitting addiction via treatment vs not treatment

Answer 2

Those who changed on their own actually stayed changed longer

Question 3

Shame vs guilt

Answer 3

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,

Question 4

Is shame a good motivator?

Answer 4

It’s actually a motivation killer

Question 5

How to decrease shame

Answer 5

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”

Question 6

The both and relationship to change

Answer 6

Resistance to change is a PART of change

Question 7

What is the most important idea to help you change, of those listed in this book?

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Lewin

Answer 8

Father of modern social psychology and influential figure in organizational psychology

Question 9

What does much of Lewin’s research revolve around?

Answer 9

The tension between where we are and where we want to be and how this tension affects our motivation to achieve that goal

Question 10

What is important in understanding Lewin’s ideas behind motivation?

Answer 10

Understanding the idea of a “gestalt”

Question 11

Gestalt etymology

Answer 11

Means “shape” in German. Indicating something complete, identifiable, and comprehensive

Question 12

Give an example of a gestalt

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What happens as a result of our mind always trying to create a “whole”?

Answer 13

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))

Question 14

Some psychologists believe what about emotions?

Answer 14

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]

Question 15

Paradox of human nature with relation to gestalt theory

Answer 15

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

Question 16

What is another way to resolve this tension ( the tension caused by not yet achieving a goal?)?

Answer 16

Giving up

Question 17

The strongest enabling factors and the strongest restraining factors often reside where?

Answer 17

in the underlying very unique, very personal goals.

Question 18

What does Ellenhorn mean by the “meaning of our goals”?

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

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)?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Lewin’s force field model

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

When you hope, you:

Answer 21

Assign a positive value to having the hope realized and a negative value to not having it realized

Question 22

The foundational laws of personal change

Answer 22

Anxiety, hope, and fear

Question 23

Law 1

Answer 23

The dizziness of freedom and its restraint

Question 24

Law 2 of personal change

Answer 24

The driving force of hope

Question 25

Law 3

Answer 25

The driving force of faith and the restraining power of helplessness

Question 26

When you fear hope it is because

Answer 26

You are struggling with faith in yourself and faith in the world around you

Question 27

The more you fear hope

Answer 27

The more you both want to block out too many possible good events immediately in front of you and constrict your overall time perspective, a sort of near sightedness about the past and future

Question 28

Reason 7 we don’t change

Answer 28

Staying the same protects us from the insult of small steps

Question 29

[lemma 1] Ross Ellenhorns definition of hope

Answer 29

a mindset that pulls you through uncertainty and towards something you long for

Question 30

[lemma 2] By substitution, what would Ellenhorns definition of fear of hope be?

Answer 30

A fear of [having a] mindset that pulls you through uncertainty and towards something you long for

Question 31

[lemma/assertion 3]

Answer 31

change requires going from one state to the next and uncertainty is present in that change [particularly uncertainty with regard to the outcome AND the effect that that outcome has on you being able to fulfill your values and/or other goals (particularly goals pertaining to core human needs)]

Question 32

The strengths of ___ and the weaknesses of _____

Answer 32

Contemplation; advice

Question 33

To change you have to want to change. And You can only get to wanting to change by

Answer 33

Considering all the reasons you are resisting change

Question 34

Understanding what drive is essential to understanding personal change?

Answer 34

The drive for our minds to “make things whole” - what I think Ellenhorn is referring to is the tendency/need for our brains to take new information (that may not conform to our current mental models) and figure out they conform with our mental models (I’m assuming without our brain changing it’s mental models (at least most of the time))