Modeling a new self. How to turn hope into foreboding.

[Brother]

All skills, including character traits, are composed of models of internal and external behavior. Those. in order to turn any skill into a skill that can be mastered, we need to direct the lens of our modeling camera at behaviors in such a way as to focus on the specific internal processes that interact and are realized in these behaviors. And if we can recognize and understand the set of components (or, as we call them, "internal processes") that are the cornerstones of behavior, we can organize them into a model and use them to create such behaviors - and thus skills and traits - which we wish. To do this, you just need to find and model a set of internal processes that underlie any behavior.

Experience, Structure, and Transmission.

By examining the internal processes of individuals in different contexts, we found that:

... between individuals exhibiting the same behavior in a particular context, there is a remarkable similarity in the models of the internal process;

... a successful description of these internal processes naturally includes a certain set of variables.

The discovery that different people exhibiting the same behavior are similar in their underlying internal processes is significant for two reasons. First, certain models of internal processes are largely responsible for the manifestation of certain behaviors. And secondly, behavior, therefore, can be studied by changing the internal processes accordingly, ie through the adjustment of the entire bouquet of internal processes underlying this character.

Another finding - that a consistent set of internal process variables underlies all of our behavioral responses - means that it is possible to devise a successful method of acquiring skill. The success talking we're about is the ability of our method to both highlight the sources of an individual's behavior and provide the information necessary to communicate that behavior to someone else.

From our experience, we know that almost any behavior can be transferred from an individual who already manifests it to a person who does not yet manifest it, but would like to, provided that the internal processes underlying this behavior are turned into external ones and laid down in a shape that can be adjusted to fit the "receiver". Before we go any further, we want to let you personally experience and feel everything that we are talking about here. The exercise below will help a lot with this if you do everything as it is written there.

1. Refer to your experiences and find an incident or sensation that you would never want to relive. For example, you might not want to be rejected or used; be out of money; you don't want to ever get angry again, or hurt someone, or go nuts.

2. Spend a few moments hoping that "this" will never happen again.

3. Now take a deep breath and feel for a while that "this" will never happen again. If your common sense does not take this as an opportunity, just imagine for a moment that you can anticipate such a future.

Have you felt the difference between hope and anticipation that this will never happen again? Compare, and you'll probably notice that anticipation made you feel confident about being free from future manifestations of this unpleasant experience, while hope sowed uncertainty about being safe from future trouble.

Thus, the subjective experience of the hope that you will never be rejected again is an unstable suspension of the desire to be accepted and the realization of the possibility of being rejected anyway; at the same time, the premonition that you will no longer be rejected is a pleasant state of knowing that it will be so. The inner process underlying the subjective distinction between hope and anticipation is this: when we hope, we simultaneously maintain inner images of what we want and not get what we want.

(You can test this by looking at your own hopes and noting how that hope is expressed.) When we anticipate, the inner image of only one possibility is maintained. (If you imagine other possibilities, they do not merge with what is anticipated. You can experiment by noting the content of the images, anticipating or anticipating something in the future). Now let's move on to the next stage of our experiment.

1. Refer to your current hopes and choose one (for example, that you will remain close friends with someone, that you will have a lot of money, you will travel, master a sport or musical instrument, etc.).

2. Now erase all the possibilities except for the one with which you are bound by hope, imagining the image of only one remaining possibility; notice how your subjective experience has changed. (For example, imagine only that you will make a lot of money, or just that you will not make a lot of money).

You may have noticed that when you were left with just one imaginary possibility, your experience immediately shifted in the direction of anticipating this future. (The premonition scares you or gives you pleasure - it depends on the imaginary, whether it is only an unwanted opportunity or only a desired opportunity). This model makes it impossible for two possibilities to exist simultaneously.

1. Choose some decidedly unpleasant incident that you currently anticipate (dump a fool on a date, get a huge bill from the tax office, and remain a fool for the rest of your days, etc.), and feel that this is happening. ..

2. Now draw a picture for yourself that everything is not going the way you anticipated (on a date you turned out to be simply charming, a tiny bill came from the tax office, the work is still in your hands, etc.), and put it in front of you both pictures at once. Notice how your subjective experience changes.

Here you may have noticed that you suddenly became hopeful. Whereas before you had a presentiment of, say, dumping the fool on a date, now (with the imaginary possibility of being charming as well) you hope you're not dumping (or hope you'll be charming).

A significant difference in subjective experience appears with the transition from anticipation to hope, you can see for yourself by experimenting with the model. This difference will be expressed in behavior. A person who has a presentiment that he is dumping the fool on a date will react in a very different way to the possibility of failure than a person who hopes that he does not dump (or will be charming)

The difference between hope and foreboding, with which you were just experimenting, is one of dozens of phenomena that we discovered when modeling the internal processes of many people who either hoped or had a presentiment of something.

Having understood the underlying model, we were able to meaningfully (and often deeply) influence our own experiences and the experiences of others through this model. That is, we presented the internal processes underlying "hope" and "anticipation" so that they could be transferred in the form of an ability to someone who needed and wants to have it. One of our acquaintances, a middle-aged man whose unhappy life was spent in almost complete isolation, became more sociable when we helped him paint a picture of a happy family life as an addition to the well-established premonition and fade away in bachelors.

Perceiving this perspective, he felt more strength in himself in the search for love - a change in perspective manifested itself in a more sociable behavior. Likewise, one woman who had hoped for a lot was intimidated by an unwanted half of her hopes and rarely did anything to fulfill her hopes. She has learned to erase the inner images of frightening possibilities. And when she was left with only one desired result appearing before her in her imagination, she changed her experience to a premonition. For her, it was expressed behaviorally through the fulfillment of everything that led to the realization of the future.