Belief Makers

In designing exercises to go with Teflon's series on Option basics, I first thought to write about identifying beliefs and whether or not they were happiness fueling. Then it occurred to me that I might want to start with something more basic, so I moved to situations (stimuli) that cause responses. But then it occurred to met that even this might not be basic enough, so I decided to start with responses. Before we look at beliefs or stimuli, we want to learn to identify our responses and whether or not they're happy, unhappy or neutral.

Think about it, how many times have you asked someone whose face was turning red and whose voice was getting increasingly louder whether or not he was angry, and he responded, "No! I'm not angry!"

In those moments we deny what is being observed because we have judgments about being angry. "Being angry is bad", so we respond with "I am not angry". So, the first step in applying Option is to identify our responses and whether or not they are happy, unhappy or neutral. To do this effectively, we must learn to observe ourselves without judgment. You are a little miracle; you can change moods and feelings so fast, it's incredible. You can go from happy to unbelievably angry in just a few seconds. Isn't that wonderful!

My thinking is that these exercises will be self-extinguishing. After you do them for a while, the new thought processes will become so automatic that you do not have to think about them anymore. Compare it with driving a car. The first couple of times you had to think about everything: giving gas, remembering where the brake was, how to turn on the lights, learning to use the mirror, keeping track of the other cars around you, etc. This is just a partial list of all the things we had to learn, and most of us do it after a while without thinking; we drive on automatic pilot, while listening to the radio or our friends talking to us. Some people even run meetings from behind the wheel.

Exercise 1: I feel... A. Happy or B. Unhappy
Once a day, sit down with a piece of paper or with your computer and write down five things that happened where you felt happy, and five things where you felt unhappy that day. If you do this in the morning, you can take the day before as your inspiration.

Example: (it's early morning here, so I'll draw from yesterday).

I felt happy about:

1. having bought myself a pair of new running shoes
2. having seen some of the Olympics
3. having discussed my blog exercise with Mark
4. having found some good exercises for my legs
5. my dad called to check in with me
   
   

I felt unhappy about:

1. the Myrtle Beach marathon being canceled
   
2. my drinking caffeinated coffee
3. my goose bumps
4. the pain in my knees
5. my Internet connection changing on me all the time

Exercise 2. Symptoms of Happiness/Unhappiness
Now that you have identified some happiness and unhappiness from the last 24 hours, look at your thoughts, feelings, actions and beliefs that accompanied your happiness and unhappiness. For each of the five happy responses and five unhappy responses, write down what you were doing, thinking, feeling and/or believing. What was inspiring about the situations that inspired happiness or unhappiness?

The following answers are each related to my answers to Exercise 1.

Thoughts, feeling, beliefs and actions surround happy experiences.

1. While driving home, I was thinking about how comfortable my shoes would be running. I thought of how I would not have to run with wet shoes because I had a second pair. I told Mark excitingly about it at different occasions during the day with a big smile
2. When I finally found a television station at the end of the day that showed the Olympics I sat myself in front of the television and I didn't move. I was no longer available for conversations, chitchat, or phone calls. I was just present watching.
3. While discussing my exercise with Mark, I first got a little irritated because I created this great exercise that turned out to be too complex to start with. When I recognized I was using frustration, I let go and embraced the conversation to move the exercise in a new direction that would be very useful.
4. I believe that some exercises for my legs and knees are better then others. When I tried out some yesterday, some tension that I had felt building up over the last week disappeared. I realized that I was on the right track. As a teenager I had long lasting knee problems and I believe that I can take actions to avoid this happening again.
5. When I think about the call with my dad, I have to smile. He sounded so happy.

Thoughts, feelings, beliefs and activities surrounding unhappy experiences.

1. My first thoughts regarding the Marathon cancellation were: People have been training for this marathon so long and then it just disappeared on them. If the organization had decided to start later in the day, the weather would not have been a problem. They could have done better. But during the day I started to think: the organization is responsible for people's well-being. They were afraid cars would slide into the runners. Changing the time is hard with so many volunteers who all have their jobs to go to etc.
2. Coffee has a dehydrating effect on me and I am not that good in holding water anyway, so I better not drink it. I tell myself that I shouldn't do this anymore! I judge myself.
   
3. I am writing in the local supermarket cafeteria where it is cold and all my muscles are starting to cramp. I notice that I have a frown on my face and eyes as if this will help warm myself!
4. Over the last week, I started to slowly feel some pain in a tendon around my knee. As a teenager I had lots of knee problems, so I am aware that I have to take this seriously. I started to feel a bit nervous and focus extra attention on it. Only after I realized what I had done in my twenties to get rid of it, and how I could implement that into my daily life, I started to feel OK with it.
5. I have felt a bit out of control with my Internet connection. Some moments it is great, other moments it is gone. Sometimes, the connection drops in the middle of a work phone call and I get irritable. I know irritation does not work with computers, but I am sure as hell trying to make it work!

Exercise 3. Embrace Yourself
By now, you have a written a full page about yourself. The words say something of who you were today (or yesterday). The say nothing about who you will be.

The last step of the exercise is the most important one. Looking straight on at who you were today, it's time to fully embrace and accept yourself. As you read what you wrote look for places that you judge what you felt, thought, believed or did. Then, turn the judgments around by actively accepting yourself knowing that you were doing the best you could in the situation (even if you want to do something else next time).

As you do this, don't rewrite what you did or censor it. Take it straight on without excuses or what-ifs or change. Just see you and accept you. When we censor our actions rather than changing our judgments of our actions, we end up creating a detachment from ourselves and the world around us. The goal is not denial, it's dropping judgments.

So, embrace all you have written down by telling yourself, "Yes, this is who I was today and I am perfect."

Who you are today, doesn't say anything about who you will be tomorrow or one year from now. Changing who you are and how you respond starts with actively acknowledging how you've respond and what you felt, believed, thought and did.

Labels: all blogs, exercises, iris tuomenoksa, option

Over the past week or so, we've been digging into the basics of the Option philosophy and it's application to unhappiness. Option is a moving-away from method. We start with whatever it is we're unhappy about, we look it straight in the eye, we take it apart and ferret out the root belief that is causing it, and then we change the belief. All of this is based on moving away from unhappiness, not moving towards happiness. Option is quite effective at this.

Another approach to unhappiness is to simply conduct activities and pursue beliefs that make us happy. We humans have a great advantage over the gods in that we're finite. In order to do any one thing, we have to give up some other thing. Believe it or not, even our unhappiness is finite in nature. Every ounce of unhappiness is an ounce less of something else; every ounce of something else is an ounce less of unhappiness. We can view happiness and unhappiness as a zero-sum game; in the end it all nets out.

Now all you foo-foo types who see happiness as endless, limitless and infinite, just hold on for a minute. Viewing happiness and unhappiness as finite (as a trade-off) is good news. Because they're both finite, we can eradicate unhappiness simply by displacing it with happiness.

Right Tool for the Job
One of the things I've talked about before is the phenomenon of, "If all you have is a hammer, then every challenge looks like a nail."

This phenomenon occurs quite frequently among those of us who enthusiastically put into practice the Option philosophy. Option is great for isolating and breaking down our beliefs that cause unhappiness and then rebuilding them in a way that no longer causes unhappiness. However, Option is not particularly good at making happiness bigger. If you want to displace unhappiness rather than breaking it down, you'll need another tool.

Specificity and Generalization
The reason Option is not particularly good at making happiness bigger is that, by design, Option makes things smaller. The lynch pins that hold Option together are clarity and specificity. We start with a big unhappiness and we break it down into smaller and smaller parts driving towards clarity and specificity. While the big aggregate unhappiness is difficult to get your arms around, the tiny components are much easier to manage.


This is the essence of what makes Option work. All the rest (the questions, the model of stimulus-belief-response) are just a framework to help us get to clarity and specificity.

However, making things smaller doesn't work very well if your goal is to actually make something bigger. That's why, if you've ever tried to use the Dialogue to build up happiness (optimism, positive outlook), it probably hasn't worked very well: certainly not in its pure form.

So, if you want to use displacement as a way to become happier, then you'll want to use something other than Option to do it.

Playing to Your Strengths
The approach to making happiness bigger is basically inverted. Start with something small that you really love, that you really want to do, that makes you happy, but that you don't do or feel you can't do. Call up some positive beliefs about what you want to do and make them bigger. Since specificity breaks down beliefs making them smaller, specificity isn't the way to go. Instead, you want to become more general in order to expand your beliefs.

Now, if you're good at unhappiness, you're undoubtedly good a vague generalizations. I just know that you've said things like, "Sigh... I'll never get past this" or "Why does this always happen just when I'm..." or "I must be the world's worst..." If you're an unhappiness aficionado then using vague generalities should come completely naturally.

All you have to do is re-target your generalizations from your unhappiness producing beliefs to your happiness producing beliefs. Rather than deciding to believe that you could probably lose a few pounds someday, maybe... decide that you're going to become the healthiest most fit person in the world. Rather than trying to get over your self-consciousness and fear of making presentations, decide that you're going to be the absolute best speaker and presenter in your entire company. Making your beliefs big, bold and general is the essence of becoming positive, optimistic and happy.

Since we're displacing unhappiness, once you've come up with your big, bold, generalized happiness fueling beliefs, spend at least as much time thinking, writing and talking about them as you did your unhappiness fueling beliefs.

Hand-in-Hand
Once you've built up some really big, generalized positive beliefs about what you want to do, you can bring specificity back into play in order to discern how to get from point A to point B. Remember, if you want to break things down into easy manageable chunks, Option is great and specificity is the key.

However, here's the kicker. As you get small and specific in terms of your action plan, you want stay big and general in regard to your beliefs. You want to dig into the nitty-gritty details of how to get where you want to go while maintaining really inspiring generalizations of how easy, wonderful and great it's all going to be.

Labels: all blogs, empowerment, mark tuomenoksa, option

A quick note. I missed yesterday. So we have two blogs this morning. Please don't miss Faith Clarke's wonderful post "To Sulk or Not to Sulk" below. Teflon

Regarding Tuesday's blog, More Doing, Less Thinking, Sree commented:

Tef: you say "...there actually is no big unhappiness...it's likely that the big unhappiness is a side effect of other smaller bits of unhappiness". Pray tell us more about this one...it seems to stand all by itself.

So, I thought that I'd dive into the concept of no big unhappiness.

There's an old story that goes something like this:

A guy leaves a bar late at night and comes upon his buddy (who'd left the bar an hour earlier) crawling around the parking lot on his hands and knees.

The first guys asks his buddy, "Hey, what are doing crawling around the parking lot? It's nearly two in the morning!"

The buddy responds, "I dropped my keys and can't find them. I've been crawling around here for an hour!"

The first guy joins his friend in looking for the errant keys, first walking about, then stooping to look, and finally joining him crawling from place to place.

After another hour passes, the first guy comments to his friend saying, "I don't know where your keys could be. There's plenty of light from the street lamp. I'm sure that if they were here, we would have found them by now. Are you sure you lost them here?"

His buddy stands up brushing himself off and declares, "No, I lost them way over there, but the light's much better here."

Where Are You Looking?
If you experience stubbornly persistent, big unhappiness that you'd really like to overcome, then it could just be that you've been looking for answers in the wrong place. The thing about big unhappiness is that it's, well... big. It's bright. It's like a beacon in the night among all the smaller, less brightly lit bits of unhappiness. As such, big unhappiness tends to draw most of our attention while the little bits of unhappiness go unnoticed.

If you've been frustrated in your attempts to use Option to chase down and eradicate your biggest, most elusive forms of unhappiness, you've probably cycled through the same sets of beliefs more than once (or twice, or a perhaps hundreds of times). You've probably dialogued repeatedly covering the same ground and coming to the same conclusions. And yet nothing changes. (For the sake of the theoretically inclined or addicted, I know that something always changes, but, hey, we're trying to get something done here.)

If you've experienced this cycle (or something similar), I would dare to say that doing the same thing another hundred times probably won't get you where you want to go.

Why Not Just Decide?
Let's start with why we need Option in the first place. Remember, Option is for people who don't believe that happiness is a choice. So, the first question would be, "Why don't you believe that happiness is a choice?"

The answer lies in the levels of indirection (the steps) between our unhappiness and the source of our unhappiness. If everything were simply direct cause and effect (A directly causes B), then deciding to be happy would come quite easily. I could simply look at A and decide not to be unhappy about it. However, it's not usually (if ever) the case that cause and effect are so closely related. Usually the source of our unhappiness is several if not many steps removed from the immediate experience.

It seems that every time I've seen people finally overcome persistent unhappiness, it's been because they explored something that seemed to be completely unrelated to their unhappiness. I wrote the other day about a guy whose smoking cigarettes was not so much due to addiction to nicotine as it was to not managing anger. I wrote a while back about how Mark K and my dad overate and overdrank (respectively) in response to feeling depressed... which in turn was a response to being bored... which in turn was a response to inactivity... which in turn...

So, the reason deciding to be happy (in the specific, not the general sense) doesn't work is because the subject of our decision isn't the source of our unhappiness. We decide not to be unhappy about thus and such (our jobs, our partners, our finances, our weight, our schedule), and it doesn't work or it doesn't stick.

A Miracle Cure
The reason that Option is so effective (when properly applied) is that it's great at getting past the brightness and bigness of the immediate, supposed source of unhappiness and ferreting out the root cause of unhappiness. I would venture to say that, correctly used, Option can eradicate any unhappiness with just a single application.

So, the question becomes one of, "what do you mean by 'properly applied' or 'correctly used'?"

Good question.

Although I'm sure I could stretch this out into a long dissertation on the proper application of the Option method to persistent unhappiness, the answer involves just two words: specificity and relevance. Forget theory. Forget stimulus-belief-response. Forget whatever you've learned. We're going back to the 'happy detective'.

Follow the Thread
A couple of metaphors for the Option self-explorer are happy detective and happy alien.

As we explore the beliefs that drive our unhappiness, we take the role of a happy detective who explores all clues no matter how relevant or irrelevant they may seem to be. We take the role of a happy alien who doesn't know anything and therefore can make no assumptions, but instead must ask questions that lead to greater specificity no matter how obvious the answers may seem to others.

When we dismiss avenues of exploration as irrelevant, we end up bypassing potential exit ramps from our cycles of unhappiness. When we dismiss details as unimportant or obvious, we can completely overlook the very answers that we so intently desire.

Betcha a dollar that, if you're someone who consistently experiences the same unwanted unhappiness, it's not just that you suck at Option, but that you specifically suck at pursuing 'irrelevant' paths of exploration with intense specificity and lack of assumption.

No Big Unhappiness
So, back to no big unhappiness. If the causes of our big unhappiness were themselves big, then they'd be big, bright and easy to see. The reason we can't find them is that they're small and hidden in vague irrelevance. Option is great because it's specifically designed to ferret out even the smallest, most seemingly innocent causes of our unhappiness.

When we do Option but leave out specificity and assume relevancy, we throw out the most important two components of the method. We have a beautiful car that has everything but steering and brakes.

I'd like to invite you to revisit some of your big unhappiness and explore it as a happy detective or alien. Nothing is irrelevant, nothing unimportant or insignificant. Drill down with great specificity until you get HD clarity and see what happens.

Teflon

Labels: all blogs, empowerment, mark tuomenoksa, option, philosophy

If you're someone who's struggled for years with the same challenges, then this one's for you. We're going to get over it once and for all.

Running with Iris
As Iris strolled into the house yesterday morning, she proudly announced that she had run four miles. In January, Iris decided to make 2010 really special by doing something she had never done, never would have done and never would have believed she could do. So she decided to sign up for the New York City Marathon in November. Yesterday, after just three weeks of running she reached the four mile mark.

As we talked about her running last night at dinner, Iris pointed out that there were times during her run where she started to feel tired. Her mind would immediately flood with all sorts of thoughts designed to get her to stop: you need to be careful about not getting cramps; you're pushing yourself too hard; you need to save something for tomorrow, and so on.

However, as Iris has been training, she's been paying particular attention to the thought flood phenomenon, and having read a bit about it, she's acquired the habit of simply saying to herself, "Oh, I'm doing it again. I'm just going to get present, focus on my breathing and my running, and not think about anything else."

As we finished our conversation, in summary Iris said, "Yeah, less thinking, more doing!"

Do You Want to Be Happy?
As we've been playing with the question, "What exactly is Option, and what exactly isn't?", one of the concepts that has really caught the attention of many is that, within the Option framework, unhappiness is an involuntary experience that results from beliefs, not a voluntary action. In short, you can be unhappy and not want to be unhappy; happiness is not a choice.

For many of you, this has been a bit of a breakthrough allowing you to get out of the cycle of questioning why you're choosing unhappiness, and get you into the cycle of focusing on the beliefs that are causing your unhappiness. However, I wanted to point out (with far too many negatives) that happiness not being a choice doesn't mean that unhappiness is not a choice.

So, not to mess wif ya, happiness is not a choice, except when it is a choice. In other words, just because you can experience unhappiness for reasons you don't understand doesn't mean that you can't also simply decide to be unhappy.

So, if you're unhappy about something, it may be simply because you want to be. If you're stuck in a cycle or in a specific custom version of unhappiness, the first question would be, "Do you want to be happy?"

Really Bad at Getting Happy?
If in fact, you really do want to be happy, then the next thing to figure out is how to go about it.

If you're someone who uses the Option method and you've spent more than a month (let alone months or years) on the same issue, I would suggest that whatever you're doing ain't working. So, drop the metaphors of the same foot in the same river and notions of incremental growth and change and say it out loud, "I suck at Option!"

Think about it; If you really want to be happy and have access to all these great tools that can help you to become happy instantly, then there's only one viable conclusion, you're really bad at using the tools.

Alternatively, you could say, "It's not me, it's these damned tools!" in which case, I would go with Iris' "less thinking, more doing" or alternatives to Option such as "choosing happiness" or "just stop it!

Applied Option
OK, if you've got this far then:
1. You really do want to be happy
2. You really do buy into Option as a way to get happy
3. You therefore agree that you're not very good at it

The above being the case makes everything else pretty easy. The trick is to distinguish the theoretical underpinnings of the Option philosophy from the practical application of the Option method.

As I listen to many Optiontonians talk about their own cycles of unhappiness or listen to them explaining Option to others, it's kind of like listening to people discussing history, not like people discussing math or music. It comes from the perspective of someone who's memorized a set of rules and looks to experts to tell them which rules are correct and how and when they should be applied. Helping others and themselves often turns into a debate over what is the correct Option way to do thus and such. It's all academic.

This being the case, it's no wonder that people can spend years taking programs at the Institute cycling on the same unhappiness or its variant strains.

So, the key is to get your head out of the books and into the lab. Forget about the theory and get into the application.

Starting Small
Let's say that you were teaching a child to play the piano. Would you start with the Chopin Etudes (where the metronome is clicking along at 180 beats per minute and the page is black with notes), or would you start with Mary Had a Little Lamb? If you wanted to run a marathon, would you start with running a marathon, or would you start with a walking a mile? If you were teaching a teenager to drive, would you throw him into the middle of the Indy 500, or would you take him out to an empty parking lot? (BTW, these aren't really questions.)


Of course, we'd always advise people to start small and develop their skills. Yet, if you look at how people apply Option, they typically aim it at their biggest unhappiness, the one that is most pervasive and long lived, the one that is most stubborn and difficult to deal with. And then they wonder why Option isn't working. Well, to put it simply, duh!

The Option method is something to be learned, practiced and developed. It's not like taking a pill or applying a patch or putting your leg in a cast, it's a skill. If you think of Option in this light, then you would want to start out with something a bit less challenging than the biggest unhappiness in your life. Don't worry about having enough material. If you've got something that big in your life, then you no doubt have many smaller things as well.

As you apply Option to smaller bits unhappiness, you get better at the process. As you get better at the process, you can take on larger bits of unhappiness. And so on.

There is No Big Unhappiness
The final bit here is that there actually is no big unhappiness. If you're struggling with a pervasive and persistent unhappiness that you really want to change, in addition to your being really bad at applied Option, it's likely that the big unhappiness is a side effect of other smaller bits of unhappiness. As you take care of those, the bigger one will dissipate.

So, before taking on why you hate your mother, you might want to start with something simpler like why you don't like broccoli. Before you take one why you can't lose all that weight, you may want to start with why you get bored with conversations that aren't focused on you. Before you take on why you could never finish a marathon, you may want to work on why you always take the elevator even if it's just one or two flights up.

So, enough thinking, it's time to start doing. Start small and make it big!

Teflon

PS If you're looking for a training partner or coach, I would suggest that you not take advice from theoreticians (people who know Option still cycle in their own unhappiness). One of the great things about the mentor certification program is that the mentors are required to put their theory into practice oftentimes being asked to completely resolve in one night an unhappiness that has plagued them for years. If you're going to train and grow with someone, you want to do it with someone who has this level of skill, not simply knowledge.

BTW, this needn't be someone whose done even more than a week or day of training in the Option philosophy. Iris and I have friends who as soon as they got it, everything clicked and they were on their way without ever needing another ounce of instruction. Lose the theoreticians and find the practitioners.

Labels: all blogs, empowerment, mark tuomenoksa, option, philosophy

If you've ever read the side panel of a bottle of medicine, you've seen the words "active ingredients". The medication may contain many ingredients such as coloring and materials that allow it to take the form of a pill or a capsule. However, these are all simply packaging designed to help get the active ingredient from the medicine bottle to where it needs to be in your system to do it's work.

In applying Option, all the discussion about beliefs, stimuli and responses are the packaging creating a delivery system for the active ingredient: specificity. Without specificity, the rest of the system doesn't really work.

At a high level, the framework goes something like:

1. Identify the unwanted reaction or emotion that you would like to change (response)
   
2. Identify situations in which you experience that response (stimuli)
   
3. Identify what you believe about that situation that is leading to your response (belief)
   
4. Disassemble that belief into its component elements looking for gaps in logic and flaws in assumption
5. Reassemble the belief filling the gaps and fixing the flaws
6. See how you feel based upon the new belief

Without specificity, the framework represents the drug delivery system; it's the drug without an active ingredient, a placebo. However, as we learn to apply specificity to each of the above steps, we empower the framework to help us make really big changes quickly.

Getting Clear and Specific
Let me preface the following discussion by saying that the examples below are just an illustration, not a guide to "picking the right question". Let's start with step one. In helping someone with self-exploration, you might ask, "What would you like to explore?"

And they might respond, "I'm really unhappy!"

You're next question could be any of:

1. Why are you unhappy?
2. What are you unhappy about?
3. What do you mean by 'unhappy'?
   
4. When do you get unhappy?
5. Why don't you just decide to be happy?
   

So, which question would you pick? The answer lies in applying three basic rules of thumb:

1. When it comes to the structure of the exploration, you're the expert helping the self-explorer shine the brightest light possible on what he wants to explore. However, when it comes to the content of the self-exploration you're 100% clueless and therefore incapable of making any reasonable assumptions. Even if you think you know what the other person is talking about, you don't.
   
2. You have absolutely no answers or advice to give, not even answers or advice in the guise of a question. All you can do is ask clueless, structured questions.
3. As the facilitator, you don't set the goals or determine the path of exploration; you simply provide structure, and help drive towards clarity and specificity.

Given the above, question #1 kind of jumps to the end game skipping the structure altogether; however, it can often be construed into 'what are you unhappy about' which can be useful. Question #2 is good in that it's leads to greater specificity and clarity, but indirectly. Question #4 moves right into step two of our process, identifying situations where we experience the unwanted response, but we still don't really know what the response is. Question #5 isn't a question.

However, coming from a totally clueless place and wanting to drive towards greater specificity and clarity, we'd want to ask question #3: "What do you mean by 'unhappy'?"

This may seem a bit counter intuitive, you know, "He said he's unhappy! So, he's unhappy. What more is there to figure out?"

However, we don't know whether unhappy means afraid of losing his job or dissatisfied with his partner or angry at the guy who just cut him off in traffic. So, before exploring the causes of the unhappiness, we might want to start with understanding what the explorer means by 'unhappy'.

Specificity Trumps Structure
Let's say that the explorer says, "I'm afraid of losing my job!"

Sometimes, in our attempts to uncover beliefs, we might stop following and start leading the explorer asking the question, "Why do you believe you're going to lose your job?"

However, the explorer didn't actually say that she believed she was going to lose her job; she just said that she was afraid of losing her job. So, the more useful question (driving towards clarity and specificity) would be, "What about losing your job makes you afraid?"

The explorer might respond with:

1. "If I lose my job, I won't have enough money for rent", or,
2. "If I lose my job, I won't be able to see my friends at work any more", or,
3. "If I lose my job, I'll have to spend more time at home."

With the basic statement, "I'm afraid of losing my job", you simply don't have enough information to ask about a belief. So, you want to keep moving towards specificity.

Even with the above answers all representing beliefs about the future, we would still not want to ask, "Why do you believe that?" Instead, we would want to ask for more specificity. We might want to ask about which friends at work she'd miss or what about spending more time at home makes her afraid.

The reason for this is that getting to beliefs without specificity can lead to conclusions that lack depth and staying power. If you were to simply ask: "Why do you believe that losing your job will mean that you won't get to see your friends", you might get an answer such as, "I guess it wouldn't mean that; I could still see my friends."

You'll have modified a belief, but in a way that actually masks what's really going on for the explorer. You still wouldn't know the explorer's motivation for seeing her friends. Is it as comrades or as colleagues? Is it social or business? Without these details, the results of the exploration can feel a bit off and unsatisfying.

Dialogue Placebos
In the end, it's the specificity and clarity that we bring to beliefs that allow us to change beliefs in a way that is meaningful and lasts. Without specificity and clarity, we can end up dismissing beliefs as irrational or stupid without ever uncovering the rational and brilliant reasons we had for them.

I know a man who struggled for years to quit smoking. After a couple of dialogues in which he explored his "addiction" with great specificity and clarity, he came to the realization that he didn't smoke because he was addicted, he smoked because he used smoking to cope with anger. As he started working through his anger, he commensurately reduced his smoking, until he stopped altogether.

Smoking is a great example of something we make many assumptions about. If his dialogues had gone with those assumptions instead of driving towards greater clarity and specificity, he might still be smoking today.

Homework
Over the next couple of days, spend time in conversation working towards clarity and specificity and following the conversational thread established by the other person. Become aware of the times where you make assumptions without asking for clarification, where you redirect the conversation rather than following the thread, and where you lack the specifics to really know what the other person is talking about.

Forget about beliefs. Forget about judgments. Forget about happiness and unhappiness. Just be clueless, interested and agenda free.

I'd love to hear what you experience as you conduct this little exercise. I'd also love to hear what others experience as you conduct this little exercise.

Specifically, Teflon

Labels: all blogs, mark tuomenoksa, option, philosophy

So we've been having lots of fun with the distinction between choosing happiness and choosing Option. If you recall from my last blog on the topic, Is Happiness a Choice?, we started with the statement that Option is the second best way to become happy, the first is to simply decide to be happy. We went on to see that, if you're actively working through your unhappiness using Option, then in that moment you're actively not believing that happiness is a choice.

Judging Option
This last statement drew some interesting responses via email, phone calls and from Iris, so let's clarify it a bit more:

fundamentally, using Option is just like using cocaine, but with different side-effects.

Iris asked me, why such an extreme example. I think extreme examples often provide much brighter light and greater clarity.

I haven't used cocaine myself, but what I understand from people who have is that cocaine leaves them feeling clear, focused, confident and energetic. In my experience, working through and reconstructing my beliefs leaves me clear, focused, confident and energetic. Cocaine of course has many potent and undesirable side effects (loss of taste and sense of smell, breakdown of nasal cartilage, addiction, financial ruin, prison) that Option doesn't have, but nonetheless, both are ways to become happier that don't involve simply choosing to be happier.

Using Option to become happier is fundamentally no different than using food or money or sex or drugs or medication or psychoanalysis or diet and exercise; your happiness is a side effect of having changed beliefs, not a direct effect of having decided to be happier. All the above can lead to greater happiness; they just vary in their cost, accessibility, effectiveness and unwanted side effects.

I believe that many of us have judgments about good ways to become happier and bad ways to become happier and therefore set Option apart as though it were fundamentally different. It's not; it's just better. Option (the philosophy, not the place or trademarked versions) is simple, is easy to learn and practice, doesn't require special training or degrees, is free to anyone who wants it, has no lasting side effects, can be used any time and anywhere, and it works. Hence, better.

Still, if you could take a happiness pill that had no undesirable side effects, cost nothing and was available everywhere, I would take the pill. If you would have issues with that, then you probably have judgments about Option versus other methods of becoming happier.

Get Over It
Most of what I learned about Option, I learned from tapes that Bears recorded in the early eighties. Although a bit pricey at $160, they're available on CD from his publishing company Option Indigo and I recommend them if you want to get back to the classic Bearsian Option.

One of the things that really hooked me on Option is when Bears said something on the order of, "Ultimately, Option is a self-extinguishing process."

As we practice Option, we build evidence that happiness is indeed a choice. At some point, the evidence tips the scale and we try out deciding to be happy rather than working through beliefs to get happy. As we get better at choosing happiness, our choosing happiness displaces working through beliefs; before we know it, you've become someone who doesn't need Option to be happy: someone who just decides to be happy.

I imagine that when Bears started the Institute, he didn't envision people becoming Option junkies and coming back over and over again to rekindle what he envisioned as a self-extinguishing process. I'm sure that he would have seen repeat offenders as an indictment of what was being taught or how it was being taught. In the end, the effectiveness of how Option is taught and applied can be measured by how quickly it becomes unnecessary. I can't think of a better quality for a product than it's being self-extinguishing.

Wanna Don't Wanna
The other concept that seemed to grab a lot of you is that, within the framework of Option:

Unhappiness is an involuntary experience that is a consequence of beliefs, not a voluntary action. Therefore, one can simultaneously be unhappy and want to be happy.

There is a pervasive belief among many schooled in Bearsian Option that if you're unhappy, it's because you want to be unhappy. Within this school of thought, to say, "I don't want to be unhappy, I just am" would be considered inauthentic and not useful.

This belief is particularly counter productive if your goal is to become happier. By insisting that you must want to be unhappy when everything inside you is screaming, "but I don't want to be unhappy!", you end up looking for answers in all the wrong places. This belief appears to walk hand-in-hand with a judgment that unhappiness is bad.

If instead, you simply view your unhappiness as an unwanted experience that you want to change, you can approach it without judgment and you can start looking in more productive places. Rather than endlessly exploring, "why do I say I want to be happy, when my unhappiness is a clear indication that I want to be unhappy?", you can actually start exploring "why am I unhappy?"

Blue Pill or Red Pill
While talking with Mark K last night about the wanna/don't wanna debacle, he said, "Now that I see I can be unhappy while wanting to be happy, I'm not so sure that I want to be happy! I mean, I might lose all my friends."

When I asked him about this, Mark responded, "At least 90% of my conversations with people are about unhappiness: things we don't like about ourselves and others, things we want to change, and so on. If I were happy all the time, what would I talk about?"

This go me thinking about the happiness pill (or based on the work that Jonathan has been doing, perhaps the happiness chip). And the question that came to mind is this:

If I were to offer you a free pill that you could take once and from then on be happy without any side effects (from the pill), would you take it?

I'm quite curious about how you might answer and why, so I started going through reasons we might have for not wanting happiness. See if any of them resonate with you.

Happiness is Uncool
I think the biggest reason that many of us have for hanging on to unhappiness or not letting it shine too brightly is social acceptance. It starts way before we become teenagers trying to fit in with the cool crowd. At very early ages we begin to learn the benefits of guilt and remorse. We learn that, if we feel badly about what we've done (at least outwardly), then adults don't punish us as harshly as when we don't.

To simply say, "I understand now that my actions have displeased you and therefore I will not repeat them" doesn't in any way go as far as "Oh, mommy, I'm so so so sorry. I feel horrible. I'll never ever do that again!"

Big displays of unhappiness can be quite effective in garnering social acceptance.

On the other hand, if you walk around being happy, people begin to dismiss you as lacking depth or unaware or stupid. How can anyone who sees all that's wrong in the world be so happy!

Happy Vegetable
Another reason to avoid the happy pill is the belief that you'd never do anything. Take an inventory of why you do what you do. How much of what motivates you is based on unhappiness or avoiding unhappiness. Of course, every activity involves a mix of motivations, but you gotta ask yourself... Do I work more because I love my job or because I need the money? Do I spend time with my kids more because I delight in them or because I should? Do I get up in the morning more because I can't wait to start the new day or because I gotta get to work on time?

With so much of our daily activity motivated directly or indirectly by unhappiness, it's easy derive that without unhappiness as a motivator, you might end up not being motivated to do anything!

Happy Sociopath
As I've mentioned before, Iris has been reading books by Martin Seligmen about positive psychology. As she's been reading excerpts to me, it's become clear to me that Dr. Seligmen has uncovered some really great ways to become happier and to have a more positive outlook; it's also become apparent that he doesn't always consider ultimate happiness to be a great idea due to the side effects of being completely happy.

Given how we humans interact (and how much of Mark K's time with friends is focused on unhappiness), it would be easy to conclude that it's our shared unhappiness that binds us together as a species. It's our unhappiness that makes us human. If we were to lose it, we would lose our ability to empathize with and care for others.

Happiness Should Be Earned
At the core our work ethic is the idea that I don't deserve things simply because I'm occupying space and using air. I deserve things because I work for them. I believe that many of us apply this to happiness. If we don't work for our happiness, if we don't earn it somehow, we cheapen it and don't value it.

Happy, but Lonely
Of course, if you were happy all the time and weren't motivated to be with people out of obligation or to share in the latest gossip or to listen to and tell sad tales, then you might end up all by yourself. And then you'd be... unhappy?

Happy, but Bored
While talking about losing all his friends if he were to suddenly become happy, Mark K also mentioned that he just wouldn't know what to do with himself. What would happen tomorrow morning if you never, ever again had obligations or fear of the future or regrets from the past or limits on what you could learn? Would you revel in it or panic?

Happy End of the World
The culmination of all the above beliefs about the downside of happiness is that the world would simply fall apart. Imagine if all at once everyone, everywhere were to become happy! It would be as though the glue that holds everything together (businesses, religions, families, countries, marriages, friendships) would dissolve. The result would be chaos.

Is Happiness a Good Idea?
Although I can relate to and understand the above beliefs and others, I don't buy them. There are cases where I see them play out in the moment, but the results we anticipate are coming from a place of unhappiness and fear.

It's not that being happy wouldn't potentially lead to many changes in your life (new job, new career, new religion, no religion, new partner, new location). It's not that many people wouldn't decide that you're no longer their cup of tea. It's simply that, in the end, we do all this unhappiness for one express purpose... to become happy.

In the movie, The Matrix, Morpheus offers Neo the opportunity to leave the matrix forever or to return to it as though nothing had happened.

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

So, what would it be for you, blue or red?

Happy Saturday!
Teflon

Labels: all blogs, mark tuomenoksa, option, philosophy

Wow, we've had a lot of discussion both on and off the blog regarding the basics of Option. Thank you everyone for your comments, emails and phone calls. I thought it might be useful to look at several of the topics we've discussed.

What's the Point
One of the things that I learned from Paul Weichselbaum was to always be asking myself, "So, what?" I think that "So, what?" has become my greatest weapon in my arsenal of productivity. It keeps me from wasting time on activities that are irrelevant to what I'm trying to accomplish, it helps keep meetings on track and productive, and it lets me avoid endless hours of explanation and argument by jumping to the end and asking, "Let's say that everything you're about to explain is true; how would that change what we're doing?"

In a comment on Back to Basics, Ari offered:

I thought this might be relevant...

Bruce Di Marsico, From "Beliefs are not a problem"

"Now the only judgment and beliefs that are really going to affect your happiness are judgments and beliefs that have to do with your happiness. It might not make much of a difference to your happiness for you to make a prediction about where the stock market is going to go, as long as your money, or your lack of it, is not going to be something that you’re going to make a judgment that you’ll be happy about or not.

A person who is really being happy might not make judgments or beliefs about their happiness, but they might make them about anything else, knowing that they are only just judgments, they are only just guesses, they’re only just beliefs, which they’re doing in order to get something or to conduct some business or to negotiate or to relate to someone."

The essence of what Bruce wrote is, "So, what?" We could spend years debating the nuances of judgments versus assessments versus fact-observation, but it all comes down to the question, "why are we looking at these in the first place?"

The basis of the discussion is not the question of 'what is a judgment', it's the question of 'what beliefs have the greatest impact on our happiness' (note, happiness is another term we want to clarify in a bit).

[You might also note that whereas Bears might talk about judgments being an important subset of beliefs, in the text above, Bruce presents them as parallel concepts (i.e., judgments and beliefs), not as super set and sub-set.]

Facts, Beliefs, Assessment and Judgments
Many of us who have learned about the Dialogue as a method of self-exploration or facilitated self-exploration have come to distinguish two basic forms of statement regarding stimuli: Fact/Observation and Belief. Those of us who learned about the Dialogue at the Option Institute^TM and Fellowship have further learned to segment beliefs into Assessments and Judgments.

Let's start with statements regarding the temperature of the air outside. Within the context I've described above:

1. "It's -1 degrees" would be an example of fact/observation.
2. "It's cold outside" would be an example of assessment.
3. "Shit, it's friggin cold outside!" would be an example of judgment.

In all three cases, we're talking about beliefs. We don't know it's -1 degrees; we just believe it is. Still, one can see that the three statements regarding the temperature vary significantly.

Forget What You Know
Since they seem to cause so much confusion, I'm going to suggest that we abandon the terms: fact/observation, judgment and assessment, and instead look at the process in the following way. (Don't worry, we can resurrect these terms later.)


Please note that the following explanation by way of introduction presents what is ultimately a cyclical process linearly. Also, please note that the above diagram is not to scale; however, beliefs actually are green.

Our world is crowed with gazillions of stimuli which are illustrated in the diagram above in orange. Of the gazillions of stimuli only a small number fall into our awareness (we'll talk about that process later.) Our minds are crowded with zillions of beliefs (represented in green); these beliefs vary in emotional charge. Some are quite positively charged (happiness fueling beliefs), some are negatively charged (unhappiness fueling beliefs), and some don't have much charge one way or the other.

As various stimuli enter our awareness, we engage a subset of our beliefs that we consider relevant to the stimuli. For most of us, this process happens so quickly that we would call it automatic. However, I would suggest that we simply view it as really fast thinking.

As we engage relevant beliefs, they form a filter through which we experience the stimuli that have entered our awareness. It's the beliefs that actually lead to our emotional responses. If we engage happiness-fueling beliefs, then we respond happily. If we engage unhappiness fueling beliefs, then we respond unhappily. In fact, one might say that our happiness is directly proportional to the net sum of the charges on the beliefs we engage.

For example, let's say that you encounter someone you're quite fond of. Your Happiness Quotient might be computed based on several (oversimplified for the sake of illustration) beliefs illustrated below.

Belief	Charge
He's wonderful	+6
I need him	-3
He's not going to want to be with me	-5
Happiness Quotient	-2

So What?
In the end, whether or not a statement is fact/observation or belief, whether or not a belief is a judgment or an assessment is not particularly useful; I would go so far as to say it was simply intellectual masturbation.

What actually matters is what beliefs you engage and the degree to which each of them fuels either happiness or unhappiness.

Both factors are important as the same belief experienced by two different people can have completely opposite happiness fueling effects.

All the above only matters insofar as it helps us achieve our goals, which in this case are generally to become happier and specifically to guide our self-exploration in a way that helps us ask the most meaningful questions.

Working Backwards
A great way to keep yourself on track with what's most important (i.e., most relevant to accomplish your goals) is to work backwards from the goal.

If our goal is to become happier (however you want to define happier), then let's start there. Working backwards from a goal of being happier, we fundamentally have two choices, we can look at situations where we're already happy and make our happiness bigger; or, we can look at situations where we're unhappy and turn them around. Option is particularly good at the latter, and not particularly good at the former (I'll explain more about this in another article.)

Working backwards as we apply option to modify our unhappiness works something like this.

1. We look at situations in which we manifest the specific unhappiness we'd like to change
2. Once we've identified a situation, we dig into it looking for specific stimuli that result in our unhappiness.
3. Having isolated those stimuli, we then look at our beliefs regarding them.
   
4. As we look at those beliefs, we identify ones that have particularly strong charge
5. We then dig into the beliefs with the strongest charges becoming more and more specific
6. As we become specific in our understanding of our beliefs, we identify gaps or flaws in our logic and/or potential faults in our assumptions
7. As we identify these gaps and faults we can choose to keep them, fill them, change them etc.
8. Changing the beliefs changes the charges associated with them which in turn changes our response.

Stimulus->Belief->Response or Response->Stimulus->Belief
As Iris and I talked about all this yesterday, we realized that the structured presentation of concepts and techniques as a sequence can be misleading when it comes to applying them to the real world. For example, we can talk about the process of stimulus-belief-response. Stimuli pass through beliefs that yield responses. This is a great conceptual model, but the sequence is not particularly useful in discovering why we do what we do.

The application of stimulus-belief-response in conducting self-exploration is most effective when done in the sequence: response then stimulus then belief. We start with the response that we want to change (e.g., what would you like to explore today), we identify the stimuli that seem to trigger the response (e.g., what's an example of a time when you responded that way), and then we look at our beliefs regarding those stimuli (why do you belief that...)

That's it for this morning: much more to come.

An Invitation
As you know, the Belief Makers blog is completely open to your commentary. Please let me know if you agree, disagree, see something totally off or something that's really working for you. Also, if you would like to contribute and article on this or any other relevant topic, please let Iris know via the FaceBook group and we'll get you in there.

Happy Sunday, Teflon

Labels: all blogs, mark tuomenoksa, option, philosophy

Based on a bunch of discussions I've had of late as well as some of the comments I seen on various blogs and discussion groups dedicated to the Option philosophy, I thought it might be good to get back to basics.

Before starting, I want to be clear that I have absolutely no credentials to speak of; I'm not certified in any way in regard to the Option philosophy. I imagine that I'm the last person on the planet that Bears would want talking to anyone about Option. Also, I would note that if you're someone who actually looks at credentials to validate what someone is saying, well... please stop now.

Clarifying Terms
Once upon a time (in the early 70's or late 60's), a man named Bruce Di Marsico invented something that he called the Option Method (and at times, Option Therapy or the Option Process). I would note that under the threat of severe saber rattling, I feel compelled to let you know that the latter is a registered trademark of the Option Institute which is itself an unregistered trademark of Barry Neil Kaufman. I know, it's silly and perhaps unbelievable, but people literally get all sorts of nasty-grams for not appropriately referencing the Option Institute and its founders. Sigh...

Anyway, as far as I can tell, all the core principles of Option such as stimulus-belief-response and the method of talk therapy referred to as the Dialogue all originated with Bruce.

Among the small group of people to whom Bruce taught the Option Method was Barry Neil ("Bears") Kaufman. Bears subsequently wrote several books about the Option Method, renaming it the Option Process® which he trademarked. He also established a really wonderful place called The Option Institute and Fellowship, which is a 5013c n0n-profit religious organization that among other things offers workshops that facilitate experiential learning the Option Process. The tag line for The Option Institute^TM (trademark of Barry Neil Kaufman) is "A place for miracles", and I must say that, in my experience, it is.

All this is to say that, when I refer to Option, I'm referring to the core system of philosophy that originated with Bruce. I'm not referring to Bruce's specific instantiation (The Option Method) nor Bears' trademarked version of the same (The Option Process) nor the non-registered trademarked place that Bears established called The Option Institute; I'm just talking about the philosophical core.

The Foundation
Bruce's critical insight that forms the basis for everything else is simple: our emotions are voluntary actions, not involuntary reactions. Everything we feel is something we do, not something that happens to us. Being something that we voluntarily do, every emotion, every feeling is a choice. In particular, for Bruce and Bears, happiness is a choice.

Labels: mark tuomenoksa, option, philosophy