(If it is good for me, I must TRY HARD.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
If it is to be valuable, it must be difficult.)
These are common ideas about life and are often true. But the trick is such a stance does not always apply.Counselors, healers and theoreticians wrestle with the best approach to get people to do what is good for them. Sometimes, people trying to stop drinking or losing their temper or buying too much or whatever verbalize an idea about what they should do about the problem and yet they don't follow up on their own idea.
One of the best insights I have heard is from Prochaska's "Changing for Good", where his team of researchers found that one good predictor of successfully giving up smoking (one of the toughest of addictions to break, I have heard) is that the person tried and failed to manage to give up smoking previously. I think most people would predict that a previous failure would predict that the person is a "loser" and would not ever be able to stop. But that is not what the data showed. It showed that later attempts were more successful. In other words, this was a case of trying repeatedly for pay-off.
Another approach that seems valuable to me is that of appraisal theory. The appraisal often takes place extremely rapidly. I look at a shirt and I decide I like it or I don't like it extremely quickly, in just a few seconds. Then, my mind cascades through its typical, habitual pathways into thinking how happy I would be if I had that shirt, which gets me to thinking how unhappy I am with my wardrobe, my whole life - bang! I'm in a bad mood. The whole chain begins with that appraisal of the shirt. The better we know our minds, the better we can question the appraisal.
A third is heuristics as described by Wray Herbert and David DiSalvo. These are thinking shortcuts that our brains can use without notice and that often speed up our decision-making but that may need us into errors. For instance, our familiarity with Earth's gravity makes us extrapolate its pace in other areas such as waxing and waning fashions.
Some things are good for us but are easy. Meditation is an example. It is difficult to fail at meditation since you are only looking at where your mind is. It is an easy thing to do for 30 seconds or 1 minute. We are rarely unable to spare that much time out of a day. Try it again tomorrow or in a day or two. Avoid judging whether you like it or if you do it well.
You can plunge in or just put a toe in.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
