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Now I want you to return to your trios for another fifteen minutes to experiment with some of the things we've been talking about in regard to the checklist. Try out different ways to represent your examples, and use your felt sense of its stability or strength as a guide to how you can make that aspect of your self-concept even stronger and more durable. Anything you do to make it stronger will also tend to make it more sensitive to the discrepancies that provide feedback about how well your behavior is aligned with your self-concept. Again I suggest that you start by silently experimenting in your own mind, and then share and assist each other in playing with this.

Do you have any questions or comments now, after another opportunity to experiment with these elements of self-concept?

Al: When I was examining my examples, there were a few that were actually examples of my not having the quality. I think those must be "important, and I wonder why you haven't mentioned them.

Those counterexamples are very, very important, and we'll spend a lot of time with them later. For now I want to ignore them, because I want to build a solid foundation of basic understanding before we explore counterexamples. All these things are going on at the same time, so the sequence of our exploration is somewhat arbitrary, but I have found that it is very useful for you to have a thorough understanding of some simpler aspects of self-concept before learning about counterexamples.

Summary

We have been exploring how you select and assemble examples into a structure that provides a basis for your knowing that you have a quality. We have examined the effects of a number of very important process variables: number of examples, location, simultaneous/sequential, modalities, association, and submodalities.

We have also been finding out how changes in these variables also affect the content that is represented in your database. All these elements make a quality of your self-concept more durable and more responsive to feedback at the same time. This is the first step in transforming yourself: making the qualities that you like even stronger and more sensitive to feedback.

Keep in mind that the structures that we have discussed are only a very small sample of the many ways that someone can put these variables together to provide a basis for knowing who they are. However, now you have some generalizations about these processes, that will enable you to explore and understand the structure of anyone's qualities, even if it is quite different from the ones we have discussed.

I'd like you to take a minute or two to reflect back on when we began this exploration a short time ago. When I first asked you to turn inside to find out how you thought about this quality in yourself, you were probably a bit confused, because it is something that is usually unconscious and out of your awareness. But like many other aspects of our mental functioning, it is available to consciousness if we take the time to turn inward, ask the right kind of questions, and be sensitive to our responses.

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Exercise 4-2 Changing Your Self-concept

piter239 18 января 2007, 15:14 в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

Exercise 4-2 Changing Your Self-concept (trios, 15 minutes)

Again I want you to start by silently exploring your own experience for about five minutes, guided by these questions, and then share and discuss what you found with the others, and help each other find out what you do by observing nonverbal gestures and asking good questions.

After you have shared, I want you to start experimenting with changing elements of your database, and noticing how that changes your experience of it. One thing you can do is to go down the checklist, changing each of the variables that I have listed. Try adding or subtracting examples in your database. Whatever number you have, try making it considerably more or less. If your database is sequential, try making it simultaneous, and vice versa. Try adding or subtracting modalities. Find out what difference it makes to associate into an example as if you were there, and then dissociate by stepping back out of it and seeing it as if it were a still picture or a movie on a TV set. Play with changing the submodalities that you use in the database, making the pictures or sounds more or less intense, making them closer or farther away, larger or smaller, etc.

Another way to explore is to try on the ways that the others in your trio use. If you have about five large examples spread out right in front of you, and one of your partners has thirty smaller ones off to her left, try doing it her way. Make only one change at a time, so that you can notice how each change affects your experience. First you might add in twenty-five examples to the five you already have, and see what difference that makes. Then change back to the five you started with, and just make them smaller. Then change them back to your original five again, and move them off to your left. Finally, try making all these changes at once, so that you can experience the same thing that she does.

As you experiment, the main thing I want you to notice is how each change affects your feeling of certainty or solidity about your self-concept. In the example I gave, you can compare the difference between having five examples and having thirty. Which one feels stronger—more real or true? This feeling is a good indication of the durability or strength of your quality. Start with five minutes of silently using the checklist to examine your own experience, before sharing and experimenting with the others in your trio.

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Checklist 4 Process Elements of Self-concept

piter239 18 января 2007, 15:12 в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

Checklist 4 Process Elements of Self-concept

Number of Examples. How many examples are in your database? (roughly) One, five, thirty, a hundred?

Location. Where are your examples in your personal space?

Simultaneous/Sequential. Are examples available to you simultaneously, all at the same time, or sequentially, one after the other (or both)?

Modalities. Are all major modalities included? (visual, auditory, kinesthetic feeling)

Association. Can you easily step into, and associate into any example?

Submodalities. (Submodalities are the smaller elements within a modality.) Which submodality elements (size, brightness, distance, movie/ still, tonality, volume, etc.) make them robust and substantial, real and convincing to you?

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Exercise 4-1 Discovering Your Self-concept

piter239 18 января 2007, 14:50 в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

на русском языке упражнений пока нет, есть на английском:

Exercise 4-1 Discovering Your Self-concept (trios, 15 minutes)

I want you to get together with two other people to form a trio, and enjoy a short discovery exercise. I assume that you have already identified some quality or characteristic in yourself that you are sure of, and that you like. As soon as you sit down together, I want you to close your eyes, and silently explore your own experience for about five minutes, asking the

question "How do I know I'm ?" It should be fairly easy to identify the summary representation; probably you have already done that. I want you to spend most of your time examining your database of examples to find out what that is like. What images, feelings, sounds or words do you have, and where and how do you experience them?

Then open your eyes and take another ten minutes to share your experiences. You can learn a lot just by doing this yourself; you can learn even more by sharing with others, and assisting each other by asking questions. I want you to do this without ever mentioning the content—the name of the quality that you are examining. Talking about the content would only distract you from the task of finding out how you represent the content. Talk to each other only in terms of the structure—the pictures, sounds, or feelings that constitute your database, and how and where you represent them. You can always talk about the content later if you want to.

"Well, I do this and that; what do you do?" Share your experience, and if anyone has any difficulty, assist each other, "Well, how do you do that?" and watch for nonverbal cues and gestures that often clearly indicate the size, distance and location of images or voices, to get the basics of how s/he does this.

I'll give you more specific directions later, but for now I want you to explore on your own. Then we'll get together and discuss what you found. Are there any questions about the exercise?

Tess: Please go over the distinction between the summary representation and the database again.

Perhaps an example will help. I often use kindness when I need to talk about content, because I like kindness, and I think it would be nice if there were more of it in the world. You could have an internal voice that says, "I'm a kind person," but that general statement doesn't specify what kindness actually is. However, your database contains a wealth of examples of how to talk kindly, act kindly, touch in a kind way, think of kind words to say, kind things to do, etc.

From now on we will be working almost entirely with your database, because this is where the real information about your self-concept is. That is where you can transform yourself by making profoundly useful changes in how your self-concept functions. Out of all the experiences that you have had, over however many years you have been on the planet, how do you know that you are a kind person—or that you are tenacious or sensitive to others, or whatever your chosen quality is? Which experiences do you represent, and more important, how do you represent them? When you make changes in the database, you can really make your self-concept work well— but before you change anything, it's important to know what is already there.

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