From the monthly archives:

February 2010

On Being Certain – Robert Burton – Lazy Book Review #2

See, I’ve been wanting to write something about Robert Burton’s book for ages. In my personal exploration of how to Be Less Certain, I was thrilled to find a book on that very topic, seeing as I have a hunch (!) that being less certain can help us to reduce fighting and freaking-out in our [...]

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The ‘Question/answer format? Totally overuse it.’ Version – YoO Friday 5/52

This is the Friday review of week 5 of my Year of Opening (because it’s good to itemize my life notice things). In which I try to get the ‘Question? Answer.’ format out of my system, but end up just loving it more. Opening/ calm/conscious/ conflict/ crisis-y type noticings My first reaction is to get [...]

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If the world is provisional, certainty is insanity

These days, when I say, ‘You might be right,’ I often really mean it. I remember when I first started working as an internal training officer (several life-times ago), I attended an assertiveness class. Phrases like ‘You might be right,’ and ‘Could be,’ were labelled ‘Verbal Judo’ or something, and were ways of taking someone’s [...]

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Opening Alarm totally works – YoO Friday 4/52

Crap. Missed last Friday, and now it’s 10.35pm and all I have is notes on my phone. This is the Friday review of week 4 of my Year of Opening (because it’s good to make big declarations about lessons learned notice things). Opening/Calm/Conscious/Conflict/Crisis-y type noticings My Opening Alarm helps. Like a lot. Every hour on [...]

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What feelings want

See, it’s not the feelings that are the problem. It’s what the feelings want. Primary emotions I’ve been looking at what I’m feeling, and notice that there are three primary emotions: Anger, Sadness, Fear. These have lesser siblings: Irritation, Pissed-off-ness, Anxiety. And big Mommas: Rage, Grief, Terror-Panic. (For the moment, we’re ignoring weird meta-emotions like [...]

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My experience of opening

Seeing as I expect to learn some stuff about opening in my Year of Opening, I thought it might be useful to benchmark my experience of opening and see if and how it changes over time. (If you’re freaked out by woo-woo, move along, please). In the past couple of days, I’ve moved opening up [...]

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The One Freak-Out Rule

I’m instituting a new rule experiment (seeing as it’s a listening week). If someone else is freaking out, shut up and listen. In other words, you’re only allowed to freak out if the other person isn’t. Fear and anger make listening hard I’m noticing that when I’m feeling one of the adrenalin emotions (fear, anger, [...]

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Creating a Trigger List and freaking out less

Feelings are almost never fresh out of the box. They are almost always (and I’m saying ‘almost’ just to seem all cool and provisional and fair and not-totally-certain but I really mean always) about something that has happened before. They are (almost) never about what seems to be happening in front of you. We have [...]

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