From the category archives:

Be Less Certain

Hector Projector strikes again

I find some benefit sometimes from exploring the thought that What you want others to do is what you want you to do. For example, the other day I was getting annoyed with a Person I Care About. I was struggling with a deadline, and this Person was not behaving how I wanted them to [...]

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If only this were my real life

I”ve been playing with long-standing productivity-and-guilt patterns recently. It’s like there’s this shadow life that I’m meant to be living, where I’m all efficient and productive and stuff. The productivity threshold for this life is set incredibly high. If I do not have a full-seeming day where I complete six or seven major things in [...]

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Surviving the dangers of getting advice

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself hearing how certain someone says something, and treating their words as if they were true. Especially if I don’t have a very fixed opinion on the subject, or if I feel ill-informed. The corollary of putting the Lost Performative back into your own statements is [...]

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And on Saturday I made a superstition

One of the things that everyone, Buddhist or scientist or whatever-psychology-ist, agrees on is that the mind draws a conclusion from sparse data, and, left to its own devices, it then looks for evidence that confirms that conclusion. It’s one of the things that leads us to brilliant discoveries and also that makes us bombastic [...]

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I am not a mind reader and neither are you

Well, seeing as this is a Be Less Certain week, I thought I’d point out a place where’s it’s really quite useful to practice being less certain: people’s intentions. Mindreading – we can’t help it First watch this video based on an experiment done in the 40s by Heider and Simmel (even if you’ve seen [...]

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Opening to uncertainty

So, you know how I talk about how being less certain is an essential part of conflict resolution? Well, wow. Being less (than) certain can be deeply deeply uncomfortable. I wrote yesterday about my spiritual-path crisis (as a result of being less certain – ironic, eh?) What I notice today is that I’m feeling such [...]

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The danger of being less certain

So, it turns out that being less certain can be a bit dangerous. I’m having a spiritual-path crisis and I think I made it happen by following my own advice. Never doing THAT again. Bit o’ background About six years ago, I started studying with a meditation school, basically because I was training in a [...]

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Beware A and B

Here’s a tool that’s helping me out with the Being Less Certain. Tiny bit of meta-blogging So, obviously, the Internal Expert wants everything to be flagship life-changing content, and so I’ve been frozen on putting this idea into words for days. I’m working on getting better at aiming for a small step in the direction [...]

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Provisional thoughts about being less certain

Part One of my Grand Manifesto for Resolving Conflict and Fighting Less is: Be Less Certain (This is the second version of this post – I started with a really expert-y one, with quotes and sections, and references. It was, as my old colleague Zoe might have said, lame-O. Be glad I pressed delete.) So [...]

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