Rationalization: Learning Without Development
Rationalization refers to your tendency to explain negatively reinforcing outcomes. Rather than examining both your beliefs about a situation and the behaviors involved, rationalization supports a possible change in behavior without any question of the underlying logic of the behavior and without any question of the social role you have defined for yourself. In many cases, rationalization functions to delay changes in your behavior.
I understand that your powers of reason are well-practiced. In fact, I recognize it as an indication of your potential for greatness. You must entertain all options, though, including the option that the depth of your error extends beyond the current choice and outcome. Your error is in your core definition of your social role. In other words, it is not just the “what you know” that you have opportunity to inform, it is also the “who are you” that needs to be redefined. It is a questioning of thoughts and feelings, knowledge and attitudes, learning and self-development.
I understand that this questioning is often difficult because the patterns of rationalization you employ have been passed down to you by people that you respect and revere: parents, pastors, mentors, and other loved ones. All knowledge must support the search for new knowledge and the potential for change (cognitive flexibility), or it is dogma and does not fit the definition of self-development. Once-for-all knowledge traps you in a mental prison and a developmental rut.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Introduction: 2 of 3
Counterfeiting: Defining Your Community
Counterfeiting refers to the mis-classification of your experiences. More than a mask you put on to deceive the world around you, counterfeiting is deception of yourself. You begin to define peak experiences in terms that lack the power and enduring quality of the genuine peak experience. You train yourself to be contented with an inferior quality of life that, in time, ceases to motivate you. Worse yet, I gain no motivation from your experience. You accept mediocrity as excellence. Depth of insight, genuineness of relationship, clarity of role is judged by how well it fits with your current understanding rather than the height of standard it calls you to obtain.
You begin to mistake counterfeited behavior as acceptable. You begin to display counterfeit behaviors because they look and feel positively reinforcing. But, often the short duration of your reinforcement and the lack of sustainability reveal that, in the long run, the behavior and relationships created on the basis of the counterfeit do not result in achievement of your goals.
The key is to genuine interaction is to risk what you have come to protect, your feelings, and to speak your truth without sparing the feelings of others. The mechanism is to live within the seeming contradiction of valuing others and their opinions and living as a captain, decisive. Knowing the difference between counterfeit and the genuine is to cultivate diverse sources of information. The potential harm of being wrong decreases with the amount of knowledge considered in the deliberation of a decision. And, in the end, the choice is yours to make and to live with…and to celebrate. No matter the outcome, you acted genuinely allowing me to make my decision in an atmosphere of genuineness.
Counterfeiting refers to the mis-classification of your experiences. More than a mask you put on to deceive the world around you, counterfeiting is deception of yourself. You begin to define peak experiences in terms that lack the power and enduring quality of the genuine peak experience. You train yourself to be contented with an inferior quality of life that, in time, ceases to motivate you. Worse yet, I gain no motivation from your experience. You accept mediocrity as excellence. Depth of insight, genuineness of relationship, clarity of role is judged by how well it fits with your current understanding rather than the height of standard it calls you to obtain.
You begin to mistake counterfeited behavior as acceptable. You begin to display counterfeit behaviors because they look and feel positively reinforcing. But, often the short duration of your reinforcement and the lack of sustainability reveal that, in the long run, the behavior and relationships created on the basis of the counterfeit do not result in achievement of your goals.
The key is to genuine interaction is to risk what you have come to protect, your feelings, and to speak your truth without sparing the feelings of others. The mechanism is to live within the seeming contradiction of valuing others and their opinions and living as a captain, decisive. Knowing the difference between counterfeit and the genuine is to cultivate diverse sources of information. The potential harm of being wrong decreases with the amount of knowledge considered in the deliberation of a decision. And, in the end, the choice is yours to make and to live with…and to celebrate. No matter the outcome, you acted genuinely allowing me to make my decision in an atmosphere of genuineness.
Introduction 1 of 3
Redirection: Defining Your Role
Redirection enables what psychologists call fixed action patterns. Fixed action patterns are better known as habits. Some of the habits you practice inhibit your continued learning and self-development. These habits are especially damaging when they are prescribed by institutional bylaws, doctrines, or creeds, which do not change easily. Redirection reinforces your habits while obscuring the reality that your desired future is not being achieved. You begin to see the pattern as productive because you can count on it—not for future success, but for present stability.
Correcting redirection as a protectionist instinct begins with attention to the power and potential of your gifts—to match your view of yourself with a definition of your future success. Defining your future success requires that you take responsibility for your future. You must stop giving in to the temptation to lean on institutions or stable patterns that obscure the fact that you are no closer to your goals than when you began the habit. Risk is the goal, not suffering. Your sweat and sacrifice must yield results.
At its core, redirection is a choice of worldview, specifically perception of the future. At its worse, the question of success is defined as a question of comfort and stability—a definition that does not motivate changes, and therefore, ensures failure. Redirection encapsulates a number of choices you must face in perception of your future and definition of your social role including: to invest or to buy, to energize or to drain energy, to lead or to manage, to captain or to navigate.
Redirection enables what psychologists call fixed action patterns. Fixed action patterns are better known as habits. Some of the habits you practice inhibit your continued learning and self-development. These habits are especially damaging when they are prescribed by institutional bylaws, doctrines, or creeds, which do not change easily. Redirection reinforces your habits while obscuring the reality that your desired future is not being achieved. You begin to see the pattern as productive because you can count on it—not for future success, but for present stability.
Correcting redirection as a protectionist instinct begins with attention to the power and potential of your gifts—to match your view of yourself with a definition of your future success. Defining your future success requires that you take responsibility for your future. You must stop giving in to the temptation to lean on institutions or stable patterns that obscure the fact that you are no closer to your goals than when you began the habit. Risk is the goal, not suffering. Your sweat and sacrifice must yield results.
At its core, redirection is a choice of worldview, specifically perception of the future. At its worse, the question of success is defined as a question of comfort and stability—a definition that does not motivate changes, and therefore, ensures failure. Redirection encapsulates a number of choices you must face in perception of your future and definition of your social role including: to invest or to buy, to energize or to drain energy, to lead or to manage, to captain or to navigate.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Introducing Redirection, Counterfeiting, and Rationalization
Beyond Behaviorist Learning
More than a simple function of automatic and conditioned responses, human behavior is steeped in how you define your role in the world and how you interact with your community. That is, you behave in ways that fit with the way in which you see yourself. You update this view of self in response to interactions with other people. Change in response to interactions or recognized fallacies in your worldview or inconsistencies in your behavior can be productive as you are reflective and open to new information. Inhibiting this productivity is the fact that humans are more comfortable with stable views of the world. The preference for stability may lead to limits in the process of role redefinition and limits in the variety of interactions experienced. When new information is limited in this way you can maintain a stable, reassuring view of yourself and the world around you.
A constant state of chaos is not advisable. As well, considering a change in belief or behavior is no obligation to change. But, when you find that your sense of self and your behaviors are inconsistent, it may be time to map the inconsistency and consider change. What typically occurs though is a redoubling of our protectionist instincts. Redirection, counterfeiting, and rationalization are comfortable processes we use to regain equilibrium without considering change.
More than a simple function of automatic and conditioned responses, human behavior is steeped in how you define your role in the world and how you interact with your community. That is, you behave in ways that fit with the way in which you see yourself. You update this view of self in response to interactions with other people. Change in response to interactions or recognized fallacies in your worldview or inconsistencies in your behavior can be productive as you are reflective and open to new information. Inhibiting this productivity is the fact that humans are more comfortable with stable views of the world. The preference for stability may lead to limits in the process of role redefinition and limits in the variety of interactions experienced. When new information is limited in this way you can maintain a stable, reassuring view of yourself and the world around you.
A constant state of chaos is not advisable. As well, considering a change in belief or behavior is no obligation to change. But, when you find that your sense of self and your behaviors are inconsistent, it may be time to map the inconsistency and consider change. What typically occurs though is a redoubling of our protectionist instincts. Redirection, counterfeiting, and rationalization are comfortable processes we use to regain equilibrium without considering change.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Great Delusion Masking Great Power
The challenge of great delusion, deception, is to corrupt each of these choices by creating safe havens. Safe havens, in this context, are social environments that attend to your presenting need for information with a calming, safe, reaffirming worldview. Through safe havens, you can feel validated in your previous knowledge, confident that you have learned. You exhibit no negatively reinforcing behaviors, and the choice was yours autonomously.
The problem is that you did not lose anything. You participated in a closed-system loop. Input your worldview. Output your worldview. By definition, if you experienced stress in the context of a worldview you held, that worldview cannot be reaffirmed. It must be updated. This updating of your worldview can be termed development. Development requires a loosening of your structured worldview. Development is the process of redefining your role in the context of the world that you perceive. Wisdom is the result of reflective, open-system determination of the best way to use knowledge. Wisdom requires you to see the world in a new way and redefining your place within it.
Simple behaviorism (to be distinguished from radical behaviorism or learning theory, which incorporate cognitive realms) views the process of social role definition as natural process of automatic and conditioned responses. Much like simple learning without development, behaviorism proffers that the response to stress is an attempt to return to equilibrium and low-stress. You have the capacity, as a human animal, to exercise autonomy within a social context. That is, learning can be combined with self-development as an experience beyond the search for reduced stress—to build a view of the world that is fluid and a power within yourself to define a specific role in creating the world around you.
The problem is that you did not lose anything. You participated in a closed-system loop. Input your worldview. Output your worldview. By definition, if you experienced stress in the context of a worldview you held, that worldview cannot be reaffirmed. It must be updated. This updating of your worldview can be termed development. Development requires a loosening of your structured worldview. Development is the process of redefining your role in the context of the world that you perceive. Wisdom is the result of reflective, open-system determination of the best way to use knowledge. Wisdom requires you to see the world in a new way and redefining your place within it.
Simple behaviorism (to be distinguished from radical behaviorism or learning theory, which incorporate cognitive realms) views the process of social role definition as natural process of automatic and conditioned responses. Much like simple learning without development, behaviorism proffers that the response to stress is an attempt to return to equilibrium and low-stress. You have the capacity, as a human animal, to exercise autonomy within a social context. That is, learning can be combined with self-development as an experience beyond the search for reduced stress—to build a view of the world that is fluid and a power within yourself to define a specific role in creating the world around you.
The Semantics of Deception
Learning, Development & the Wisdom of Reason
That feeling that your beliefs contain some logical fallacies is called dissonance. Dissonance precipitates action. Learning can be defined as you attempt to handle feelings of dissonance. Self-development is the result of utilizing learning to redefine your role and increase your information by quantity and sources. You can learn without developing, but you cannot develop without learning.
You certainly have been faced with situations that cause stress. When this stress causes you to question beliefs about yourself and your values it is called dissonance. In dissonant situations, you seek to find more information about the stressor in order to return to your previous, lower stress state. Learning is a way to deal with dissonance. In this way, learning is defined as knowledge acquisition to alleviate anxiety or stress.
This may be why people think that suffering is a way to learn valuable life lessons. The stress of suffering creates opportunity and motivation for learning. Yet, true learning results in behavior change through a process of conditioning. True learning is characterized by autonomy, license, and tangible products. Two issues present here: 1) stress does not always result in positively reinforcing behavior change; and, 2) Learning at its best is entered into willingly so that an awareness of the knowledge in context aligns with motivation to attend to transferrable skills.
Consonance is the opposite of dissonance. The desire for consonance motivates the creation of a structured worldview. That is, you learn to view the world and your place within it in ways that reduce your stress. But, often, this role definition causes stress in itself. Often, your carefully constructed understanding of the world is not sufficient to alleviate stress or explain the tragedies of the world. Because of this, you choose one of two basic options: learn more or refuse to believe evidence. If you chose to refuse to believe, you have to find some social environment in which to shield yourself from opposing views. If you choose to learn more, you have to find a social environment that will inform you.
That feeling that your beliefs contain some logical fallacies is called dissonance. Dissonance precipitates action. Learning can be defined as you attempt to handle feelings of dissonance. Self-development is the result of utilizing learning to redefine your role and increase your information by quantity and sources. You can learn without developing, but you cannot develop without learning.
You certainly have been faced with situations that cause stress. When this stress causes you to question beliefs about yourself and your values it is called dissonance. In dissonant situations, you seek to find more information about the stressor in order to return to your previous, lower stress state. Learning is a way to deal with dissonance. In this way, learning is defined as knowledge acquisition to alleviate anxiety or stress.
This may be why people think that suffering is a way to learn valuable life lessons. The stress of suffering creates opportunity and motivation for learning. Yet, true learning results in behavior change through a process of conditioning. True learning is characterized by autonomy, license, and tangible products. Two issues present here: 1) stress does not always result in positively reinforcing behavior change; and, 2) Learning at its best is entered into willingly so that an awareness of the knowledge in context aligns with motivation to attend to transferrable skills.
Consonance is the opposite of dissonance. The desire for consonance motivates the creation of a structured worldview. That is, you learn to view the world and your place within it in ways that reduce your stress. But, often, this role definition causes stress in itself. Often, your carefully constructed understanding of the world is not sufficient to alleviate stress or explain the tragedies of the world. Because of this, you choose one of two basic options: learn more or refuse to believe evidence. If you chose to refuse to believe, you have to find some social environment in which to shield yourself from opposing views. If you choose to learn more, you have to find a social environment that will inform you.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
The Challenge
Challenge: Your Identity is tied to the Fallacy
The challenge is that you do not believe me. You have been so brainwashed. The current fallacy is so much a part of how you construct your identity that my proposition threatens your core identity. As a matter of self-protection, you resist this new information. I present through this text an exercise in cognitive restructuring that offers a beginning to your reprogramming. I hope you will re-educate yourself and reclaim your power. Note that your resistance (be it anger, confusion, or uncertainty) is the residual inclination toward individual choice—the confirmation that you are not completely lost.
Recognize that this text is not a call to make me a king—to credit me with your re-education and reclamation. Granted, it is not about you, but it is your responsibility. It is your choice ultimately to live in the spirit of the power you were granted in the beginning. It is your responsibility to take your rightful place, to get the information first-hand, to stay in the race and endure. To succeed, you must be able to define roles for yourself, determine truth for yourself, and encourage yourself. This text will point out bread crumbs. It is up to you to choose the path. The single challenge of life is choice, summed up in 7 statements:
1. to manage my desire for purpose and order,
2. to take responsibility for my choices related to knowledge, role, and relationships,
3. to implement my personal choice in a way that encourages responsibility in others,
4. to become the leader of myself (a captain),
5. to inspire leadership in others (time-limited followers)
6. to live within the full potential of who I am, and
7. to achieve beyond what I have achieved.
The challenge is that you do not believe me. You have been so brainwashed. The current fallacy is so much a part of how you construct your identity that my proposition threatens your core identity. As a matter of self-protection, you resist this new information. I present through this text an exercise in cognitive restructuring that offers a beginning to your reprogramming. I hope you will re-educate yourself and reclaim your power. Note that your resistance (be it anger, confusion, or uncertainty) is the residual inclination toward individual choice—the confirmation that you are not completely lost.
Recognize that this text is not a call to make me a king—to credit me with your re-education and reclamation. Granted, it is not about you, but it is your responsibility. It is your choice ultimately to live in the spirit of the power you were granted in the beginning. It is your responsibility to take your rightful place, to get the information first-hand, to stay in the race and endure. To succeed, you must be able to define roles for yourself, determine truth for yourself, and encourage yourself. This text will point out bread crumbs. It is up to you to choose the path. The single challenge of life is choice, summed up in 7 statements:
1. to manage my desire for purpose and order,
2. to take responsibility for my choices related to knowledge, role, and relationships,
3. to implement my personal choice in a way that encourages responsibility in others,
4. to become the leader of myself (a captain),
5. to inspire leadership in others (time-limited followers)
6. to live within the full potential of who I am, and
7. to achieve beyond what I have achieved.
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