most people have had the experience of being able to articulate advice that they themselves do not follow, even though it applies to their situation as well
Making an appointment with your own wisdom
19 tweets · November 2022 · 86 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
usually this implies that there’s some sort of internal conflict present—a competing commitment that gets in the way of doing the thing that the person might consider reasonable
but sometimes it's more a matter of simply not taking the time to apply your own wisdom to your own situation. your friend came to you asking for help, maybe, but you're too stuck in the weeds the solution: make an appointment with your own wisdom
put an event on your calendar, and treat it with the respect you’d give any other appointment which is to say: show up or, if for some reason it turns out you can’t, then reschedule for the nearest appropriate time
then, when the time comes, take your own advice. You can do this literally—consider what advice you’d give a friend in your situation, then do that—or you can just do the obvious thing
you can do this with specific object-level situations, eg “I need to get around to submitting that application” or with more abstract things like “I really should take more time to reflect on my life.”
tip 1: get clear on what the plan is once the appointment starts, don't take more than 5 minutes to figure out how you're going to spend it you don't need to have a perfect plan, you just need a decent one
tip 2: make an appointment with someone else if there's a chance you simply might not show up, put a time on the calendar with a friend. you'll still mostly introspect during the hour, but having social accountability will make it happen at all
the overall principle:
a case study: our GCI workshops we've been running Goal-Crafting Intensives for the last 5 years or so: an online workshop where people take a few hours to strategize about their year people say the videos & exercises are great—they are! dense & powerful twitter.com/BenRatkaj/stat…
people also say the live coaching is great and it is—we know our stuff and we're prepared to improvise
those aspects are great, but it's easy to focus on these and miss how much of the power of the event comes from the container the most important part of the workshop isn't the content, it's that the person sets aside 5 hours to be strategic, and shows up twitter.com/abhayance/stat…
if I imagine two ppl… Allie buys the presentation videos and the handbook plus the ability to get some chat-based coaching. Barry buys a ticket to “Open Goal Setting Afternoon” which is just a 5-hour solo-work context of some sort. who has the better year? my money's on Barry!
Allie would probably never actually open the handbook at all, let alone watch the videos. and even if she did, she would be likely to read it partway and then say, “hmm yeah I really should do these exercises” …but still not actually do them. or give up before getting anywhere
whereas Barry, who only has his own advice to take, is at least taking the time to do the best he knows how to do. and that's what counts. that's why even tho the GCI is 5h long, it's mostly not made of presentations, it's made of work sessions
and as of a few years ago, the whole workshop itself is self-paced, which is vital to allow it to blow the minds of a huge range of people: - seasoned productivity nerds who think they've seen it all - those totally new to the world of intentionality - &+
our workshop format a best-of-both-worlds combo of self-paced and cohort-based. and honestly multi-week cohort things are still really easy to end up bailing on compared to a single workshop session
as you may have guessed, we have more workshop sessions coming up so if you want to set aside 5h in which to remix your own wisdom with our suggestions, sign up here! it's pay-what-you-want, so it's hard to waste money on it complice.co/event/gci?tw=m…
if you're someone with a course or training to offer and you'd like to learn more about how to run something with this magical best-of-both-worlds structure, you can read more about that here: (& lmk if you want help with that)