Thinking Toys

Thinking Toys. Little tricks we can pick up, play with for a moment, and then throw aside as we move on.

See if any of these are interesting to you. Some will be familiar and obvious, whereas others may feel strange and alien.

Pro-hindsight

Simulating what success would look like in order to identify possible prerequisitives you’ve missed.

Effectuation

Exploring affordances to find out more about what’s possible rather than starting off with a narrowly specified goal.

Pre-hindsight

Simulating actions to anticipate failure modes and improve plans.

Presencing

Interrupting habitual patterns of action by bringing awareness to the present moment.

Implementation Intentions

Refactoring your habits to take new actions. Setting an intention to act with a cue-response template.

Miracle Question

A simple question that often generates surprising answers.

Granularizing

Finding a way to make progress without planning the entire path to success. Choosing next actions.

Self-Decomposition

Learning to stand back from distracting or overwhelming thoughts and feelings to examine them more easily. Finding more situations where you can do this.

Useful and not-so-useful ways of bargaining with yourself — between parts of you that desire different things. Bargaining as a mechanism to reduce anxiety, guilt, and distraction, freeing up the energy to focus on one strategy at a time.

Undichotomizing

Practicing the skill of identifying potential false dichotomies and generating alternatives. I find this to be one of the most common problems people run into without realizing.

Curiosity

How to build the skill of empathizing with ideas that rub you the wrong way. Being curious in order to improve our models of the world and thereby be able to act more effectively.

Action Echoes

Framing of action patterns as bundles of future actions as a way to overcome short-term urges. Based on Ainslie’s work in Breakdown of Will.

Tonglen

Technique for the transformation of one mental state into another. Breathing in what you are avoiding and breathing out what you seek. Based on the tantric meditation practice of the same name.

Focusing

Gendlin’s technique for making explicit the complex implicit thoughts and feelings around issues. This allows you to learn more about what you believe and what parts of you are demanding. You can take advantage of this to reduce confusions and anxieties.