CHAPTER 16

The Method,
More Challenging

In Adopt a New Belief, I told a story about changing my belief walking to my friend’s birthday party in the rain, transforming me from crouching down in misery to striding with confidence.

I left out a few details. That cold autumn evening was almost exactly a year after my “Home Run after Three Strikes” story from the first The Method video, which was my first time implementing The Method. In the intervening year, I had practiced doing The Method many times.

My unconscious thoughts—asking if the cold and rain should make me miserable, leading to my transformation—didn’t just happen. They arose from practicing The Method. As I said I always do, I was walking down the street, gauging my level of reward, saw it was low, and asked myself how I could increase it through changing my environments, beliefs, and behaviors. My questions led me to think of times I felt joy being wet and cold, which told me my target emotion. In this case, I couldn’t change the rain and cold of my environment, but I could change my beliefs, which I did, which led me to change my behavior to striding. Once my environment, beliefs, and behavior were in sync, my emotions followed and I felt confident. When the emotion took root, I felt reward.

This time was special because it was the first time I did it automatically, without thinking or trying. Using The Method effortlessly meant I had mastered the skill of turning misery into reward, like riding a bike. I felt tremendous exhilaration. I knew from handling my emotions in the cold rain that I would be able to handle discomfort on the scale I felt them and likely more.

I’m not saying I expected perfect presence of mind every remaining moment of my life, only that I recognized that I had developed the basics of the skills of personal mastery and resilience that Frankl, Bauby, Zupan, Mandela, and these other great leaders had. Am I presumptuous to compare myself to people who experienced and achieved what these historical figures did? On the contrary. As best I can tell, the reason Frankl wrote his book was to help others—us—create meaning without having to suffer. Why else would he write,

When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves.

I believe he wants us not to suffer like he did.

The Method, More Challenging Exercise

Practice, Practice, Practice

Mastering The Model and The Method take experience, so this exercise repeats The Method with a more challenging application. That is, the exercise is to apply the same steps as those in chapter 15 to a situation that is more difficult to transform.

“More challenging” usually means choosing a situation that will

Take longer to transform,

Involve more intense emotions, or

Affect more parts of your life.

Everyone’s situations are unique, so only you know what situations challenge you more.

I recommend paying closer attention to the reward you feel when your environments, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors fall in sync. Does it come as soon as you start? Before you achieve your external goals? How does it feel? Can you accelerate or increase it?

When I teach in person, some students don’t get The Method to click the first time. If you felt that chapter 15 didn’t click, I recommend for you what I recommend for them, which is to apply The Method this time to an easier situation. That usually means one that is faster, less intense, and more self-contained. When it works I recommend to keep applying The Method to more challenging situations as you gain experience.

What to Do

Chapter 15 detailed The Method’s steps, so I’ll only outline them here.

Choose a situation in your life you’d like more emotional reward from, ideally one you can change in the time you plan for this exercise (for most, about a week).

0.Know your emotional system.

1.Write out that situation’s environment, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors and your constraints.

2.Conceive of new emotions you could have in such situations.

3.Conceive of environments, beliefs, and behaviors that will create the new emotions without triggering what you won’t or can’t do.

4.Implement the new environments, beliefs, and behaviors.

When you feel emotional reward, indulge in that feeling to help motivate you to do it again. When you don’t, or you feel emotional punishment, try to acknowledge it and move on to avoid discouraging yourself.

Again, doing the exercise takes effort. You may feel fake until the new situation gives you reward. If you started with self-awareness, you will emerge more genuine and authentic than before you started.

Stop reading. Put the book down and do the exercise.

Post-Exercise

In chapter 14, I wrote about how The Model helped me answer the first of two great life questions—what a good life is for me. A good life to me is one with as much emotional reward, emotions I want, and pleasure as I can create, of many characteristics, given my life’s constraints.

The result is a life of meaning, value, importance, and purpose. I used to think of those terms as complicated and hard to define, but The Model simplified my understanding of emotions to see MVIP as describing emotional states.

The Method helps me answer the second great life question: How can I make my life better?

As I understand, Plato, Aristotle, and their peers tried to use logic and dialectic to learn or prove what a good life was and to improve theirs. Words, logic, and dialectic work for some things, but not all. They don’t help you learn to play the piano or basketball, or to appreciate other people’s performances. We know how to teach ASEEP performance. We do it through practice, not logic, and many great ASEEP performers become great leaders and live lives many of us want to emulate. Michael Phelps never took a course in philosophy, and would probably not trade his life for anyone’s, not that you need to be an Olympic athlete to learn and master through experience life lessons that many philosophers can’t imagine.

Consider the following progression of skills and realizations, which I designed the exercises in units 1 through 3 to create, among other results:

To recognize that we simplify the world into beliefs and know how
beliefs work

To be able to choose a belief deliberately

To be able to choose beliefs in general—that is, to choose to believe
what you want

To use The Model to understand your emotional system

That choosing beliefs (along with your environments and
behaviors) creates emotions deliberately

That emotions create meaning, value, importance, and purpose

That anyone can create meaning, value, importance, and purpose deliberately,
by choosing his or her environments, beliefs, and behaviors

This flow leads me to answer the second life question: How do I make my life better? The answer is to develop the skills of being aware of your emotional state and then choose your environments, beliefs, and behaviors to create the emotions you want, which is practicing The Method, based in The Model. Doing so will increase your self-awareness, which means knowing your emotional system and emotional state.

I’m not saying that The Method is the only way to create MVIP, but it works consistently, reliably, and predictably, and you can use it as much as you want. This book’s leadership exercises turn out to be life exercises.

Putting it simply, you can answer life’s great questions more effectively ASEEP-style than through logic and words. This book’s progression leading to The Model and The Method are one such approach. Unit 4 builds on these results, so there is more to come.

As far as I know, this book’s progression is the first Method Learning approach to leadership training, as Stanislavsky began in acting training. For me, at least, this approach applies beyond leadership to living life better, and more effectively than Plato and Aristotle’s logic-based approach. I didn’t study philosophy or its history, but if Western philosophy has been footnotes to Plato, then the traditional academic approach to addressing life’s big questions has been missing this active approach. I value the education I got, but I can see that teaching about leadership but not how to lead, my education taught me at most about a good life, but not how to live one. When you think of people whose lives you want to emulate, do you think of university professors of philosophy or psychology? By their logic, they should know the most of how to live a good life—but do they live them?

Your Leadership Project

We’re starting Unit 4, which begins leading other people. You can do its exercises with anyone, but you’ll engage and learn more if you apply them to a project you care about with people you care about. You’ll hear in the interviews with Chris how he did so, which led to big improvements to his life and ability to lead.

The Your Leadership Project Exercise

Before beginning Unit 4’s exercises with others, this exercise is to create a Personal Leadership Project: something you want to do that matters to you and involves at least one other person to finish it.

The project should have some measures of success, failure, and accountability of your performance. You can change projects in the middle if necessary, as long as new projects meet the criteria below.

Past projects include

Organizing a speaker panel on a subject you care about for an audience

Proposing an idea to your manager for you to own and run

Getting yourself promoted

Creating an affinity group, like a book club, training workshop, etc

Creating a new venture

Organizing your community around a common interest

. . . and more.

With each exercise in Unit 4, I recommend practicing with friends, family, and others you know will support you, then to applying them to people in your project.

When you write your reflections for the rest of Unit 4’s exercises, I recommend writing first about your experience practicing the exercises outside the project, then writing about your experiences practicing them with people in the project, when something you care about is on the line.

Unlike other exercises, where I suggest you take the time you feel right to do it, I recommend writing your project within 24 hours. If you are concerned about choosing the best project for yourself and you are having trouble choosing among more than one candidate, experience has shown that the best way to find the best project is to start one of them. If it turns out to be the best, you can continue confidently. If not, working on a project has led people to figure out which is best for them more effectively than thinking about projects without acting. In any case, the goal for this project is to start small so you can build on it.

What to Do

You won’t start working on the project now, only writing about it.

Think of a project you’d like to do that you can’t do alone and you think you could handle with a helper or two. Then, for the reflection, write the following:

The Problem: what is the situation now and what is your goal?

I recommend choosing SMART goals, meaning Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-limited.

Why it’s challenging or meaningful: why would achieving the goal matter to you and other people involved?

Cooking dinner and asking someone else to set the table isn’t that challenging. Organizing a dinner party with a speaker might be. Organizing a set of dinners with a revolving set of speakers would likely be. Organizing your three apartment-mates to agree to a plan of rotating chores and responsibilities, where everyone is accountable and getting it to stick would likely be too.

Your role: what do you plan to do to lead the others and to participate in the work of the project?

The roles of the people you’ll lead: what other work needs to be done and who is there who can do it? What roles do you envision for each of them, keeping in mind they may not want to do some things.

Accountability: how will you be held accountable to keep you motivated?

What success means in this project: how will you know you’ve finished? How will you feel when you’ve finished? How will your teammates feel?

What failure means in this project: how will you know if you should change the project or give up?

Stop reading. Put the book down and do the exercise.

Post-Exercise

Have you ever prepared for a leadership interaction, like a negotiation or interview, and thought, “I’m prepared! I’m going to say X, they’ll say Y, I’ll say Z, they’ll agree, and it will come out great!”? Then you open the door, see the other people, everything you prepared flies out of your head, and you feel like you didn’t prepare at all?

That’s the difference between knowing what to do in theory or academically versus in practice or from experience. Method Learning prepares you with practice and experience. Even so, we’ve mostly been leading ourselves so far. Leading others challenges you emotionally and socially beyond leading yourself. Creating a project that you care about where you lead people you care about lets you face those challenges on your terms so when you face them elsewhere in life, you can fall back on your experience from these exercises.

Doing Unit 4’s exercises with family and friends helps you develop their skills with people who support you, which gets you started. Doing them on a project you’re accountable for increases that challenge and bridges the gap to doing them on other people’s terms.

Before continuing, I recommend ensuring your project is not too easy or too hard for you. If you do, you will remember and use the next few exercises and their application for the rest of your career and life.