'We adults flatter ourselves when we think that we are the best models, guides, and teachers for children. Children are much more interested in other children than in us. Children are especially interested in, and ready to learn from, those others who are a little older than themselves, a little farther along in their development, but not too far along. Children are drawn to older children, and older children are drawn to adolescents. Adulthood is too far off to be of much concern. That is why age-mixing is crucial to children's self-education. #Younger children want to do what older children do: Children on the verge of being able to play strategy games, or read, or perform new operations on the computer, or engage in more advanced athletic activities, become motivated to do so by observing those activities in older children and adolescents. In our study of how and why children learn to read at the school, some told us that they wanted to read because they were envious of the older kids who were reading and talking about what they had read. As one student put it, "I wanted the same magic they had; I wanted to join that club." Younger children don't just blindly mimic older ones. Rather, they watch, think about what they see, and incorporate what they learn into their own behavior in ways that make sense to them. Because of this, even the mistakes and unhealthy behaviors of older children can provide positive lessons for younger ones. Young children talk endlessly about what they like and don't like about the activities of the older ones around them. Negative models can be as helpful as positive ones. -- #Older children are excellent helpers and advisors of younger children, partly because they do not help or advise too much: Children often prefer to ask an older child rather than an adult for help or advice, even when an adult is available whom they could easily ask. I suspect there are many reasons for this, but one of the main reasons, I think, has to do with control. Children seeking help or advice do not want to give up their own control of the situation. They don't want any more help than what they ask for, and they want to decide themselves whether or not to accept what is offered. So, here is a valuable lesson that we adults can learn from children about helping and advising children: Don't give more help, or more advice, than is asked for! Come to think of it, the same lesson applies to helping and advising adults. -- #Older children expand their own understanding through explanations to younger children: Everyone who has ever been a teacher knows that we learn more when we teach than when we are taught. The requirement to put ideas into words that others can understand, and the need to think through objections that others might make, leads us to think deeply about what we thought we knew. Often this leads us to a better understanding than we had before. In an age-mixed environment, children, not just adults, can learn through teaching. -- #Older children develop compassion and nurturing skills through helping younger ones: Even more valuable than the cognitive gains derived from interacting with younger children are the moral gains. To develop effectively as responsible, ethical beings, children need to have the experience of caring for others, not just the experience of being cared for by others. -- Sudbury Valley has about 200 students, who range in age from 4 on through high-school age (age 18 or so). It seems to work great for everyone in that age range, and I think such a broad mix is valuable for everyone. The 18-year-olds are sometimes almost like uncles or aunts to some of the 4-year-olds. They are, I think, learning to be parents. In our culture we provide very little opportunity for people to learn how to be parents, until they actually are.'

'#Pretend and sociodramatic play: We are the imaginative animal, able to think of things that are not immediately present, and so we have fantasy play, or pretend play, which builds our capacity for imagination. In this type of play children establish certain propositions about the nature of their pretend world and then play out those propositions logically. In doing so they are exercising the same capacities that allow us, as adults, to think about things that are not immediately present, which is what we all do when we plan for the future and what scientists do when they develop theories to explain or predict events in the real world. We are an intensely social species, requiring cooperation with others in order to survive, and so we have many forms of social play, which teach us to cooperate and to restrain our impulses in ways that make us socially acceptable. Children in sociodramatic play are also practicing the art of negotiation. As they decide who will play what roles, who will get to use which props, and just what scenes they will enact and how, the players must all come to agreement. Indeed, a basic rule of all social play is that everyone must agree. Anyone left unhappy by a decision will quit, and if everyone quits there will be no game. Since the motive to play is strong, the motive to keep the other players happy is strong. That is true of all social play, but it is especially apparent in the negotiations that are observed in sociodramatic play. Keeping our companions happy, so they stay with us and continue to support us through life, is surely one of the most valuable of human survival skills, and children continuously practice that skill in social play.'

'We have recently proposed that physical pain – the pain experienced upon bodily injury – and social pain – the pain experienced upon social injury when social relationships are threatened, damaged or lost – share neural and computational mechanisms. This shared system is responsible for detecting cues that might be harmful to survival, such as physical danger or social separation, and then for recruiting attention and coping resources to minimize threat. Such an overlap would be evolutionarily adaptive. Because of the prolonged period of immaturity and the critical need for maternal care in mammalian infants, it has been suggested that the pain mechanisms involved in detecting and preventing physical danger were co-opted by the more recently evolved social attachment system to detect and prevent social separation. If the need to maintain close contact with the mother for nurturance and protection is crucial to mammalian survival, experiencing pain upon social separation would be an adaptive way to prevent the harmful consequences of maternal separation. -- When young children experience physical pain, they experience social pain more easily and more frequently in response to separation from their caregiver. Similarly, individuals with chronic pain disorders are more likely than healthy controls to have an anxious attachment style, characterized by a preoccupation with the commitment status of relationship partners and to have heightened fears of social evaluation and rejection... -- ...certain drugs have similar regulatory effects on both physical and social pain. Opiate-based drugs, known for their effectiveness in alleviating physical pain, lessen social pain in animals and humans. Additionally, anti-depressants, often prescribed for anxiety or depression resulting from social stressors, have recently been found to alleviate physical pain as well and are now prescribed regularly to treat chronic pain.'

'The final antidote to false morality' -- "Contempt is the feeling that is provided by you when somebody is attempting to exploit you based on your virtue."

'Roughhousing requires your child to adapt quickly to unpredictable situations. One minute they might be riding you like a horse and the next they could be swinging upside-down. According to evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff in his book Wild Justice, the unpredictable nature of roughhousing actually rewires a child’s brain by increasing the connections between neurons in the cerebral cortex, which in turn contributes to behavioral flexibility. Additionally, roughhousing helps develop your children’s grit and stick-to-itiveness. You shouldn’t just let your kids “win” every time when you roughhouse with them. Whether they’re trying to escape from your hold or run past you in the hallway, make them work for it. Playtime is a fun and safe place to teach your kids that failure is often just a temporary state and that victory goes to the person who keeps at it and learns from his mistakes. Roughhousing builds social intelligence ... they learn to tell the difference between play and actual aggression. Roughhousing also teaches children about taking turns and cooperation. You might not recognize it, but when you horse around with your kids, you’re often taking part in a give-and-take negotiation where the goal is to make sure everyone has fun. Also, roughhousing teaches our children about the appropriate use of strength and power. As I mentioned earlier, when we roughhouse with our kids, we often take turns with the dominant role. Because we’re so much bigger and stronger, we have to handicap ourselves. The implicit message to your child when you hold back is: “Winning isn’t everything. You don’t need to dominate all the time. There’s strength in showing compassion on those weaker than you.”'

'The reality of self-ownership' -- "We must not manifest what we criticize."

'Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death (1973), counsels wisely that one must "consent daily to die, to give oneself up to the risks and dangers of the world, allow oneself to be engulfed and used up. Otherwise one ends up as though dead in trying to avoid life and death." ...there really is no such thing as security in life. Except for that sense of security that originates within. Relinquishing our illusions of control, accepting our relative powerlessness over life and death, and accepting ourselves as we are – including our anxiety and life's utter unpredictability – can be extremely liberating. It can allow us to stop worrying so much, and get on with living. The mysterious future will unfold soon enough. Make necessary plans and decisions. But don't dwell on them or be overly attached to their desired outcomes. Focus instead on what's happening right now, this very moment, however anxiety-provoking, painful, tedious or infuriating rather than anxiously anticipating what may or may not happen next. The future is never guaranteed, one way or another. It may or may not ever arrive. Something bad could happen. But, then, so could something good. Rather than hopeless pessimism or grandiose expectation, consider adopting an attitude of "benign optimism" (or at least neutrality) toward the potential but never promised future.'

'As the old Zen proverb tells us: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Even spiritual enlightenment can't eliminate life's tedious tasks. The tasks always remain the same. What changes is the attitude taken toward these tasks. And the mindful presence with which they are quite deliberately performed. In our efforts to avoid anger, pain, boredom or anxiety, we avoid being fully present in the moment. But this avoidance of what we feel in the present actually exacerbates symptoms and diminishes our quality of life. When we ignore, reject or remain unconscious of our inner child, he or she is unhappy, resentful and influences our lives in negative and significant ways. But becoming conscious of and better relating to this same sad, neglected inner child can turn this all around. Once they can conceptualize the problem in terms of a conflict between the little one within and the often underdeveloped or absentee adult self, some reconciliation, negotiation and cooperation between the two can be established. Then the adult self can deal with adult things, and the valuable and lovable inner child, no longer needing to be in control of the personality or trying to do adult things it cannot, can happily contribute to our playfulness, creativity and innate capacity for wonder, awe and joy. The secret is to spend some quality time each day together, much like a good parent does with their outer child.'

'Mental health is not defined by the absence of anxiety. The experience of anxiety is universal. No one is immune to it. Anxiety is an inevitable part of the human condition. Chronically avoiding or repressing existential anxiety gives rise to neurotic or pathological anxiety, such as phobias and panic attacks. The secret to dealing positively with anxiety is to accept it, tolerate it, listen to its message, and learn to channel it's immense energy constructively. Anxiety can, when correctly utilized, motivate, energize, invigorate and vitalize. And it is closely connected with creativity of all kinds. As philosopher Soren Kierkegaard recognized, "Anxiety is our greatest teacher." He also called anxiety "the dizziness of freedom." The trick is first to transform your negative attitude toward anxiety. To normalize rather than pathologize it. To welcome rather than run from it. To, whenever practically possible, tolerate rather than medicate it. To embrace rather than escape from it. To try to understand rather than dismiss out of hand its psychobiological, spiritual and existential significance. -- When the daimonic is habitually denied, it becomes more negative and dangerous. But when we acknowledge its presence and reality, it can be the life-giving source of energy, strength, power, spirituality and creativity. This can be said of the unconscious in general. So it is vitally important to learn to listen to one's unconscious carefully, and to what it has to say about what's happening in the psyche now and what needs to happen if the future, both inwardly and outwardly.'

#Contact: Perceptual Contact; Interactional Contact; Initial Assessment #Involvement: Mutuality; Testing #Intimacy: Personal Commitment; Interpersonal Commitment; Social Bonding; Anxiety: Security Anxiety, Fulfillment Anxiety, Excitement Anxiety #Deterioration: Relational Damage; Weakening Bonds #Repair: Intrapersonal Repair; Interpersonal Repair #Dissolution: Intrapersonal Separation; Interpersonal Separation; Social Separation

'Disillusionment becomes an engine for growth because it forces us to discover our needs. Knowing oneself, recognizing one's needs, and speaking up for them in a relationship are often acts of bravery, says Page. Most of us are guarded about our needs, because they are typically our areas of greatest sensitivity and vulnerability. "You have to discover—and be able to share—what touches you and moves you the most," he observes. "But first, of course, you have to accept that in yourself. ...taking the risk to expose your inner life to your partner turns out to be the great opportunity for expanding intimacy and a sense of connection. This is the great power of relationships: Creating intimacy is the crucible for growing into a fully autonomous human being while the process of becoming a fully realized person expands the possibility for intimacy and connection. This is also the work that transforms a partner into the right partner. Relationships need to continually evolve to fit ever-changing circumstances. They need to incorporate each partner's changes and find ways to meet their new needs.'

'In the TED* framework, the Victim shifts into the role of Creator. The Persecutor takes on the role of Challenger, and the Rescuer assumes the new role of Coach. A Creator is someone who stops to think about what they want - what their long-term goal or vision is. Creators are outcome-oriented as opposed to problem-oriented. Problems will always occur, but instead of acting as a Persecutor, the problem now takes on the form of Challenger. A Challenger is a person or situation that forces you to clarify your goal. Instead of Rescuing someone, a Coach asks questions that are intended to help the individual to make informed choices.The key differentiation between a Rescuer and a Coach is that the Coach sees the individual as capable of making choices and of solving their own problems. A Coach asks questions that enable the individual to see the possibilities for positive action, to focus on what they do want instead of what they don't want. Coaches see victims as Creators in their own right and meet them as equals. This process interrupts the drama cycle and puts the former victim in the powerful position of Creator where they make informed choices and focus on outcomes instead of problems.'

Paraphrased -- Rescuers don't see themselves as Victims; they see themselves as the one with the answer. A Rescuer needs a Victim, they need a project. They need someone they can fix so that they can feel better. The Rescuer-in-Victim is the Martyr: "After all I've done for you. I've sacrificed my life for you. I've given you this and that and sacrificed all my needs – and this is the appreciation I get." And then they get a little resentful, and they move up to Persecutor, and the way a Rescuer persecutes is: "That's it, I'm not saving you anymore. I'm kicking you out of my life." But then, there's always something that hooks them back into Rescue, and it's usually one of two things: It's either pity or guilt. Rescuers do not see themselves as Victims, and they hate to think of themselves as Persecutors.

How violence happens, using the hand model of the brain: http://youtu.be/DD-lfP1FBFk

"The brain is the social organ of the body." - "The mind is in your body and in your relationships." - "Our minds are created by our relationships." - "The body is the physical mechanism by which energy and information flows. Relationships are the sharing of energy and information flows. And the mind is the emergent, self-organizing process arising from both our bodies and our relationships." - "Thoughts have a quality of absolute certainty. When you give people the power to do what the mind really does, which is shift degrees of probability of energy flow, and bring them down to this open space which we call awareness, you actually strengthen the capacity of the mind to not only see things clearly, but literally to integrate experience... this is the way you stay fully present to another person and also to yourself."

Dan Siegel 'mindsight' and attachment videos

'This interactive talk will examine two major questions: What is the mind? and How can we create a healthy mind? We'll examine the interactions among the mind, the brain, and human relationships and explore ways to create a healthy mind, an integrated brain, and mindful, empathic relationships. In this talk, well offer a working definition of the mind and practical implications for how to perceive and strengthen the mind itself—a learnable skill called mindsight.'

'...the blame management scheme overall is designed to be fundamentally leaky and non-zero-sum, with most of the blame draining away as unaccounted-for sins, turning into invisible organizational dark matter. But there are visible signs of this accumulating dark matter: #1. Gradually decreasing morale (Loser social capital) as divide-and-conquer moves accumulate #2. The incompetence of the Clueless being gradually reinforced, making them decline rather than grow as human beings #3. The organization itself gradually turning into an incomprehensible, byzantine and increasingly error-prone maze, as it pretends to evolve and self-correct. #4. Systems and processes clogged with delayed exceptions, awaiting the attention of the Sociopaths at the top, who handle them with one eye on the residual value remaining to be harvested, trading expedited favorable decisions with other Sociopaths who need their exceptions to jump the queue. -- While the value being realized is in an increasing-returns phase, the Sociopaths conscientiously handle exceptions to make the extraction more efficient. As the value declines, they gradually start cashing out, let exceptions pile up, and allow the organization to die.'

'Losers are far too smart to fall for Hanlon Dodge maneuvers as individuals. You need to work them in groups to get them behaving in sufficiently stupid ways. When you work gemeinschaft — the matrix of personal connections and trust relationships that binds Loser groups together — there is really only one basic tactic: divide-and-conquer. The key to successful divide-and-conquer moves lies in recognizing and exploiting two features of Loser groups. Within the group ... skirmishes work to keep the group at the edge of stability. The fault lines remain in a fluid state, widening and narrowing as the group saga evolves. Attractive and repulsive forces balance to keep the group at a marginally stable level of intimacy. Until Sociopaths step in to exploit the precarious equilibrium. Loser group dynamics offer a natural exploit: almost anyone can be made to ally with, or turn against, anybody else, with no need to manufacture reasons. Almost any sub-group can be played off against any other sub-group, since there are no absolute loyalties. The presence of myriad fault-lines within a Loser group presents a canvas for divide-and-conquer artistry.'

'#The Hanlon Dodge: By shifting blame from a locus where it would be attributed to malice, to one where it can plausibly be attributed to incompetence, the severity of penalties incurred is lowered. Hanlon’s razor is double-edged, and Sociopaths use it to feign incompetence themselves or to charge others with incompetence, as necessary. When ends are defensible, but means are not, Sociopaths feign incompetence, and you get the first kind of Hanlon Dodge. When means are defensible, but ends are not, Sociopaths engineer execution failures via indirection and abstraction in the requests they make, thereby achieving their ends via “lucky accidents.” This is the second kind of Hanlon Dodge. ...seasoned Sociopaths maintain a permanent facade of strategic incompetence and ignorance in key areas, rather than just making up situational incompetence arguments. This is coupled with indirection and abstraction in things asked of reports. The result is HIWTYL judo. On the one hand, they can avoid doing unpleasant things themselves. On the other hand, they can achieve indefensible private intentions while maintaining plausible deniability.'

'On any given day we're lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lie can be subtle and counter-intuitive.' -- "Lying is a cooperative act. If you don't want to be deceived you have to know what is it you're hungry for."

'Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted.'

Therapeutic communication techniques: #Using silence: ... #Accepting: "Yes." #Giving recognition: "I notice that..." ["Let me check I've heard you correctly..." (summarize what you've just heard)] #Offering self: "I'll sit with you a while." #Giving broad openings: "What are you thinking about?" #Offering general leads: "And then?" #Placing the event in time or in a sequence: "What seemed to lead up to...?" #Making observations: "You seem tense." #Encouraging description of perceptions: "What is happening?" #Encouraging comparisons: "Have you had similar experiences?" -- Non-therapeutic communication techniques: #Reassuring: "You're doing fine." #Giving approval: "That's good." #Rejecting: "Let's not talk about..." #Disapproving: "That's bad." #Agreeing: "That's right." "I agree." #Disagreeing: "I don't believe that." #Advising: "Why don't you...?" #Probing: "Tell me about..." #Challenging: "That doesn't seem right." #Testing: "Are you sure?"

'"A Samaritan is a bit like someone standing on the edge of a deep pit and seeing a person lying, languishing, at the bottom, in terrible distress," concludes Adrian. "Some people's response would be to throw ropes down; others would shout down advice. A Samaritan would climb down into the pit, sit with the person and just hold them. It's as simple as that."'

On Becoming a Person: Dealing with Breakdowns in Communication: Real communication occurs, and [the] evaluative tendency is avoided, when we listen with understanding. What does that mean? It would simply mean that before presenting your own point of view, it would be necessary for you to achieve the other speaker's frame of reference – to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But if you try it you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. ...courage is required. If you really understand another person in this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself. You might see it his way, you might find yourself influenced in your attitudes or your personality. This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.

'The attempt to escape from feelings has its origins in a babyhood in which the baby's feelings have not been identified and responded to in a contingent way. You can only change emotional processing by doing it differently. When a particular feeling is aroused, neurotransmitters are released from the subcortex and old neural networks automatically become activated to manage this state of arousal in the old way. If your therapist accepts your feelings, they do not have to be denied by the neural network which would normally do that, or acted upon by the neural network that would normally respond in that way. The therapist's acceptance allows a mental space to reflect on the feelings and consider how to respond afresh. Whilst the feelings are alive and active, so too are the stress hormones which will assist new (higher brain) cortisol synapses to be made in response to the sub-cortical signals. Together with the therapist, new networks can be developed.'

'Shrugging off the burdens of your history...' -- "Our tendency when we're abused is to look at it as though it's personal: *I* was abused. But the fundamental thing about abuse is that it is anti-empathetic. You cannot abuse someone that you are empathizing with. ...abuse is never, ever, personal. It has nothing to do with *us* as individuals. Once we detach the personal from [abuse] there's a certain amount of relief because what we're describing is an unhappy accident. [Personalization] is what children cling to because if it's not personal then we're completely invisible – and children can't psychologically survive that. ...it seems like a universal survival tactic of children is to take it personally; it's the only way to create a bond when you're being [abused]. The defense mechanism that kicks in is: if I can take it personally, I can pretend to have control. We take it personally as a way of avoiding hopelessness, helplessness and catastrophic depression... "

“In order to have thoughts of kindness for the suffering of others, you have to have accepted your own suffering. In order to have empathy for others, we have to have empathy for ourselves. Because if we are avoiding our own suffering or the suffering we have experienced, then we will inevitably avoid the suffering of others. That which we reject in ourselves we inevitably reject in others.”

'Students often do theater and play games precisely because they are just challenging enough, with a novel twist here and lots of feedback. The processes learned in dramatic arts include the ability to express personal ideas without fear or censorship... Theater and drama allow us to act out our fears, our grief, and aggression. Drama gives us practice in gaining some competence – even mastery – over emotions that might otherwise overwhelm us. We are allowed emotional discharge without high risk. It helps us stretch our range of emotional expression, which is healing and stress-reducing.'

'This video is an introduction to working with your own parts based on the IFS (Internal Family System) model of the personality. The accompanying PDF document is available here:' -- http://www.yourtherapist.org/www/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Exploring-Your-Own-System.pdf

'This video describes the pioneering work of Dr. Richard Schwartz in outlining how the personality system operates and how to heal distressed parts by bringing curiousity and compassion from your own Self to them.'

"The only knowledge we avoid is self-knowledge. Everybody already knows. When you say the state is violence, everybody already knows it. The reason we know that everybody knows it is the speed at which they get upset. If they didn't already know the implications, they wouldn't get upset. Statism is violence; there is no 'God'. You have to work hard to avoid that knowledge because it's so obvious. So what are they avoiding? They are avoiding self-knowledge: knowledge they already possess about themselves, about society, about their friends and family, about truth, about virtue, about integrity, about courage. All of these things. So when you speak an idea and people get upset, the knowledge that they are avoiding is not what you're saying but what they already know. They are reacting not to you but to themselves. If you have to conform to other people's bigotries or face attack and rejection – that's not a relationship – it's a cult. And everybody knows that."

Gisted/Quoted -- On the Mecosystem: When you demonize the mecosystem, all you do is project it into the world, into things which other people control, into things which you can buy from people to gain their approval and so delay inevitable self-attacks. -- On Happiness: "The only way that I know of to gain the greatest happiness is to serve mankind in the cause of the truth."

'What was equally fascinating was when I decided to go against my guess, and acted as higher status than the other person no matter what their status was. A person who was confident he was an king and went around stage acting like one, started yielding when I consistently used a high posture and tone of voice during the conversation. Another who was a 5 suddenly started taking advantage of the situation when I lowered my voice and avoided eye contact. This demonstrated that by simply deciding to change my own status and acting accordingly, the other person almost immediately granted me that status and at times, changed their own. Posture, eye contact, and tone of voice were my weapons. But since then, I’ve come to realize that I was having the best social interactions with people of equal status. If that’s not the case, I’d use the status game weapons to "level up" the conversation.'

'All these failure modes arise from the same place: failing to actually think about the problem at a pre-technical level: asking the right quesitons and pondering the underlying assumptions and hypotheses. All these activities are outside of the technical work of data-driven decision making. There are no formulas or processes at this framing stage. The key is to recognize that CDDDs do everything they do out of risk aversion, but are hazy about what data reduce what risks and uncertainties. Their risk aversion also tends to be absolute rather than relative. CDDDs usually want the same levels of certainty around every decision, whether or not there is enough information to lower the risk to their comfort levels. This means they are in a hurry to get to the technical parts because it feels like they are accomplishing something. So you need to encourage them in their quest for a false sense of security, and hurry them along to the technical exercises.'

'Extroverts are not willing to have 1:1 encounters with anyone unless they’ve been properly introduced into their social fields. Extroverts tend to enjoy spending a lot of time with people they know well. Talking to strangers is less rewarding to them because most E-E transactions are maintenance transactions that help maintain, spend or appreciate the invested capital in the relationships. It is E-I interactions that create interesting tensions. Extroverts accuse introverts of selfishness: from their point of view, the introverts are taking out loans against jointly-held wealth, to invest unilaterally in risky ventures. Introverts in turn accuse extroverts of being overly possessive and stifling, since they cannot draw on the energy of the relationship without the other party being present. The confusion is simple if you note that the introvert is thinking in terms of two individually held bank accounts, while the extrovert is thinking in terms of a single jointly held one.'

Brainjuicer presentation: "If you push a message into people's heads, you stop people feeling stuff. If you feel nothing, you do nothing."

'Wanting to be liked is a significant need that must be overcome on the slightly-evil path. You must become comfortable with actively provoking and then dealing with dislike. ...once you've learned how to be annoying for no reason, and avoided the temptations of the danger zone, you can graduate to being selectively annoying in calibrated ways when you have a good reason. Why would you ever want to do that? Quite simply, because people who are in an annoyed state behave more predictably than those who are in a non-annoyed state, where they are actually thinking. If you ever need to stop somebody from thinking too much about something, and more benign methods like flattery, distraction or avoidance fail, you escalate by being annoying. It is far easier, and far more valuable, to annoy people using their strengths, than by using their weaknesses. ...causing annoyance is a tactic that can neutralize people's most effective behaviors, when they are not in your best interests.'

'To be a professional organizer of delusions, you need to focus on delusions that it would actually benefit you to believe, at least temporarily, and then figure out how to adopt them for just as long as they can serve you. Your overall goal is to create plausible deniability, even within your own mind, to defend against the accusation that you don’t believe something that you are pitching to others. Your lifeline back to reality is your capacity for doubt, which prevents plausible deniability from turning into a pattern of [persistent] denial... It is much easier to do this if you discipline yourself to only work with delusions that are a sufficiently complex mix of metaphysics, morality arguments, metaphor, narrative and facts. This is why you get the most fundamental axiom in delusion organization theory: the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell, and the biggest ones, bigger than even the civilization-scale ones, are the ones you deliberately sell to yourself.'

'As Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- If you are unreasonable, even if you actually manage to find a calling and do something that you will be remembered for, chances are high you'll die destitute and unrecognized, after a lifetime of maneuvering, fighting and making implacable enemies and loyal-to-the-death friends at every turn. Instead of medals that nobody cares about, you'll collect the detritus of failed and successful battles. And interestingly, people will scramble anxiously to preserve and pore over your unfinished junk. -- Boyd died in near-poverty, depressed and anxious about his legacy. He spent his last years battling cancer and worrying about all his papers. He died a nobody by some reckonings. But he died having done something.'

'By changing the "can I question her?" decision to a "let me judge if she's up to it" decision, the father created a safe way to say no later. "Up to it" is a judgment call that provides wide latitude. More importantly, it is a subjective judgement masquerading as a data-driven one... Unlike a straight refusal, the "up to it" decision also buys an indeterminate amount of time. The key is to make the original decision dependent on another decision which requires your subjective interpretation of some emotion-laden missing information. -- Every significant "people" decision is like a battery which can be charged up with useful emotion if you think hard enough. By injecting enough subjective and emotion-laden information into a decision indirectly, you can make it impossible for others to question your right to make the call unilaterally. Every emotional-charging decision dodge is a case of seeking refuge in the fortress of "don't tell me how to feel."'

'Being willing to walk away (BWTWA) is your single most powerful weapon. BWTWA is the simplest example of a BATNA. If you are going to die anyway, it makes it much easier to accept "death" as a BATNA for specific situations. And since nearly all other BATNAs are preferable to death, that attitude makes you a very strong negotiator. Without a defined BATNA, negotiations are toothless. BATNAs are what make all negotiating at least "slightly evil." You can add deceit, bad faith and bluffing to make the game as evil as you like, but even the baseline best-faith type of informed negotiation is "slight evil" because your BATNA is a unilateral option that has consequences for others that they will be forced to live with. Anybody can accept consequences for themselves. It takes a slightly-evil attitude to be willing to force potentially unpleasant consequences on others, regardless of what they want. Information, creativity, trust and BATNAs.'

'...sunk costs only have a seductive appeal to those who are attached to their subjective past. They do not like the thought that the person they were, two days ago, was possibly engaged in futile activity. They want to behave in ways that redeem their past days. ...if your team-member's subjective relative rationality causes him/her to react to decisions in ways that create real outcome issues for you, it will now cost you as well. To the slightly-evil, the answer is simple. Do the future real costs of the resentment for you outweigh the benefit of making the sunk-costs-indifferent decision?' Slightly-evil people, either by nature or through cultivation, are simply incapable of thinking this way. They place the most value on external, tangible outcomes. Where this creates issues is in collaborative work. Slightly-evil people, through their sunk-costs indifference, can appear insensitive and callous to others with more subjective relative rationalities.'

'This is a fantastically valuable skill to learn. And a very difficult one. It goes well beyond thick skin. It is hardened-cop style "anything you say can and will be used against you" listening. To get there takes a very special kind of personal growth. ...contemptuous listening means you don't take what is said about your personality as serious feedback worth responding to. But this does not mean you don't listen. You listen in a sort of objective, clinical way, like a researcher observing an angry animal in a cage. Your radar is primed for information that is useful to you, not information that the other party thinks you ought to know... And remember, listening does not mean agreeing or debating. You can choose to listen, draw your own conclusions, and walk away, or steer the conversation so it proceeds on terms that are useful to you. You don't have to convince the other person of your conclusions. Or even share them.'

'"A CEO's job is to interpret external realities for a company." I have met many people who've gained power and authority due to this particular trait, and it might conceivably be part of the explanation why power turns people into jerks. ...the "interpret external reality" job is a delicate balancing act on the leader's part: you need to keep your people connected enough to reality to be effective, but not so connected that they are demotivated and demoralized. ...the "interpreting reality" part of leadership is rather like parenthood. Call it "information parenthood." You have to sustain a happy bubble for others. At the same time, as a leader, your own parent is reality itself, and it isn't a very nurturing one. You yourself become the reservoir of harsh reality information that is yours alone to handle. Reserves of empathy can get drained, resentment of the demanding children can turn into sadism and justification for abuse. ...you decide to take your turn at being the "child."'

'Being able to tell apart people who are telling the truth from people who think they are telling the truth, is a far more important skill than lie detection. Pseudo-truth-telling behaviors [candor and cursing] arise from internal narratives that are grounded in unprocessed denial, rationalization and the like. You are being invited to participate in fiction they've unconsciously constructed to protect themselves. Genuine truth-telling feels like clarity. When someone has processed their thoughts, separated fact from feeling, separated what is already known from what is new or as yet unknown, and is offering up something they've deduced as being both true and unknown to you (and hence worth sharing), you'll experience at least a momentary sense of expanded clarity. Candor and cursing on the other hand, will provoke emotional responses from you rather than moments of mental clarity. ...simply separate the logos from the (unconscious) ethos and pathos.'

'While both he and Appleby understand the principle that newspapers pander to their readers' prejudices, only Hacker has realized the importance and implications of the principle. You are likely better at this game than you know. Examine your own reading tastes, and the books you quote most often. How do you think you appear to others? This is not blatant stereotyping, it is blatant archetyping. A subtly different (and morally more defensible) approach to typecasting people. Sure you'll go wrong sometimes, but you'll be right more often. Drawing conclusions from people's reading (or TV watching) tastes is one of the most robust ways to read people. It is really hard to fake your personality on this front. Most people are far too cautious about making such judgments out of a sense of political correctness. Don't be. The more you use this tactic, the better you'll get at it.'

'Do you need to break rules to mess things up? All you have to do is play by the rules. EXACTLY by the rules. Due diligence is a powerful weapon. ...rules aren't a minimum definition of the profit-making business... They are well below the minimum. The effectiveness of "work to rule" methods underlines the extent to which workers must normally improvise, bend, break, extend, and work around formal rules to keep a business running. It also explains why petty bureaucrats (the "clueless") are basically parasites because they lack the creativity to go beyond roles and rules in productive ways. They are effectively (and usually without any malicious intent) in "work to rule" mode all the time, and only earn their keep during events when others use them as pawns. The only time best-faith people bring up the rules is if their protections are being threatened by unreasonable demands or risks.' -- Management: '...give others the benefits of going beyond the rules, while taking on the risks.'

'4 stage: "Creative inertia" strategy: #Stage One: We say nothing is going to happen #Stage Two: We say that something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it #Stage Three: We say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do #Stage Four: We say that maybe there was something we could have done but it's too late now.'

'There are four status patterns: feeling low, playing low (LL) [Victims], feeling low, playing high (LH) [Abusers], feeling high, playing low (HL) [Friend-seekers], feeling high, playing high (HH) [Power-seekers]. Status is a variable whose importance is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you gravitate to preferred locked-status patterns, then you will expend energy preserving those patterns. You can be manipulated. Status matters if it matters. Conversely, if status doesn't matter to you, it becomes available to you as a situational control variable when dealing with those to whom status does matter. We all start out in a locked-status mode, but if you start breaking locked felt-played patterns then a curious thing happens: felt status of any sort weakens. Turns out felt status needs the nourishment of being hooked to a projected (and perceived-as-hoped and validated) status in order to survive. If felt status starts to vanish altogether, leaving a sort of "status vacuum" inside you.'

'What you need is a reaction that gives you reboot control, but doesn't leave you responsible for maintaining overall calm. Just your own calm. You leave the bull responsible for his/her own emotions... The basic trick is simple: you repeat all or part of their opening line, but with zero emotional content. #Bull: Whha wwhat am I going to do now? I am screwed. #You: You're screwed? When faced with an emotionally charged stimulus, your own emotional reaction will race ahead and censor the options generated by your cognitive reaction. What happens next? Usually, the bull will see your response as a request for elaboration. Elaboration takes coherent thinking, so he/she will be forced to slow down before saying anything more. At the same time, you've substituted your emotionally neutral repetition for the charged opening, as the stimulus to respond to. Most importantly, you don't end up with responsibility for the developing situation before you decide if you want it.'

'Repressed fear ... is the fear a very small child has of its parents. They pay for such self-betrayal with depression, suicide, or severe illnesses leading to an early death. The assumption I proceed from is this: for most people the idea that they were not loved by their parents is unbearable. The more evidence there is for this deprivation, the more strongly these people cling to the illusion of having been loved. They also cling to their feelings of guilt, which provide misleading confirmation that if their parents did not treat them lovingly then it was all their own fault, the fault of their mistakes and failings. Depression is the body's rebellion against this lie. Many people would prefer to die (either literally or symbolically by killing off their feelings), rather than experience the helplessness of the little child exploited by the parents for their own ambitions or used as a projection screen for their pent-up feelings of hatred.'

'Most of us were mistreated as children and had to learn to deny this fact at a very early stage in order to survive. We were forced to believe that we were humiliated and tormented "for our own good," that the beatings we received did not hurt and were harmless, that such treatment served to protect the community (as otherwise we would have turned into dangerous monsters). ...most people are not prepared to question and abandon preconceptions of this kind. Instead they chant this perverse litany: "My parents did their best to bring me up properly, I was a difficult child, and I needed strict discipline." Obviously, people who have been brought up to believe this cannot conceivably feel indignation about cruelty to children. Since their own childhood, they have been dissociated from their true feelings, from the pain caused by humiliation and torment. To feel their indignation they would need to get back in touch with that childhood pain. And who will want to do that?'

'Blindness makes it possible to survive. This is the way that the abuse of children has functioned since time immemorial. Blindness and forgiveness are essential to survival. But at the same time they lead to repetition and do harm to innocent people. To break through this vicious circle we need to understand that love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And when it requires new victims, it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me with the help of innocent people because now I KNOW what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.'

'What kind of person would I be if I could not react, temporarily at least, to injustice, presumption, evil, or arrogant idiocy with feelings of anger or rage? Would that not be an amputation of my emotional life? ...I should have access to ALL my feelings for the rest of my life, as well as conscious access to my own history as an explanation for the intensity of my responses. This would quickly temper that intensity without having serious physical consequences of the kind caused by the suppression of emotions that have remained unconscious. ...I can learn to understand my feelings rather than condemn them, to regard them as friends and protectors instead of fearing them as something alien that needs to be fought against. Though our parents, teachers, or priests may have taught us to practice such self-amputation, we must ultimately realize that it is in fact very dangerous. There can be no doubt that we are then the victims of severe mutilation.'

'...ask the candidate for your therapist about her childhood and her experiences during her training. Where did she get her training, what was helpful to her, what was not? ...does she protect people who damaged her? Does she minimize the damage? Was she beaten as a child? How does she value this experience? Is she really aware of its consequences for her later life, or is she denying its importance? Does she avoid the confrontation with her own pain? In the last case she will do everything to silence you, not always visibly. -- ...you may even find [that a therapist wants to make you feel like a] helpless child... Then you may end up in a dependence on them and on your feelings of a helpless, unchangeable rage against your parents without being able to free yourself for what YOU really need. A good therapist must help you to find and fulfill YOUR OWN needs, neglected for such a long time, needs for free expression, for being understood, respected and taken seriously.'

'The mistreated and neglected child is completely alone in the darkness of confusion and fear. Surrounded by arrogance and hatred, robbed of its rights and its speech, deceived in its love and its trust, disregarded, humiliated, mocked in its pain, such a child is blind, lost, and pitilessly exposed to the power of ignorant adults. It is without orientation and completely defenseless. Its whole being would like to shout out its anger, give voice to its feeling of outrage, call for help. But that is exactly what it may not do. All its normal reactions, the reactions with which nature has endowed it to help it survive, remain blocked. Thus, the healthy impulse to protest against inhumanity has to be suppressed. Some therapists fear this truth. By refusing to forgive, I give up my illusions. A mistreated child cannot live without them. But a grown-up therapist must be able to manage it. His or her patients should be able to ask: "Why should I forgive, when no one is asking me to?"'

'Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied. The result is that these children will tend to glorify the violence inflicted upon them and later to take advantage of every possible opportunity to exercise such violence... Children learn by imitation. Their bodies do not learn what we try to instill in them by words but what they have experienced physically. Battered, injured children will learn to batter and injure others; sheltered, respected children will learn to respect and protect those weaker than themselves. Children have nothing else to go on but their own experiences. Evil exists. But it is not something that some people are born with.'

'Enlightened Witnesses are therapists with the courage to face up to their own histories and to gain their autonomy in doing so... The adult needs assistance in coping with the present situations as an adult, while at the same time maintaining contact with the suffering and knowing child he once was, the child he could not muster the courage to listen to for so long but now, with help, can finally pay heed to. The body knows everything that has happened to it but it has no language to express that knowledge. It is like the child we once were, the child that sees all but without the aid of the adults remains helpless and alone. Accordingly, whenever the emotions from the past rise to the surface they are invariably accompanied by the fears of the helpless child, dependent on the understanding or at least the reassurances of the caregivers. In a society with a receptive attitude to the distress of children no one will be alone with his/her history.'

'...the only thing beaten children learn is to fear their parents, not to drive carefully or stay out of trouble. They will also feel guilty and learn to play down their own pain. Being subjected to physical attacks they are defenseless to fend off merely instills in children a "gut" conviction that they obviously merit neither protection nor respect. This false message is then stored in the children's bodies as information and will influence their view of the world and their later attitude toward their own children. Such children will be unable to defend their right to human dignity, unable to recognize physical pain as a danger signal and act accordingly. Even their immune system may be affected. In the absence of other persons to model their behavior on -- enlightened or knowing witnesses -- these children will see the language of violence and hypocrisy as the only really effective means of communication.'

'Successful therapy should liberate us from our ingrained adaptation strategies and help us learn to trust our own feelings - something our parents have made difficult, if not impossible. Because it was prohibited, and hence feared. ...children with serious impairments to their identity do not know what they feel and what they really need. They have to find this out in therapy, repeatedly applying what they have learned to new experiences and thus achieving the security that tells them they are not mistaken. If the therapist is a genuine Enlightened Witness, as opposed to AN educator, then the client will have learned to admit his/her emotions, to understand their intensity, and to transform them into conscious feelings leaving new traces of memory... if I am no longer a mystery to myself, then I can act and reflect consciously, I can give my feelings the room they need to develop. This is because I understand them. And once I understand them, they will no longer cause so much fear...'

'[Parents] have been prevented from loving their children as a result of the injuries inflicted on them in their own childhood. We can learn from them, and if we do, we will cease to idealize motherly love at all costs. Then we will no longer be forced to analyze infants as screaming monsters. Instead we will begin to understand their inner worlds, to grasp the loneliness and impotence of children growing up with parents that deny them any kind of loving communication because they themselves have never experienced it. Then we will recognize in the screams of the infant a logical and justified response to the usually unconscious but none the less factual and real cruelties of the parents, which have yet to be appreciated as such by society. And the worst thing is that children have to learn to see [parental cruelty] as quite normal behavior because they know nothing else. Children always love their parents unstintingly, whatever they do to them.'

'... the consequences of early, invisible injuries are so severe precisely because they derive from the trivialization of childhood suffering and the denial of its importance. Adults can easily imagine that they would be horrified and humiliated if they were suddenly attacked by a raging giant many times bigger than themselves. Yet assume that small children will not react in the same way... Parents believe that slaps and spanking do not hurt. Such treatment is designed to impress certain values on their children. And the children end up believing that themselves. Some even learn to laugh the whole thing off and to deride the pain they felt at the humiliations inflicted on them. As adults they adhere to this derision, they are proud of their own cynicism... they comply with the demands of a society that attaches supreme importance to considerate treatment for parents. ...these people obstinately trivialize their own sufferings, even if they are therapists themselves.'

'...when we stop playing down our sufferings and embark on a respectful engagement with them and with the child. The doors barring us off from our own selves suddenly swing open. ...therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective... People who genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents' behavior as a child will usually lose their empathy for their parents and gain love for themselves. They will train their affections on the children they once were. But for this change of perspective to succeed, we need a witness who sides fully with the child and does not hesitate to condemn the deeds of its parents. The FAQ list (see "Articles" on this Web page) can help to establish whether the therapist is in a position to do that. I believe that therapists who identify with the parents can be dangerous. But genuine Enlightened Witnesses can help us to abandon denial and face up to our own past, so that we can finally leave it behind without feelings of guilt.'

'Children have no choice but suppress their fear and anger, otherwise they could not sustain their love for their parents... Truly attempting to understand the child within means acknowledging and recognizing its sufferings, rather than denying them. Then we can provide supportive company for that mistreated infant, an infant left entirely alone with its fears, deprived of the consolation and support that a helping witness could have provided. By offering guidance to the child we once were, we can create a new atmosphere he can respond to, helping him to see that it is not the whole world that is full of dangers, but above all the world of his family that he was doomed to fear in every moment of his existence. We never knew what bad mood might prompt our mother to expose us to the full force of her aggression. We never knew what we could do to defend ourselves. No one came to our aid; no one saw that we were in danger. And in the end we learned not to perceive that danger ourselves.'

'We cannot resolve the effects of mistreatment in therapies that evade the facts... But we can liberate ourselves from the consequences if we are prepared to face emotionally the truth of our childhood, to give up the denial of our suffering, to develop empathy for the child that we were and to thus understand the reasons for our fears. In this way, we free ourselves from the fears and guilt feelings that were burdened upon us from the earliest age. Through the knowledge of our history and our feelings, we get to know the persons that we are, and we learn to give to them what they vitally need but never received from their parents: love and respect. This is the goal of the uncovering therapy: The wounds can be scared over if they are tended to and taken seriously; but the existence of the scars should not be denied. -- If later in the lives of these adults dangers should occur, they will be better equipped to confront them because they can better understand their old fears.'

'In childhood, acceptance and expression of ... rage would have involved severe punishment or total abandonment, and the fear of these consequences lives on in the adult children. But as soon as they realize that they are no longer in danger, they will be able to understand the situation they were in as children and to rebel inwardly against the cruelties perpetrated on them, instead of continuing to forgive them "generously." The reality of childhood will never go away. Even if these parents were suddenly all transformed into angels, the memories of their cruelties, their hatred, their rejection remain... The task devolving on the adult children is to free themselves of those memories, not by forgiving and forgetting, but by accepting the logical response to torture, the experience of rage they have denied themselves for so long. The only thing that can help us to relinquish our blindness and spare our children the same fate is the courage to accept this truth.'

'The Oracle: We can never see past the choices we don't understand.'

"If you repress your anger, if you repress your hatred, then corrupt people will just walk all over you."

'Damage control means predicting the unmanaged course of events, desigining interventions to minimize fallout, and optimally distributing the residual impact among all exposed parties. This means trading off impact on trust, credibility, and future opportunities. It means salvaging material assets. And yes: it means deciding how foolish you can afford to look. Looking foolish is serious business. Reputations take a long time to establish and minutes to lose. A basic truth about risk management is that old saw, "success has many parents, while failure is an orphan." If there's a win, you fight for as much of a share as you can (for yourself, or for a broader group whose interests you represent). If there's a failure, you rush to dissipate consequences as widely and as far away from yourself as possible. ... (there is rarely anyone who is truly innocent; every stakeholder is complicit in a failure to some extent).'

'Here's the effective method: you need to interrupt as soon as you've roughly understood that there is an objectionable point being made (which can be before the speaker has finished making it), and before you've decided what to say. You do so by thinking out aloud, going "Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!" or "Ehhhhummmmmm!" clearly, and stretching out your interrupt phrase over several seconds, until the interruptee shuts up and looks towards you. And most importantly, it should be patently clear that you haven't yet decided what to say, and are thinking about it. This means looking up, down, or away in the distance as you normally would when you are absorbed in thought, not directly at the interruptee. Don't try to stage this. An artificial use of this tactic will be transparent to smart people. The quality of your timing will tell the other smart people in the room whether you know what you are doing, or faking it.'

'A live action example of how to take down your inner Nazi.' -- "With great power comes great responsibility."

'At the beginning of our lives we were, as very small children, totally dependent on our parents. And we believed, we HAD TO believe, that we were loved by them. Even when we were abused we couldn't realize this. ...transference is unavoidable if we were once abused children. We can ... strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives. They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever. ...the transference becomes our guide that will enable the small child in us to BELIEVE what their body KNEW its whole life but his mind could never believe: that so much evil and hatred can be directed towards a small, innocent child only because the parents have endured the same and have never questioned this.'

'What could be happening when people don't trust your feelings?' -- "Where you don't have a methodology for determining truth from falsehood, you must have a hierarchy... If you're not obeying reality then what are you obeying? Well, you're just obeying whim. And in the absence of an objective methodology, personal domination is inevitable. Happiness can either be the achievement of a positive or the withdrawal of a negative. If you're sharing your innermost thoughts with people who are negative towards you, I would say – just as the person is playing out something negative from their childhood – you are also playing out something negative from your childhood. This would fall into the category: My parents rejected my emotional state. You may be reproducing the pain of being rejected – in terms of your joy – by the person who was in your life who was negative towards joy. If you need somebody to confirm [your emotional] state, it's probably because they have too much power over you."

'What about the puncher's mom? Surely she is not at fault? Well... her mistake, a crucial one, is she allowed herself to get blindsided by the Angry Mom's Cognitive Kill Switch – hijacking a discussion and making it a criticism of the person's identity instead of the actual issue. Rather than repeated I'm sorrys and he's not that kind of boy what she should have said is, "why are you yelling at me? I didn't punch your kid." That changes the whole movie, now we have a different main character. Now Angry Mom is put on notice: back off and let's talk rationally, or confirm to me you are a nut and face the consequences. But her reflex – a product of the generational forces to which she was exposed – was to square off and get defensive: my kid wouldn't do that, my kid wouldn't lie. She accepted Angry Mom's premise – the premise of Gen N – that the kid is only her, and so she took the Angry Mom's attack as an attack on her directly, which it was, because that's the premise.'

'Ways to stop self attacking and free yourself from your inner critic.'

'Every organization and company is a tribe, or a network of tribes-groups of 20 to 150 people that form naturally, in which everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows of them.' -- The same person displays different stage behaviours in different tribes and contexts. -- #Stage Four (We're great/Triadic): Values (authentic) drive activities/relationships. Spontaneous match-making having assumed shared values. -- Lower stages, shared values can't be assumed. -- #Stage Five (Life is great): A common enemy 'them' takes the form of an abstraction rather than another tribe. Hard to benchmark. Visit don't stay. -- Don't just hire best and brightest else you will stagnate at Stage Three. - #Stage Three (I'm great/Dyadic): Endless cloning/individuation cycles. Values have to be made explicit before attempting match. @44:05 See tribe stage types in social network map. Hub-and-spokes meshed using triadic connections. -- Rhetoric: Shift up stages with deliberative; stabilize with demonstrative.

"Once we are in second circle together we are equal."

"She a made a sound. It was really embarrassing."

"The way to live to is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting." <-- Anarchist ;^)