After my last post on this theme I suffered a difficult reversal. A bout of intense hay fever struck me down with the one-two punch of overwhelming headache and severe lethargy. In that state my eating habits tend to suffer, which is a problem because nasty processed carbohydrates are exactly what exacerbate my allergic reactions!

Somehow, though, I fought through the discouragement that goes with these states, looked after myself, and pulled clear of the allergy. I decided to seek out a sales job in earnest. I pursued a few leads aggressively, and within the week I had me a potentially very exciting and lucrative job in sales.

After a week, I quit. Why? I discovered something. You see, a week in this job proved to me that I had totally overcome my fear of attempting the kind of inter-personal imposition that cold telephone sales involves. I discovered I could handle the numbers game of the process, accepting 100 “no thanks” responses for every one “yes please”.

What I found though, is that the company I was working for ran things on a short term, strip mining kind of model. No networking, no relationship building, no attempts at cultivating repeat business. Consequently many of my sales calls failed because of the irritable person on the other end who had been repeatedly pestered by my co-workers in recent weeks.

Furthermore, I quickly discovered that, desperate for the whiff of money, sales people are willing to say all kinds of rubbish. One gentleman (I use the term loosely) in particular would attempt to invoke a battery of racist stereotypes in order to induce fear in his mark as a motivator to buy.  After a few days of endless racial slurs wafting through the room I found myself very repelled by a work culture willing to consider such behaviour to be acceptable.

The breakthrough happened on my last day. I figured out “how to do it” that morning, and voila – a slew of sales. That one morning was very lucrative for me personally. And then? I felt the gears shift inside me and I couldn’t do it any more. So I walked out.

What I realised is that there is a difference between fear and aversion. If you fear to do something you are less able to sense how you actually feel about doing the thing you fear. You might feel adverse to it, but that aversion seems like excuse making to justify fear, that is, weakness, and this makes it hard to trust your own feelings.

The other thing I hadn’t expected with a sales job was the boredom. SO boring. Hour after hour of having many almost identical interactions, staring at the same cubicle wall. Seeing as how I recently got my results back from this year’s studies (GPA of 4.0, thanks very much), I felt especially, well, wasted on such a role.

Having conquered my fear and proved I could do the job well, I found a knot of intense aversion. Not necessarily to sales, but to the short-sighted and destructive business model my employer utilised. And so, no longer with anything to prove, I heeded the ethical sense that I could now cleanly hear, and quit.

A couple of days earlier I had met with Donovan and we performed a beautiful blot in honour of Midsummer. All the good stuff that can happen with ritual happened – the environment around us responded to our calls, brilliant poetry came to us both, we chanted and swayed like loonies, and the mead took on that extra-special-delicious flavour that ritual mead sometimes gets.

I invited the “way” to open before me at that ritual, and from the moment I walked out of my sales job it did just that, spreading like a blossoming flower.

Having walked out of my job, I decided to go to the art gallery and take  in some of the Hindu devotional statuary there (I like paying my respects to Vishnu and Ganesh).

On the way, I get a call for a job interview.

Next day, I do the interview. It is a very sweet job.

And today I get the news that the job is mine! It doesn’t involve sales or anything like that, but it is interesting, the hours are good, it is close to home, and it is well paid. Perfect!

Lessons about deconditioning:

The most important thing I have learned from this experiment is that even when you consciously construct a plan for doing some deconditioning, you have to be open to the unexpected. A program of conscious deconditioning can confuse you into thinking that your way – your limited understanding of how things “should” unfold – is the way.

I suspect that if one gets too caught up in such a mentality one risks not having the necessary sensitivity for distinguishing between fatuous fear and appropriate aversion. I’ve known people who have bent themselves into ugly shapes by trying to force themselves to fit self-images that run contrary to their true natures.

Having the self-honesty to be able to separate out fear from aversion is a valuable skill and if deconditioning exercises can lead you to blur the distinction, my own experiment shows that they can also help you to refine that distinction.

I have also learned about the importance of being open to the unexpected when deconditioning: witness my growing public-singing habit. This has been the best discovery I have made in the process, and it is reaping all sorts of obvious and non-obvious rewards. I am determined now to maintain this habit and explore it. Curiously, after a day of telesales I found myself unable to sing: a strong message from my unconscious!

So I think I can conclude this deconditioning exercise on a note of cautious triumph (caution being adopted so that I do not devolve into tilting at windmills). This experiment has expanded my idea of what is possible, of what kinds of action and ways of being I can comfortably include within the domain of my personality. It has also given me more trust in my practical commitment to growth and  magic, and underscored the value of documenting one’s personal/magical experiments, since these articles have definitely helped refine my focus and bolster my motivation.

We are headed now into 2010: and perhaps onto bigger and better magical evolutionary efforts! Tonight I will make another sacrifice in thanks for my good fortune and my victories.

Well I’ve been busy folks and have been learning a great deal since my first post on Deconditioning.

Firstly, I’ve been singing in public a lot. So much that I don’t even notice if I am doing it or not. At first it found it very threatening. Then I pushed through that and I realised that often no one else is even paying attention anyway. We think we’re exposing ourselves and then when we make the vulnerable step we discover it was totally safe after all! It is pretty hilarious to be a human being.

The singing has caused me to have a much better baseline mood, too. We’re made to sing, it is what our bodies are for, so to sing as much as I have been is really good. I’ve come up with various interesting musical ideas, and my singing skill is increasing a lot too.

I’ve found that singing in public causes me to feel more present, and I seem to naturally have more interactions with people, too. Short conversations, whatever. I’m not always the initiator either. Simply singing has already made me much more present in the world around me as my own true self it seems. Or something along those lines.

Seeing as how I am looking for a job I decided, purely as an experimental exercise, to go to a local shopping centre with a bunch of resumes and try to get rid of them all by going into shops and enquiring for work. I’m not actually looking for retail work, but I decided this is a lot more demanding than the usual thing of writing job applications.

I’ve done this sort of thing before, but always viewed it as an onerous misery to be gotten done as soon as possible. This time I decided to take it as an experiment and try to detach from outcomes.

Before I started I spent quite a while journaling in a café, trying to uncover and counter all of the protective but unhelpful thought processes that might interfere with the task. The biggest one was fear of failure or fear of success – and I had to work hard to dismantle this with the view that the whole exercise was an experiment in trying out proactive behaviour without reticence: outcome was irrelevant. In fact, I decided that my objective would be to fail to get anywhere.

Even with this armoury, I still felt myself assailed by fear when I started – fear of failure. I found that it was easier to consider approaching shops that sold things I was interested in than not, despite the “aim to fail” attitude which meant I wasn’t planning on getting a job at any of these places anyway. I decide to work with my resistance, and let it steer me towards places that seemed more interesting. After a few of those I was more able to approach places I was less interested in.

I also worked hard to not have the attitude of “I have to tough this out”, as that has been my attitude in the past and it doesn’t help me. Armoured will power is a finite thing. I wanted to sufficiently jam my beliefs about proactive behaviour that I would not feel threatened by it. Oh, and I found a mantra of Elhaz, Ehwaz, Gebo, Sowilo to be helpful too.

As it happened it did take a bit of willpower to get started, as well as repeating the “aim to fail” objective to myself over and over like a mantra. But once the flow got going I didn’t need willpower, my natural spontaneity took over. Not without some fetters still, but mostly free. That was awesome.

So after all this prevarication, self-debate, and the rest, I nerve myself up to walk into a shop, a health food store. I walk in, say “do you have any jobs?” “Yes”, comes the reply, “got a resume?” I did and I handed it over. Voila. Instant job in a context that I’d actually enjoy: talking to customers all day about why they should have cod liver oil or organic sea salt or half a hundred other cool things that I’m interested in anyway. And the staff discounts are very generous too.

I still canvassed a bunch of other places. Most didn’t have anything, but one place took my resume.

As you can imagine, though, the smashing success of the experiment really bolstered me. In fact I was on a total high. It felt so good to “put myself out there” as it were, to take an experimental course of action like that. My new job is just one day a week, but that actually suits me as I can get a full time job as well, using my health store job as a tool to learn more about food, nutrition, and natural remedies…as well as generate more much needed cash after a year of being an impoverished student.

So far, then, I’ve been very successful with the deconditioning process. Curiously, though, the list of tasks I set myself has not proved helpful other than as a tool to get me started. For example some of the tasks, such as having interactions with people, being a difficult customer, and so forth, have been just happening naturally as my public singing unlocks my courage to be in the world. Since I am spending a lot of time asserting my identity in public space I just don’t think it anything special to do so in specific interpersonal contexts.

I am now actively looking for a job in sales, too. The dare of being able, as someone who used to be so damn shy and socially anxious, to make a living out of sales is just too enticing. It is a bit of a digression in the map of my career perhaps, but as Clint pointed out, sales skills are relevant to anything. For me, though, this is about discovering just how much I can expand the field of actions that I believe I can succeed at.

I’ve never applied the whole chaos magic deconditioning thing to my life in such an organised way (the closest example I can think of would be the way in which I learned to ride a bike), but it is really bearing fruit. It is important for me not to get lazy or rest on my laurels though, I have to keep upping the challenge level: hence seeking a sales job.

I really hope this experiment inspires others to get off their rears and challenge their limitations. I’m feeling very positive about life: my success in breaking down self-imposed limitations so quickly is making me feel a lot more capable and able to direct my own life. I’m not sure what happens next, but I am confident I am equal to the challenge. A-Viking we go! As I explore further experiments in this vein you can be sure to read about them right here…

I have decided that I want to engage in some deconditioning, to eliminate some specific limits within my personality that really bother me. I’ve been researching the psychological technique of systematic desensitisation, but that doesn’t seem quite right for what I need (and tends to rely far too much on teamwork and imagination for what I intend).

Trawling through my limited selection of chaos magic books, and through the web, proved similarly unhelpful. Folks love to talk about the subject of transgressing one’s boundaries from an armchair, and they love telling lurid stories of (mostly other people’s) weird misadventures when doing so, but I cannot seem to find a decent template or framework for doing this myself.

So of course I am going to invent one.

One of the great things about having a blog is that it can be used as a tool: specifically, a tool for compelling honesty with myself, since if I publicly announce something I intend to do in this journal and then do not do it…well, yes, I can lie on the internet, but I will know that I am lying. That in and of itself is a powerful stimulus for honesty.

Ok, so first I am going to outline a very simple deconditioning methodology which borrows from half a dozen magical and psychological techniques. Then I am going to plan out the use of this method with some specific aspects of my own life. Then I am going to apply that method.

Before I get started though, I would like to indicate that all of this involves a lot of fear. Why? Well, transgressing one’s limitations is scary. Anything could happen. Especially when they involve other people, as my specific focus does.

Ok, so here is how the system works.

First of all, you need to define exactly what it is that you want to ‘decondition’. In my case it is a set of rules I impose on myself about my behaviour, but it could be anything. You might want to decondition your emotional reactivity to a given trigger (something I’ve been working on this year); you might want to decondition a tendency to leap to a negative interpretations of events; you might want to decondition a story you live out such as ‘I will always be poor’; you might want to decondition even a physical mannerism that might arise in response to some situations.

The thing(s) you are seeking to decondition might be quite superficial or they might have deep roots. It is impossible to know exactly until you start messing with them – sometimes serious problems prove to be largely due to habit, other times trivial problems turn out to be deeply rooted in the psyche.

I suggest that avoiding entertaining too many expectations is helpful, since these are basically empirical questions and if you presuppose an answer then you risk getting into trouble.

Also, often our theories for our negative aspects are quite thin and one-dimensional and very easily obscure our ability to notice all the other possible interpretations that could also be true. Human beings are very vulnerable to confirmation bias – we tend to notice evidence for what we already believe and ignore evidence that contradicts our beliefs.

Hence it might be safer to uproot and avoid an particular explanation for the psychological pattern you intend to shift and just get on with shifting it.

So how do we do that? First of all, you need to work out a hierarchy of intensity. Brainstorm a whole bunch of situations that might set off the pattern that you wish to decondition. They might be actual experiences you have had, or imagined ones that could happen. Try to sort them into a ranking of extremity. You’re going to work through these so the ranking is reasonably important. I will give you an example in a moment.

Once you have your hierarchy of conditioned thoughts/feelings/behaviours, you need to work out some alternative responses to what you’d normally do. So if a particular provocation would normally throw you into a rage, you might prepare a plan involving slapping yourself in the face to break the anger circuit. The idea is simply to transgress whatever your habitual response is (it might take a bit of reflection to work out what the habit is that you are trying to break).

Of course, remembering to do this interrupter might take a few tries and a bit of effort. And it needn’t be dramatic – even just consciously reminding yourself that your response is arbitrary and open to transformation might be enough.

Once you have managed to master the first rung on the hierarchy – that is, you have exposed yourself to the provocation enough that you can reliably exercise choice in your response – you can proceed to the second, third, fourth, etc. With luck you’ll soon have shed a whole load of psychological armour and be much less encumbered.

Be wary of doing harm to yourself, however. The objective is not to force yourself. You need to be able to do the new response without discomfort or displeasure. Otherwise all you are doing is pitting conscious will against unconscious habit, and we all know where that battle usually ends up.

I’m not sure how well I have explained the idea (and bear in mind that this may well be a load of rubbish that won’t work, not even for me), but here is my example of me.

What I would like to be is less concerned about taking social risks. I would love to be so confident that I could be a sales guy, specifically. Not that I ever want to ‘go into sales’, but I would love to have that much social confidence. I would love to talk to strangers in the street without fear. I would love to happily make a fool out of myself, cause offence, or stick my nose into business where it might not belong. I would love to see strangers as potential new friends rather than anonymous robots.

This is all the more relevant because right now I am looking for a job. So these kinds of social confidence skills would be very handy. My reclusive nature has flared up however (predictably) and so I find the process much more stressful than really I would like it to be.

I realise that looking for work is not fun for most people most of the time, but I would like to think that if I am any sort of well-adjusted person then I should be able to learn to handle the process with aplomb.  Instead I find it rather anxiety provoking, and that really has to go.

Oh yes, things are not totally one dimensional. I have started to get into a habit of singing reasonably loudly to myself when in public. It utterly terrifies me to do this (what a transgression of public robot-space)! But I think I might gradually be learning that if you sing in public people just ignore you and nothing bad happens at all…and this might be a nice little microcosm for the whole process that I intend to explore.

Ok, my personal list of exercises (not quite in a hierarchical order) for reducing social fear:

Singing in Public

This is where I am currently working. I will know I have it mastered when I spontaneously sing in public and don’t even think about it.

Greeting People

I would like to walk down a street (preferably a reasonably busy one) and happily greet each person as I walk by them. This is quite a transgression, it seems, in a built up urban environment (whereas when I lived in a more rural setting it became much more habitual). I might even be singing between greetings!

Striking up Conversations

At this stage I would like to feel so confident that any time I am standing in someone’s proximity for any length of time (e.g. waiting for a pedestrian light to change) I try to start up a conversation. Woah, scary! It doesn’t matter if they are not interested (I do not have to try to force them or anything silly). The point is just to discover that I will survive the experience.

Asking for a Favour

At this point I have to be able to approach someone and ask them to help me, say, ask them directions to something, making it a bit difficult for them (that is, I have to play a bit dumb). Then I have to try to get them into a conversation. Sort of an elaboration on Stage Three, but one with more artifice and more of an attempt to irritate the other person a bit (not too much, I hope).

Complaining

This is a tricky one, something I have often struggled with in more benign forms. The idea is to go to a café or restaurant, make an order, and then when it comes say that I have been served the wrong thing. Holy cow, this is getting scary. The complaining is not to be done in an aggressive, jerk kind of way, and I am allowed to let them off the hook (that is, I don’t have to make them take it back). I am sure I could think of other situations where complaining is warranted too…

Cold Job Lead Hunting

Since I am looking for a job, what about cold calling a few companies and asking if they have jobs going, if I could have an interview anyway, and all that sort of thing? Likewise dropping in resumes off the street. Oh, scary. I mean, I have done this sort of thing before, but how cool would it be to be able to do it all day, every day, without raising a sweat?

Selling Stuff on the Phone

What about inuring myself to cold calling random people and trying to sell them stuff? That’s got to be close to the ultimate in scary for me. Maybe I could sell copies of my Ein Skopudhr Galdra CD, which I would love to shift a few copies of (hint, hint, dear reader).

Selling Stuff in Person

Same as above…except doing it door to door or on the street like those charity collector folks. I’d love to actually get, and thrive in, a sales job like that…just because it would represent a total victory over my social fears and anxieties.

These items are more or less in a hierarchy, although I struggle to get it into a perfect linear structure. Maybe it does not matter so long as the general hierarchy holds. Some of them I have actually done before, but not enough that I feel at all comfortable with them.

What sort of time frame should I adopt for this experiment? Well, that really depends on the number of opportunities I have (a lot of this relies on me wandering around in public), how brave I am, and how long it takes for me to acclimatise.

Setting a definite deadline is no good, therefore, and there’s no point hurting myself with unrealistic expectations. By the same token, I need to be honest with myself so that I am not, as we say in Australia, just ‘copping out’. I will have to refine this aspect of the process as I go.