I can't claim that I'm particularly good at being happy and productive while being non-coercive, but I mostly don't force myself into things, so it feels like the default rather than something to get really excited about.
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Being cruel to someone you love (with their consent) is how you help them overcome laziness. It's a shove out of a local optimum for their own good, because you love them and they trust you to have their best interests fundamentally at heart.
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It's also a lot of fun. I *love* causing people cognitive dissonance. The look of irritation as I can see their thoughts reshaping. Mmm, yes please, that's the sort of personal growth I'm 100% here for.
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But, and this is important, you can't do this all the time, or to an unbounded degree. Sometimes you'll go too far, and you need to be sensitive to that, and they need to be able to trust you that when that happens you will stop and help them recover.
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The goal is to make someone uncomfortable, not to hurt them, and they need to be able to trust you to understand and respect the difference. You also need to be able to trust yourself in this way if you're to have productive negative self-talk.
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2. See non-coercion Twitter for details but TLDR if you're constantly relying on negative self-talk for productivity that's bad and you're going to burn out. This should be a thing you use for one-off tasks and the occasional nudge to get you out of bad equilibria.
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3. This is a general principle: If a particular emotion is always terrible and bad, that's not a problem with that emotion it's a sign that you are emotionally dysregulated over it. All emotions have a useful function, and if you cannot handle a particular emotion you lose that.
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I don't currently have *great* advice on that front, but basically I think what you need to do is very cautiously approach the emotion, possibly in the presence of a trusted friend you can talk things out for, and figure out why it's so bad.
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CBT and the like get a lot of hate around here, but my impression is that CBT is actually quite useful for this process (I haven't tried it myself because I don't really have problems with the sort of thought processes that CBT is designed to solve).
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The reason I think CBT is helpful is that it helps create a certain degree of safety: You know you *can* break these thought loops as they come up, which allows you to safely approach them and gradually defuse them.
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This process of defusing is of course going to be at least a bit uncomfortable, because it requires you constantly going just outside your comfort zone.
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How do you get yourself to do that? Well... take everything I said above and apply it to itself. Mostly use noncoercion (this is exciting! I am excited to see what is in there!) and occasionally give yourself a kick up the arse (stop being lazy and eat your shadow!)
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In this thread I've tried to articulate what the correct amount might look like: Not so much an internal task master, but a little internal trickster god needling you out of your comfort zone, or a kind parent gently telling you that yes it's unfair but we gotta.
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A certain level of gentle cruelty is useful and very fun, and there are all sorts of ways to get that with others. It's a shame to deny yourself that too.
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End of conversation
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