Drew Burney

Why can't we do this on purpose?

You can't voluntarily collapse your identity, right?

That's kind of what you're saying.

Because your identity, its whole job is to have this like cohesive story about who you are.

It's literally there to say, no, this is who I am and I'm not going anywhere.

And so if you're deliberately trying to say, hey, get out of there, like it's going to rebel right away, right?

The dog chasing the tail, right?

It's almost like a survival mechanism, you know, that it's just... That's just not going to happen.

You're not going to destroy your own identity just by thinking about it or just by trying really hard to do it.

It's just not going to happen.

I think another one is...

your values clarification, if you're aiming at, I'm trying to change this value, that's also a story that you tell yourself.

And it's looking for coherence, not truth.

And so the narratives all around that, those are there to protect you as well.

They're there to just give your life a coherent story, no matter if it's serving you or not.

And so dislodging that, again, it's like a survival mechanism.

We need to make sense of the world.

And so

just trying to pull a random value out of the the mix of all the values and and habits and beliefs that you have and narratives and all that that's very very destabilizing and so again you just have the self-protective function that's just not going to allow you to do that

willingly right the closest approaches that we do have uh william miller um the same guy who coined the term quantum change also came up with he was the co-inventor of what they call motivational interviewing which is like a less intense kind of like deliberate trying to show people okay you say you value this but here you're behaving this way and now let's get in and do the work in between it's slow though it's not you're probably not going to get quantum change out of that necessarily