I thought I was saved:
Age 20, I was lurking around the university library like all normal college freshmen do on a Saturday afternoon.
I flipped over a book that somebody had left on a table. It turned out to be an instructional manual for cognitive behavioral therapists.
As night started to fall, I read it. It blew my mind.
I recognized all the distorted patterns of thinking that the book described, which lead to anxiety and depression. I knew them all from my own head. Now I had labels to identify them, and techniques to challenge and redirect them in the future.
For a day or two after, I walked around on a cloud, feeling my life was transformed. I had finally found a way out of the gloom that had formed around me in my teenage years.
Except it didn’t last.
Within a couple days, the CBT stuff had largely slipped from my mind. So it was back to catastrophizing, and black-and-white thinking, and overgeneralization.
Apparently, I’m not unique in this. A few days ago, I was reading an article about the promise of AI for treating mental illness. The article mentioned CBT, and how effective and popular it still is — IF. From the article:
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When [Alison Darcy, a psychologist at Stanford] was in graduate school, she treated dozens of hospitalized patients using C.B.T.; many experienced striking improvements but relapsed after they left the hospital. C.B.T. is “best done in small quantities over and over and over again,” she told me.
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I’m telling you this because in my still-catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, and overgeneralizing head, this connected to another thing I was reading a few days ago.
This other thing was a book by sales trainer David Sandler.
Sandler had came up with this amazing and low-stress sales system. He wrote it up in his book. He taught it to beaten down, despondent salesmen during live seminars.
The salesmen went out of the seminar walking on clouds, certain they had been saved from ever again being bullied by prospects or ashamed of selling.
Except it didn’t last.
That’s why Sandler’s book is called You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar. From that book:
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Of course, people want instantaneous impact change. They want to see positive, enduring changes immediately. But our experience is that that kind of change is going to be sustainable over time only if you create a solid ongoing reinforcement program to back up the learning.
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Maybe this is true of all really effective but unnatural systems.
You hear such a system described. It makes sense. You get energized, follow through for a couple days.
Eventually though, you revert back to the mean.
The solution: small doses, over time, with regular reinforcement.
Yes, I know this is the exact opposite of what typical direct response offers promise (Gene Schwartz’s publishing company was called Instant Improvement).
But this reinforcement learning approach has its appeals as well:
It’s easy to get started with something when you know it only requires small doses, rather than a drastic change.
And with reinforcement training, it’s easier to get committed to starting today, rather than starting later AKA never. That’s because since change will take time, and reinforcement, rather than a one time big bang that you can get with the flick of a credit card, every minute that you delay ends up costing you down the line. Best start today.
It holds for CBT… for sales training… and for the effective but unnatural habit that is writing a daily email for your business.
For CBT reinforcement, you now have AI apps to talk to you and offer to correct your distorted thinking day in and day out.
For sales training, you have David Sandler’s President Club, which reinforces his sales system during weekly meetups for a modest $12,000 a year.
And as for daily emails, you have my Daily Email Habit service, which nudges you to write a daily email every day, and gives you a puzzle to mull over, and even some hints to make sure what you write is effective.
Daily Email Habit doesn’t use AI, and it doesn’t quite cost $12,000 a year, at least yet. If you’d like more information on it, today, when it’s best to get started: