interpersonal communication

UpTrust is both destroying my interest in other social media platforms and improving the way I interact with them.

It became blatant to me this week when I realized my screen time limits had long since stopped popping up for social media. I would open an app, look at up to 5 things, feel an "ugh," and go do something else.

More and more in conversations I've been saying, "I just wrote a post about that on UpTrust!" an more and more the reply is, "How can I get on it??"

I've never much been tempted to share and/or elaborate on my opinions anywhere on the internet. But I have been interested in posting them here, and my reason keeps being that it feels like the algorithm has my back. After I post an opinion here, the likelihood that something generative and worthwhile will happen feels way higher here. Even when I imagine a bunch of buttholes joining.

Earlier today, something happened that I totally had not forseen. I replied to a Facebook post I was tagged in that I've been annoyed by and avoiding for months. And I replied the way I'd reply here- thoroughly, thoughtfully, with a belief that it could be worth my time and energy. I think UpTrust is giving me a lot of practice at typing what matters to me in this kind of format, and my increased skill is getting paid forward to other parts of life.

PS- I keep wanting to type "algorhythm" because of my music background, but anyway it's an amazing name for a math rock band.

AMA with Hannah Aline Taylor. Wednesday 2/4 at 4:00 PM CT

love, boundaries, and mistakes in relating, community, and peopling together (+ thank god love doesn’t look like you expect it to)

AMA with Hannah Aline Taylor. Wednesday 2/4 at 4:00 PM CT

love, boundaries, and mistakes in relating, community, and peopling together (+ thank god love doesn’t look like you expect it to)

AMA with Hannah Aline Taylor. Wednesday 2/4 at 4:00 PM CT

love, boundaries, and mistakes in relating, community, and peopling together (+ thank god love doesn’t look like you expect it to)

Incorruptible Organizations AMA with Eric Ries. Wednesday 2/4 at 3:00 PM CT

Lean Startup author who now focuses on legal structures to protect mission-driven organizations from corruption. incorruptible.co

Free book giveaway! Register here.

Engage or Enrage. It is likely that we have family members or friends that we differ with greatly when it comes to politics, healthcare, etc.  I am no different.  When the inevitable hot topic arises, do you recommend flight or fight, engage or enrage?  How do you respond when this occurs?

Helping my mom ease into AI. I'm thinking about helping my elderly mom get set up with Claude or ChatGPT. (Free ChatGPT allows more usage even after the limit has been reached. This could be a bonus for her.) 

She has suggested interest in it a couple months ago and has not mentioned it again since. AI can be so helpful if used well! I am at her home this week. If I set her up now, I can help her navigate it for the next days before I go home. 

I'm concerned she might use AI to medically self-diagnose or lose skepticism and take answers as facts. Claude has a "personal preferences" area where I could write some instructions on how to engage. With Chat you can enter that into a thread but I've noticed it can forget instructions from other threads. 

She doesn't work so won't use AI for projects. She'll likely use it to ask about health concerns, which supplements to buy, getting help with emails or letters, help with doing things around the house (like how to clean her air purifier, or create recipes). She might ask questions about politics. 

Can any of you with AI expertise give me suggestions?

1. Go wtih Claude or ChatGPT? 
2. Any instructions I can enter as preferences so she is less likely to act on misinformation? There's the thing about limiting the compliments too. 
3. Any other suggestions I am not considering? 

I'm grateful for any help you can offer!

when are masculine / feminine frames useful, and when not?  Language can bring us into more intimacy with reality, or separate us. It can help guide us, or obfuscate. How do we use "masculine" and "feminine" to be more intimate with the real (present), more honest, and more loving?

The 'masculine' and 'feminine' meaning-making about relationships annoys me often. Not so much when either is used by itself. These archetypes are powerful frames, better navigated in the light of consciousness. Both exist in me, along with a lot of other things.

I get the importance of biology too—"male and female" is what, like 2 billion years old? That's a lot of accumulated lineage karma in our DNA.

When it bugs me, it's not because its wrong or particularly fake—almost every parent that's not ideologically committed to a preconceived notion of gender notices some standard differences amongst young boys and young girls. Jack is so sensitive, but he also loves to pick up sticks and hit things. Ciça is so tough, but she also loves dolls and stuffed animals and her baby cousin Sanne. Jack doesn't really care about any of that stuff—Sanne is boring. Ciça lights up.

But I wonder if the heart of it is that I'm just scared of reifying black and white thinking. This kind of thinking seems to make people celebratory of killing or subjecting whoever the other tribe is. I can see that this frame—

• is often used to oversimplify
• often presents a false sense of control over a wildly chaotic world
• the categories are usually not clear, and often insulting, usually to the incredible women I know (like women are somehow less "rational" bc they're more "emotional"? This does not reflect the brilliant women and men I know, and literally all of the trans people I know are geniuses. Similar with intellectual/embodied, independence/connection, competition/harmony, etc)
• often pluralizes values instead of evaluating better and worse versions of any given polarity, or being willing to claim one side as being overall better. There is healthier and more toxic versions of chaos and order, for example.

I'm noticing the frame annoys me often as "masculine and feminine" in relationship, not so much when either is used by itself. That's interesting.

I realized after writing this another thing that bugs me is when they're taken too seriously. This isn't physics, and even then construct-awareness reveals reality entangled with the choice of how you look—I dont even mean quantum physics, I mean as literal as "what are you seeing right now from your eyes?" Whether it's light, or a screen, or atoms, or quarks, all depend on scale. Whether it's society, or the information age, or whatever, are all honest, accurate interpretations based on time, or purpose, or some other choice the subjective meaning-maker made in how to answer the question and engage/relate.

I guess I don't mind the frame so much as the assumption that it's somehow pre-existing rather than made and re-made. It is a well-worn groove, but ironically the self-help understanding of it is fairly new.

#masculinity 

Austin's Proposition Q - A misleading text that really grinds my gears. I've received multiple texts from various groups with this language:

We can debate the merits of Proposition Q separately; what I am worked up about is the absolutely false language about "Trump cuts" to city services like fire, EMS, parks, etc. The federal government doesn't fund municipal services*. The federal government shouldn't fund municipal services, and in fact our fire, EMS, and police being independent of the federal government is a fundamental part of states' rights or how our government is intentionally structured. EVEN if I don't support defunding the police, it was absolutely within Austin's right to do so, and that had nothing to do with federal funding. 

*there are grants that impact some of these services, like the transportation grant Trump did cancel that would include parks over the new I-35, but that is not fundamentally a park funding grant.

Being With. What how do we explain relateful? How is it different than Authentic relating, circling and T Group? 

Back story, Circle Anywhere- Relateful have changed my life in ways -no other tools has ever come close... AND I CAN't ARTICULATE how and why!

One way it makes sense to me is that through relateful practices - learned to separate from the story by noticing present based things such as sensations, connections to other etc..  

So when explaining to others who are suffering in life and want change but haven't heard of relateful.. Words can not cover my life changing experiences.  Closest at the moment is disccusing how i learned how to be with anger instead of BEING angry. 

BUT - YES AND - does that land with people who don't do relateful or circling and have never heard of authentic relating etc.  

There are layers and many ways this practice create lasting positive change.  I know from personal experience it works, but what is the IT?!!!

Staying at the level of sensation is a great tool for staying in present moment, but also, by doing so, it creates the habit of noticing what is happening in the body when the nervous system in dis-regulated.  This habit of noticing, on top of the practice in a group - of being with emotional disregulation/anger - being asked "what's that like" and having the opportunity to explain how anger feels - little tiny knives attempting to exit the skin from within to the the outside = painful physically.  

This pause - checking the sensations - NOT going into the "why am i angry" seems to be a huge life changing piece of the puzzle.  As anger arises, noticing the sensations and letting the story of the anger take a back seat - now there is agency on acting out the anger.  The anger doesn't take me away on a journey of dissipating the energy by taking it out on others.   I do still get angry, but how i express it is changed.   It's like being with anger instead of BEING ANGRY!

AND THAT IS JUST ONE OF MANY STORIES - can do similar with shame, with self hate, with so much more.

BUT HOW DO I SHARE THIS WITH OTHERS?  

Would love to know!

Quick take. Whether you are familiar or not with Freud's concept of "the narcissism of small differences", it's affecting the way you relate to people and ideas 

Shadows of personal growth culture: weaponized toolkits. I think everyone here has probably experienced weaponized NVC. What are some of the other things you see weaponized that annoy you?

eg:

• Weaponized Commitment to connection: there are bunch of versions of this: i can’t heal myself without you, my feelings are dependent on your reaction (classic codependency) you must stay in the connection and respond to my inquiry or else you’re not deep, spiritual, or committed enough, etc

• weaponized owning your experience

Of course most of the time if you simply use principles, steps, and tools for yourself only you dont run into these issues; but even then people are sneaky and manipulative (often without even realizing it themselves!)

Can someone actually have any Teal if they score 0% Orange, Amber, Red, and Magenta? Going through the scores of the Better Political Conversations quiz is fascinating. (reference: https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/we0q1pq/run)

Now, this very well could have been someone running an experiment to test the scoring, or to try to get a sense of a friend or family member, but they did give a name where a lot of people leave that blank.

Their scores are:
Teal 55%
Green 45%
Orange 0%
Amber 0%
Red 0%
Magenta 0%

Is it at all possible that someone could select every single response at Orange, Amber, Red, and Magenta as False, wrong, or just doesn’t make sense and have any actual Teal?

Also interesting, I got an email from someone who thinks of himself as primarily Orange, but was surprised that his quiz results came out 0% Orange. He referenced his Meyers-Briggs results as a reference in support. Utterly fascinated, I’ve asked him to let me know what correlation he sees between the Integral levels and Meyers-Briggs, and I’ve asked him what statements at Orange would have had his quiz results come out accurate for him.

Each time I make a significant edit in the content of the project I make a note of the change in the google sheet where I’m keeping track of scores. Here are the averages of the currently 75 scores:

Amber 26%
Green 25%
Teal 21%
Red 12%
Orange 11%
Magenta 5%

One blatant pattern I’m seeing is that high Green scores ALWAYS pair with a high score in Amber, and that people who have that pairing always score exceedingly low in Red and quite low in Orange.

Coaching at Amber level of development. Hey! If you have coached someone at Amber, what do you expect can be accomplished? What do you hope for and what is your approach? In my experience they are not able to self-reflect, don’t get metaphors, and see their beliefs as rigid rather than flexible. If you’ve worked with Amber, can you share what you see and how you do it? <3

Being Out of Sync in a Group Meeting. I was just in a meeting that I was leading where, almost every time I spoke, someone else spoke at the same time. The other person would continue speaking and I would stop. It was as if my timing was wrong; I was out of sync with the group. I imagine there were a number of things going on. One is that I was holding the list of topics to talk about as if we needed to get through all of them in the time we had, while the group wanted to savor and speak to each item at length. But it wasn’t just that. Within a topic, I was always bumping against someone else, timing wise. It felt awful. Any ideas or comments about this phenomena?

Oppress me. Is it possible? Can you oppress me right now?

Context:
The guy I’m dating (Ken) had said he was frustrated with the Austin School District teachers that he’s teaching Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to because they were all giving wrong answers to the question, Who is the oppressor in your classroom? According to Ken, and apparently according to the book the teachers had been assigned to read, the oppressor in a classroom is the teacher.

Last night I was telling my friend Arun about it and he said Oppress me! Right now!

All of this post is rooted in my discomfort with the premise that all teachers are oppressors in their classrooms. I can see the roots of truth of it, but making that its own conclusion point looks wildly flawed to me.

So.. who’s winning in y’all’s opinion?

Dates with an uber-green guy... Tonight is my second date with a guy who’s the head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Austin school district. I enjoy him a lot, but EVERYTHING is identity for him. I brought up integral theory on our first date and he’s super interested. But I find myself surprisingly awkward feeling like I need to side-step all the sacred cows of his worldview. But so far anytime I’ve pushed back on it he has lit up, so maybe I can just chill the eff out.