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Beautiful post, thanks for sharing! I really admire how you described your inner thought processes too.

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Beautifully done. Thank you for sharing it. The happiest New Year to you and yours. ~

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Hey Dr. Gena, your reflection conversation with yourself is an excellent example of the benefits of distanced self-talk (AKA illeism). Dr. Ethan Kross has done extensive research on this technique and has written about it his 2022 book "Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It." https://www.ethankross.com/chatter/

The key is that you have to talk yourself in the third person. So for example, I would say to myself (outloud or internally) "Hey Griff, what are your thoughts an feelings about the new year ahead?" And then after I replied, the follow-up would include the word 'you." So I might say to myself, "Well that's interesting that you say you're feeling a bit nervous about the upcoming year. Can you say more?"

Kross has a video clip of a presentation about this titled "Why You Should Start Referring to Yourself in the Third Person"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVc6-q1sRQ

Also, you wrote that "ChatGPT is here (and perhaps will even be able to conduct this interview itself by the end of 2024)."

I find that both Anthropic's Claude and Inflection's Pi are already quite good at this type of personal reflective conversation, as they were engineered more for it than ChatGPT.

https://claude.ai/

https://pi.ai/talk/

It might be interesting to copy/paste your initial reflection into each of them and see where it goes in comparison to your distanced self-talk version.

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