As January 1 approaches, I predictably feel a lot of internal pressure to write some kind of “year-in-review” post. Most of it I can chalk up to the nauseatingly familiar drone of my resident inner drill sergeant. “Look at all these other influencers posting their years-in-review, no wonder they have so many more followers”; “isn’t this supposed to be your whole schtick?”; “how do you expect to impress the top-level people if you can’t even come up with something inspiring to post on f*cking New Year’s?”; that sort of drivel.
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"
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.
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.
Beautiful post, thanks for sharing! I really admire how you described your inner thought processes too.
Beautifully done. Thank you for sharing it. The happiest New Year to you and yours. ~
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.