It doesn’t matter how long you practice piano each day... If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.
Below are types of resources scored by the impact each has on my learning. This is a “back of the napkin” metric; Daniel Kahneman says that’s typically good enough.
| Score | Type of Resource |
|---|---|
| 5 | - observing IFS sessions |
| 4 | - audio lessons from top experts (IFS Institute circle group) |
| 4 | - practicing w peers and getting feedback from self, others, supervisors |
| 3 | - books (audio, physical, digital + highlights) |
| 3 | - consulting professionals (very limited experience as of Dec ‘21) |
| 3 | - blogging, teaching what I'm learning |
| 3 | - solo meditations |
| 2 | - watching / listening others talk about IFS |
| 1 | - consulting the hivemind, people on forums |
This is all subjective, and from my personal experience and learning style. I’m not saying “there isn’t good info on forums”, just that I have difficulty determining the accuracy of that information.
I dedicated much of my life to working with kids, especially while training and working as a CCLS at children’s hospitals. At first, what I observed from my colleagues seemed like a kind of magic. I was already “good”, having followed the books, lectures, and my own intuition, but none of those could show show me greatness. Likewise, my most effective teaching moments have come through through real world demonstrations.
When I first got serious about learning IFS, I started transcribing sessions, and studying written dialogues like those in the The 2017 Skills Manual. By comparing, word-for-word, 5 different responses to the same question, I created a reliable Session Cheat Sheet for use in my own practice.
I’m now more comfortable going “off script”, still glance at my cheat sheet almost every session. I’d love to just “speak from the heart”, but when my vocabulary is lagging, I rely on the elegance of the experts to convey those sentiments.
All speaking is public speaking. Practicing IFS (with someone else) is performative. Embodying self-energy, while necessary, is not sufficient for helping others. Great actors, athletes, & poker players all make a practice of watching the tapes.
The IFS Books, Youtubes, etc has categories for both “private / paid” and “free / publicly available” resources.
(still working on this)
Take Steven Covey’s “put first things first” literally. When I wake up each day, I hit play on a playlist of audio sessions.
What gets measured gets managed. I use Habit Share to track this habit, sometimes adding notes about the quality of my attention.
I listened on the red days, but the presentations didn’t contain sessions... Perhaps I should change those to gray.
Take notes. Score what you observe. IFS Books, Youtubes, etc