Interchapter Report 2: Metapractice 101

It took him years in an interchapter break to practice lying until he could do it skillfully. In the beginning he didn’t even know how to practice. Before he could practice lying, he needed to spend a year practice practicing. But how could he learn to metapractice?

He’d developed powerful beliefs about practice. He had believed that he didn’t need to practice. When he realized that he did need to practice, he replaced that wrong belief with other wrong beliefs: that he didn’t have the ability to practice; that he did not have the discipline to practice; that he couldn’t learn to practice; that he couldn’t develop self-discipline. He used these beliefs to support his belief that the situation was hopeless.

But he did have one very odd belief that led him to success. He believed, for some reason, that he should reread page 105 carefully. He did, and remembered what he’d written earlier about The Most Powerful Forces In The Universe.

He remembered that belief was the most powerful force in the universe. He remembered that his beliefs were not helping him. He remembered that he could change his beliefs. He remembered that it could be difficult. By the time he’d finished writing this paragraph he had decided to change his beliefs.

He imagined some new, more helpful beliefs. He decided to believe there was hope. He decided to believe that he did have the ability to practice and the discipline to practice and the discipline and ability to learn. For two minutes he tried to imagine practicing in a disciplined way, then stopped, exhausted. He realized that those beliefs were welded into a metabelief system.

A metabelief system is a set of beliefs along with a set of beliefs about beliefs that support and reinforce one another. While you try to change a belief, the metabeliefs resist change and change the new belief back. His metabelief system had two powerful metabeliefs: he believed that his beliefs were true, and be believed that those beliefs could not be changed.

He decided to change his metabeliefs. And he succeeded, but only because his metametabeliefs—that his metabeliefs were true and unchangeable—were weak. If they’d been stronger, he’d have had to go meta at least one more level.

Changing his metametabliefs was easy. Changing his metabeliefs was a bit harder. Once he’d changed them, he set to changing his beliefs. Then he set to imagining a more effective approach. He couldn’t imagine that he could learn to practice, but he could imagine that he could imagine it. So he metaimagined that he could learn to practice.

It was hard, but he found that he could do it. He practiced until he could easily imagine that he could imagine it. Then he metaimagined that he had self-discipline despite imagined distractions, self-doubt, and opposition. That took more work, but he did it. Then he metaimagined self-discipline despite greater imagined obstacles. Each time he tried it became easier and each time it became easier he did it again, only with still greater imagined obstacles. In a short span of interchapter time he was able to metaimagine self-discipline while a hundred thousand imagined voices screamed that he could not do it.

Finally he was ready to imagine. He took a deep breath and imagined that he had the self-discipline he needed to practice. It was also hard, but not as hard as his metaimagining had been. He imagined obstacles and almost as quickly imagined that he overcame them.

He did it over, and over, and as he worked he wrote down his thoughts and impressions. By the time he was finished he’d filled more than a thousand pages. To keep the story moving, he deleted them.