Intro to SelfAuthoring
I'm Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto in Canada. I'm going to tell you the story behind the Self Authoring Suite website.
A few years ago, I realized that the students in my classes had written essays on all sorts of subjects in grade school and college. However, they'd never been asked to write thoughtfully about themselves—about their own past experiences, personalities, and visions for their futures. Upon reflection, this lack of opportunity struck me as strange, to say the least. Since there's nothing more important to get straight than your own personal experience.
At the same time, I was speaking with managers at various companies about how to hire more effective workers. They were much more interested in how to improve the performance of poorly performing people they had already hired. I didn't have much to tell them at the time because improving people is very difficult. Nonetheless, the two problems stuck in my mind.
So I started to search for psychological interventions that could be used widely and practically to clarify and improve people's lives. I already knew that people lived inside the stories they told about themselves and that they used those stories to interpret everything around them. While considering this, I came upon Dr. James Pennebaker's research conducted at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Pennebaker tested Sigmund Freud's theory that the release of emotions related to traumatic events could be curative. He had his students write for three days for 15 minutes a day about the most upsetting experiences of their lives, while a control group wrote about ordinary daily activities. Those in the former group experienced long-term improvements in their psychological and physical health after a brief dip in mood—not so much because of the expression of pent-up feelings, however, but because they drew more specific causal conclusions about what had happened to them in the past.
Dr. Laura King had her subjects write about their ideals and future goals instead, but they experienced the same benefits. Our research team specifically tested the effects of the future authoring program, part of the Self Authoring Suite, related to goal setting at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland. Academically struggling McGill students increased their grades by 25% in one year and decreased their dropout rates from 30% to zero. The same thing happened at Erasmus University with more than 1,200 business students.
These effects do not just apply to students either. Dr. Frank Schmidt, one of the world's outstanding industrial psychologists, has demonstrated that participating in such programs makes all kinds of people substantially more effective at whatever they are doing. People who complete such programs appear to benefit because the careful articulation of their experiences—past, present, and future—decreases misery related to threat and uncertainty and increases happiness and hope, which people experience when they progress towards somewhere they truly want to be.
When complicated experiences are carefully put into words, the manner in which they are represented in the brain changes. They move from the areas associated with stressful emotion, demanding constant physical readiness, to the areas associated with detailed comprehension and understanding. This makes articulate people less stressed and more informed about how to be successful now and in the future.
It is for these reasons that we developed the Self Authoring Suite—a set of four interactive online writing programs—and are offering them to anyone who wants to concentrate on improving his or her life. If you want to understand yourself better, become less anxious and happier, and commit yourself more firmly to your education, career, or your relationships, these programs will help a lot.
Each of the programs is composed of a series of interactive web pages that present you with specific personal questions. This simplifies and guides the difficult process of personal writing. Each program requires careful thought and takes several hours to complete. It is better to write over a number of days so that you have time to think, and because sleep aids the process. The writing is challenging, but the experimentally documented benefits are worth it.
The past authoring program helps you write an autobiography. It will present you with pages like this, introducing you to the program and providing psychologically sound advice and information. It will then ask you to start writing, dividing your life into seven epochs or sections and describing the important experiences of each. The present or future programs help you address your personality faults and capitalize on your virtues.
When you start either of these programs, you will also be presented with instruction pages. Then you'll be provided with a list of adjectives, some of which will accurately define you, and be asked to select six to nine. Describing your faults, if you're feeling up to a challenge, or your virtues if you could use a boost. You will then be asked to rank order these adjectives and to write a paragraph describing a time when each had a specific effect on your life.
The future authoring program helps you define the future that would work best for you three to five years down the road, and just as importantly, to describe the future you want to avoid. It starts with some questions like these, which will start you thinking in the right direction. Then it will ask you to write freely about what you want and don't want, and about how to justify your decisions and stay on the right track.
The programs contain much more detail than this brief summary presents. Here are the sorts of additional questions you will be asked to consider: What were your 10 most important experiences? Were they positive or negative? How did each experience change you or your view of other people? Were there things that you should have done differently? Are you the life of the party? Do you feel comfortable around people? Do you think before you act? Are you full of ideas? Are you a sensible person? Do you do things according to a plan? Are you too quiet around strangers? Do you daydream too much? What is one thing that you could do better? What do you want to learn about? How should you handle your drinking or drug use? Describe your ideal social life.
You may choose to complete any or all of the four programs. You will be given a confidential username and account password, and your writing will be securely stored. Once you have completed each program, you'll receive an organized, comprehensive email laying out the work that you have done. You can return to the programs in the future to edit and update your work.
Many people do not understand who they are, where they are, or where they are going. In consequence, instead of attempting those actions that would make their lives as valuable as possible, things just happen to them—and they're often not good. Carefully answering all the questions in the Self Authoring Suite in your own words will clear the fog from your vision, make you healthier and stronger, and increase the chances that you will exist in a manner that justifies all the trouble that life inevitably presents.
This will help you be a good person for yourself and for other people. Carve yourself a new and better you. There's no sense slouching around miserably when you can aim for what you should have and get it. Good luck with the programs!