Dr Grinder First allow me to say that I found your posts in this thread to be extraordinarily rewarding to read, and the advice you offer is advice I aspire to follow. However there has also been one aspect of them which has been bugging me ever since I first read them. you wrote: !"Also take a lesson from Castenada in the sense of cultivating a practice of reducing self-revelation, be whatever you choose to be but explain nothing and forget that you have a background (or alternatively, keep your background to yourself). While being absolutely straightforward or whatever your style, there is little point to describing the past - you are what you are, you do what you do. People who make judgments about others based on their personal history are often seeking to categorize and predict behavior. These same people fail to note and respond to the person in the present. Of course, if my job is to vet potential intelligence sources, such a background investigation is warranted and relevant - otherwise, place yourself firmly in the present with a future dream as an orienting reference point and kick." Allow me to paraphrase some of the advice you offer here (and hopefully I will not get that word backwards this time:) - Do not reveal stuff about your background and personal history. - Let your actions be guided by what you want to be in the future. To me this appears to be content advice. Granted it is on a high level of abstraction, but still advice to avoid certain content in conversations, and advice to put attention on the future rather than the past, which admittedly would seem rather quirky even to me, but still. I just reread the pages 334 to 344, where you and Bostic st Clair point to the fact that there are no formal characteristics defining the process/content distinction and seem to say that it is a relational quality, so that content is content in relation to something, and the same goes for process. My question is how to discern that your advice is process instructions rather than content advice, if indeed it is, or did I miss some communication from Jane where she provided the content in question, or is there another explanation? Spike