About FEIT Training
FEIT is a practice in exploratory conversation. Instead of immediately converting a thought into something to agree with, rebut, or correct, notice what it is leaning on and see what happens when you move that structure.
Want to practice offline?
Download the complete FEIT Workbook for guided practice away from the app.
Load-bearing structures
A thought may lean on a causal relationship, threshold, distinction, comparison, implied rule, value hierarchy, prediction, or assumption. There is often more than one beam worth touching.
“If somebody repeatedly makes me feel bad about myself, I am allowed to cut them off.”
- Repetition is being treated differently from a single incident.
- There is some threshold at which harm becomes sufficient reason to end access.
- Ending contact protects against further harm while sacrificing the relationship’s value.
The four moves
Follow
Trace it.
Stay inside the speaker’s framing and see where one of its own threads leads.
Extrapolate
Extend it.
Turn a relationship up, down, outward, across cases, or toward a limit.
Inspect
Ground it.
Bring the abstraction into contact with something observable.
Translate
Remap it.
Find another object or system in which the same important relationship appears.
The moves are not mutually exclusive. A response may do more than one thing at once; the distinctions are useful because they open different directions of thought.
Where FEIT came from
FEIT grew out of studying what Alan Watts did with ideas while thinking and talking: following a thought within its own framing, carrying it farther, bringing abstractions back to experience, and shifting a structure into another image or system. The goal is not to imitate Watts’s voice, personality, or conclusions. It is to make a general conversational capacity trainable.
FEIT in actual conversation
Available, not compulsory. Empathy, humor, explanation, disagreement, silence, and simple presence remain available.
Analysis can happen backstage. You may notice a complicated structure internally and say only, “What makes those different?”
Leave some cognition unfinished. Put something interesting between two people and let the other person participate.
Steer, but remain steerable. Challenge is compatible with FEIT as long as exploration rather than winning remains the priority.
Does this thought presently want exploring?
“My mother died last week and I don’t know what to do with myself.”
Rife for exploration? Yes. Appropriate to explore right now? Perhaps not. Being present may be closer to the mark.
The aim
Not merely to convince. Put something between two people that both can turn over—and remain open to discovering something yourself.