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Milton Erickson often transformed a digital limitation into an analog series that the client could vary over a range until it was no longer a limitation. One man had a compulsion to pee through a metal or wooden tube that was 8-10 inches long, which prevented him from joining the army. Erickson had him purchase a bamboo tube that was 12 inches long, and then gradually shorten it by 1/4," 1/2," or even an inch, until he realized that he always peed through a tube—his penis.
A digital, all-or-none challenge provides a lot of drama. The high arousal, emotional state of fear, and then surviving the fear can definitely create lasting learning. People often do learn to move beyond the limitations of what they think think they can do.
However, we know that many people often learn utterly ridiculous and severely limiting beliefs in such highly focused experiences of great fear, narrow focus, and arousal. My favorite example of this is a woman who had a phobia of not seeing her feet. When she was seven years old, in a moment of extreme fear, she happened to be looking at her feet, which were hidden by 10 inches of muddy water. When someone is in a state of intense arousal during a heroic challenge, we don't know how or where they are attending, either externally or internally. What is to prevent them from learning something very different than what is intended?
In the adrenalin rush of a heroic challenge, and the highly-focused attention that results, someone is quite likely to learn something else that is potentially quite harmful and even dangerous. They may conclude that they have to make changes digitally, by taking a big leap of faith, rather than by chunking down a risk into an analog series and testing the results of their exploration at each step.
They may also chunk very large, and conclude from a small success that they can now do anything. As Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, said after striking a match, “Look, a common twig. Think what I could do to a tree!” Participants are often even told to chunk very large in this way. For instance, Bolstad writes, “I remind them that their success is evidence that they can 'do anything they decide to do.'” As a result, some people develop somewhat grandiose ideas of what is possible for them, flipping from one limiting belief, “I can do nothing,” to an equally extreme limiting belief, “I can do anything.”
After a firewalk, one man declared that now he knew that he could be at ground zero of a nuclear explosion and not be hurt. Hopefully he will not have a chance to test that new belief, but it may lead him to take a lot of other risks that he is equally unprepared for. Another firewalk “graduate” was so convinced of his abilities that he went home and signed a year lease on 10,000 square feet of office space to use for self-development seminars (which never happened).
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