Do you need years more therapy, or could one conversation make the difference?
I’ve been trying to help people resolve lifelong issues after one conversation.
It took 6+ months of working with a counselor to outgrow the worst of my anxiety. Afterward, I wondered, “How could this been 10x easier?” This was my guiding light as I began helping others resolve their chronic issues.
When I was considering offering this service, I hated the common incentive structure: getting paid per hour of effort. Therapists and “coaches” get paid more the more complicated it is to resolve the issue… this doesn’t seem like it has good incentives.
For this reason and others, I made payment contingent on results:
Set a bounty on resolving your lifelong social anxiety or romantic insecurity. Work with me, pay your bounty when you feel satisfied. —incentivealigned.com
Bounties set the financial incentives to resolve resolve issues as efficiently as possible. So wouldn’t it be cool to help someone in “one shot”? As in: just one conversation or intervention.
People I help are often surprised at how I do things because it’s so different than everything they’ve tried before:
No digging into past trauma, no lingering on all the things you don’t want. Instead, focusing on what you want to see more of right now.
It’s unlearning, not learning. The process removes “lines of code” — I don’t help you add a bunch of conscious “techniques” that slow down your reaction time.
It’s not coaching so much as learning how to self-coach.
Conversations aren’t time-bound; have ranged from 5 minutes to 4.5 hours.
It can be quite technical. I speak of local optimality, risk aversion, and Newcomb’s Problem.
Impromptu scheduling.
I actively try to talk less in sessions. There have been multi-hour sessions where I spoke for ~5 min total. Again: It’s unlearning, not learning.
I work from first principles.
So does it work? Can one conversation help resolve lifelong issues resistant to years of therapy, coaching, meditation, and psychedelics?
This may sound outlandish, but consider: They don’t have to resolve their issue in the session. They just have to learn how to resolve their issue in the session. They just have to learn how to coach themselves.
This doesn’t always happen, but when it does it‘s very cool. Examples below.
1/ Before: 8 years of talk therapy
I spoke to a man I met at a prediction market conference for 4.5 hours. We untangled his core blocks in that (one) conversation, and in the following months he unlearned many of his triggers. 6 months later, he reports far less anxiety and far more agency:
Every week I had some new ridiculous, fun, stupid project that I had others rallied around. It's exactly the stuff I kind of pictured doing but never really did.
People even started describing him differently:
One of my new friends said, “You're so adventurous.” That shocked me… If you were to ask my high school friends, that’s not a word they would use.
Listen to how is his work, social, and dating lives have changed from applying the skill:
Validation: Yes, he paid a (large) bounty when he was ready.
Long-term data collection: 1 year after our work together, he says he’s doing great.
2/ Before: Talk therapy, CBT, and IFS
The first person I ever tried to help with my techniques had previously tried talk therapy, CBT, and IFS to small effect. When we met at a CFAR reunion in November 2023, I tried to help him address his emotional reactivity. Our conversation lasted 3 hours. We also spoke for another two hours in August 2024. In October 2024, he said:
I used to get triggered by very small things that some of the people surrounding me would say or do… These things would incapacitate me for 48 hours, I would have to shut myself in my room. Now I just laugh…
This wasn’t exactly “one shot”, but I think it’s close enough and I happen to have a detailed interview with him. He talks about his life has changed and how he used the skill he learned from me to grow so much:
Read on for reflections about what’s going on, and more examples of one-shotting:
Long-term data collection: 18 months after our main work together he provides an update.
How does one-shotting happen?
The main way one-shots happen: the client learns how to coach themself.
Both people in the videos above discuss how they use what they learned from me (the skill of unlearning) to untangle triggers on their own. They applied what they learned from me over and over again without prompting.
Another example:
A client came with a multi-decade porn addiction. He had tried various internet blocking methods before (though no coaching, meditation, or therapy), but the problem persisted. In mid October 2024, we had a session lasting 1.75 hours where I taught him how to “try on the feeling” he wants whenever he feels the desire to use porn. Ever since, he’s used that skill. It’s a few months later now, and he rarely ever feels the desire to use porn. Update June 2025: Yeah he says he doesn’t have urges anymore.
Validation: He has paid a significant amount of his bounty already, and is paying the rest over 3y.
Another way one-shots can (very rarely) happen is if the client “deeply unlearns” their issue in the session. Generally people have hundreds of triggers creating their issue, but if they only have a few (or already untangled most of them) then it’s possible to find and defuse all of those in a single session.
Example:
A tech founder based in SF tried 2 years (~120 hours) of IFS therapy, retreats, and hundreds of hours of meditation to resolve his lifelong block on romance and attraction. Our first conversation lasted four hours where I helped him unlearning some deep self-loathing. He slept a lot after the session and woke up with intense muscle soreness the next day, lol. Within two weeks he had comfortably asked out multiple crushes. He had never easily asked someone out before. He didn’t resolve all of his romantic blocks after the first session to be clear.
Long-term data collection: 6+ months after main work together he says he’s doing well and got a girlfriend — video.
Which issues fit best?
It seems much more common to one-shot issues that manifest as anxiety (feeling bad) rather than avoidance.
I suspect this is because people who avoid X also tend to avoid feelings related to X, which slows down any growth or coaching attempted. So they won’t coach themselves. These people also tend to not ask for help or schedule sessions.
This is probably why I’ve never seen lifelong procrastination one-shot.
It’s very difficult to one-shot an issue that the client depends on in some way.
For example, anxiety that is helping someone (as a locally optimal strategy) set boundaries with their parents, while they’re living with their parents. So they won’t coach themselves because they’ll risk conflict with their parents. It’s far easier if they move out first.
Similarly, if someone has an issue relating to their partner but they live with or are financially dependent on their partner, they usually lose the ability to rationally consider the possibility of breaking up.
Which people fit best?
One-shotting can happen regardless of prior attempts to resolve their issue. If anything, those attempts may have helped by untangling all but a crucial missing piece.
That said, I’ve never seen a one-shot where the client had extreme difficulty feeling their feelings — these people essentially can’t introspect.
I also haven’t seen a one-shot where the person has given up on working on their issue — they won’t even try to coach themselves.
More one-shots
5/ Social anxiety
Previously he had tried most of the tpot meditation advice to resolve his multi-year social anxiety. Meditation alone did not resolve this. On September 30, 2024 we had a three-hour session:
And while I may have one-shot some specific parts of the issue, a few weeks later he had more complexity appear and helped some more. So maybe not a true one-shot, but it does hint at what’s possible.
Recently he told me “All going well on my end” and that he’s still using skill of unlearning he learned from me.
6/ One-shot by a tweet?
Here’s a fun example: Maybe sometimes all it takes is the right tweet?
I was actually going to coach Sarrah, but by the time I had time she said she didn’t need it anymore:
“Any time I wanted to stop… I would ask myself and?”
Misc. examples
An anonymous client decided to pay a large bounty after only one 75-minute conversation.
Someone I spoke to for 15 minutes at a party told me months later that it changed her year and helped her get out of a bad relationship — even though we didn’t talk (directly) about relationships.
An eye contact workshop I ran had positive effects on attendees weeks later.
Someone read a tweet of mine and dm’d me.
There are more cases I either can’t share, don’t have detailed information about, or for which it’s too early to tell.
Have you ever had an issue one-shot?
Have you ever had a lifelong issue one-shot with effects still 6+ months later? Leave a comment or DM me or email chris@chrislakin.com, I’d love to hear about it.
Also: Do you know any coaches who have facilitated multiple one-shots of lifelong issues? Please contact me if so. I’m always looking to send bounties beyond of my purview to outstanding coaches. There’s a lot of people we can help!
Fascinating. Nice work Chris!
I’ve had some “one-off” successes like this too (sometimes in as little as 30 minutes, though this was in an environment where we had a lot of shared context). A lot of your intuitions about this match mine, and I hadn’t actually made the “anxious vs avoidant” heuristic explicit to myself until I read your account of it, so thank you! Also love the “bounty” idea, and will think about how I might be able to implement it in my own practice.