the balance method - preface

This book is for people who think about things. It is intended to help you with those situations that leave you feeling hopeless (e.g. interacting with others, enjoying yourself) and to ensure that you try to be prepared and consider all possibilities for any given situation.

The key is to pre-empt criticism at every step in your daily life. It is imperative that you are aware of this as your aim at all times, preferably from within 5-10 minutes of waking in the morning until sleep arrives in the evening; some experts in the technique even manage full risk awareness when dreaming, but this requires many years of practise.

It is important for anyone interested in acquiring the technique to first learn a little about its inspirational (if unintentional) founder, Claustophanes the Ready, who lived from 750-695 BC.

Claustophanes was a Roman senator, who was famous for securing the island of Phobia for the Romans, and for the system of graphs and formulae he developed in order to measure the 'appropriacy' of potential decisions. Claustophanes' system was designed to be used by anyone who was interested in being an appropriately behaved member of civilised society and who wanted to be certain that each decision they made was the correct/ right one. It consisted of several complex algebraic formulae and a series of graphs into which numerical approximations of life criteria were fed.

The Balance technique as we know it today is hopefully much more accessible to you and I. Myself and my colleagues have strived to provide an updated version of the technique in order that we may all conduct ourselves in an acceptable and constructive enough manner that society continue to function properly and as it should. We hope that we can reasonably be said to have achieved our objective, and feel sufficiently confident that this is the case.

Jessica Falstaff - Institute Demonstrator