Dr. Phil is controversial and I don't plan to get into Shape Up and the other issues. As a psychologist, he's been criticised for his 'in your face' style and yet ... and yet ... for all that, the paraphrase below of his first five lifelaws makes a person at least stop and think. Don't judge the man - judge what he says:

Lifelaw 1 - Life rewards action.People don’t care about our intentions. They care about what we actually do. Good intentions, without action, take us nowhere. The difference between winners and losers is that winners do things losers don't want to do. People who win take meaningful, planned action; they don't just think about it. To have what we want, we have to do what it takes.

Lifelaw 2 - We create our own situation.If we consider that we are no longer children, then we, ourselves, must answer for our own life - good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, happy or sad. If we don't like our job, we must answer for it. If our relationships are on the rocks, we must answer for them. It is never completely the other person’s fault. We, ourselves, may also have contributed to this situation.

Although we might accept this in theory, we nevertheless believe that in our particular situation it’s different, of course – we can prove that it is the other person’s fault. This is actually our problem.Sometimes we then start gathering friends and colleagues together who will agree that we are innocent and that the other person is guilty. In the end, this is a waste of time and energy and helps maintain our self delusion.

However, if we can accept that we may possibly have erred, even a little and that only we, ourselves, are going to get us out of our own troubles, then we can start working on them. Perhaps forces outside our control did cause our situation but if we allow that situation to continue or if we remain in it – then that’s our own fault.At the same time, if we choose thoughts that create low self-esteem or which make us angry, this achieves no lasting result and leads us to become alienated and bitter.

Lifelaw 3 - People do what seems to work. We all occasionally indulge in negative behaviour without truly understanding why we do it.It could be that we make nasty comments, which give us some satisfaction for a short time; it could be smoking, which relieves our stress for a short time; it could be self pity, which helps us cope with the injustice of what has been done to us.

The hard part is identifying exactly what results we get from this behaviour. These results can develop into something extremely unhealthy, such as self-hatred, distorted self importance or simply vindictiveness. There may be a fear of rejection, of not being noticed or from a desperate desire for others to see us as “cool” people.

This fear can be so strong that we'd do anything to avoid it. And we keep on with these behaviours … until one day perhaps, we wake up and start to come out of this negative spiral.

Lifelaw 4 - We can’t change what we won’t admit. In all humans, there is a self-protective mechanism called "perceptual defence". This protects us from what we do not want to face up to. If there is something not right within us, we’d prefer to either ignore it or blame it on something or someone else, rather than admit to it and to face up to it.If we can admit the existence of a possible problem, it becomes much more difficult to allow it to continue and this becomes the first step towards solving it.

Lifelaw 5 – Persuasion leads to success. Think about successful people. They know how to get others to do things they want. There are some common truths behind this:
· The number-one fear among all people is rejection and the number-one need is acceptance.
· To manage people effectively, we must do it in a way that helps promote their self-esteem. It can’t be done by promoting oneself.
· Every person approaches situations with some concern for "What's in it for me?" and everybody prefers to talk about things which are important to him or her personally.
· People hear and take in only what they understand.
· People like, trust and believe those people who actually like them.
· People often do things for other than the apparent reasons and every person wears a social mask.
· Manipulation is not, in itself, a bad thing. It is only bad if it works against the other person.

The last five lifelaws will be posted in a few days.

posted by james higham at Wednesday, August 09, 2006