Be careful to not become so caught up in getting ready to live that you
forget to live.
Imagine a football team that becomes so involved in planning their
strategy for the big game that they forget to leave the locker room to go
on the playing field, or the student who never applies the knowledge
acquired from years of study. Psychotherapy, personal growth seminars, and
reading self-help books (like mine) are classroom time, locker-room
preparation. The real deal is out there – in our day-to-day, unpredictable
lives. The challenge is to live a life that you feel good about, to be the
person you choose to be. On your deathbed, when you are 112 or so, and
someone asks you “how do you think you did?” most likely, you will want to
be able to say, “Pretty good I think.”
Accomplishing this goal is very much like saving money: you cannot wait
until the last minute, or even tomorrow – since tomorrow may be the last
minute. You have to start now. You’ve probably heard countless times that
if you want to save money, you have to “take it off the top.” If you wait
for the “extra money” to save, there will be no savings. A life that you
feel good about will be built out of days that you feel good about. You
cannot afford to wait for spare time to feel good about yourself. Any more
than you can wait for the extra money to save. Each day ask yourself, “How
do I think I did?” And listen carefully to the answer.
Several of the books I have written have been about what happens – or
what I believe needs to happen – inside the locker room. Earning Your Own
Respect is about what I believe needs to be happening outside the therapy
room, outside the personal growth seminars, and outside the covers of the
self-help books. For as much as I believe in what I do for a living, I
also believe that we must balance “study” with “application,” and
“preparation” with “action.” As important as it is to break through the
resistance to reaching out for help when we need it, it is equally
important to learn how and when to rely on ourselves. The goal of any good
therapy or strategy for personal growth should be to help set us back on
our own two feet, to connect us with our own good judgment, to reintroduce
us to the one person on this earth who we need to be able to trust above
all others. Guess who?
+ Aligning Your Life with Your Personal Value System
In its simplest form, here is my thinking as put forth in Earning Your
Own Respect: To earn your own respect you must live responsibly. To live
responsibly you must identify and clarify your personal value system and
act on a daily basis in accordance with that value system. In other words,
you will respect yourself to the degree that you do not violate your own
value system. This is one of life’s offensively simple truths, something
Alcoholics Anonymous refers to as “simple, but not easy.”
I worked as a magician off and on for much of my young life and still
throw in a trick or two at my seminars and speaking engagements. When
demonstrating sleight of hand with a deck of playing cards, I will
sometimes show an interested spectator how I accomplish a particular
effect. His response is often something like, “Oh I get it. That’s
simple.” And then he attempts to duplicate the moves I have shown him,
only to be frustrated again and again with each repeated attempt to follow
my “simple” instructions. What He has not taken into consideration is that
simple does not mean easy, and that by rehearsing my sleight of hand moves
for years, I have created a secondary illusion: that the card trick is
both simple and easy.
The same principles hold for the simple instructions for self-respect.
Identify your personal value system, then act according to that value
system. Presto, there you have it: self-respect. (Oh I get it. That’s
simple.) Yet here are entire books (mine and others’) written to explore
the meaning and practice of personal responsibility and self-respect, and
the thoughts and ideas contained within those books can barely scratch the
surface of all that can be said about such an important subject. The
subject of my book in its broadest sense is an exploration of our human
condition. More specifically, there are two questions I want my book to
introduce or reinforce in the reader’s mind; ask yourself, “What do I
really want to do with my one human life?” and “Am I doing it?”
+ Aspiring to Selfishness
Living responsibly requires a lifetime of rehearsal, and a dedicated,
even selfish focus on the goal. Ironically, it is our acts of thorough
selfishness that will often lead us to responsible lives and self-respect.
Certain behaviors we traditionally think of as “selfish” are not, in the
bigger picture, very self-serving. For example, the young man who has a
gun in the face of the clerk at some corner market right now may seem to
be acting selfishly, but his choices will not serve him well. The woman
who rushes into a burning house to save children she has never even met
will appear to us to be acting “selflessly,” when in fact, it is a reflex
of selfishness that drives her to the courageous act. Her value system is
developed to the point where she knows instinctively that in order to
remain congruent with that value system she must attempt the rescue. She
is acting to avoid pain – the pain of violating her own value system. Most
of us will not often, if at all, face such dire circumstances in which our
values are tested. But in more subtle packages, we are all presented with
“values clarification” tests every day of our lives. To act in congruence
with our value systems is to act responsibly, and this will serve us well.
This is the selfishness to which we must aspire; this is the selfishness
with which we will earn our own respect.
Thom Rutledge is a psychotherapist and author of several books. This
article is an excerpt from Embracing Fear (HarperSanFrancisco 2002).
For more information, e-mail the author at thomrut@us.inter.net or
visit his web site http://www.webpowers.com/thomrutledge
