Introducing The Limping Shrink Rules and Rule 1
Anyone who's seen the US tv series NCIS more than once will be aware of 'The Rules'. These are the rules by which the enigmatic team-leader Gibbs trains up his subordinates to behave at work. An example would be Rule 3: Don't believe what you're told - check. These rules are down to earth pragmatic, memorably simple and essential for the task of effectively catching villains.
Rules for living a good life are going to be different of course. I've been thinking for a while about what my 'The Rules' would be. You might even say that it's my life's purpose to work out what the rules are for a good life. Hence the career in mental health and the slightly embarrassing obsession with all things personal development. Over the years the form and content of my rules have evolved many times, but over the last few years they have popped out of the box marked 'How to get what I want' and into a larger box named 'The human condition'. You don't see so much of that online. And what you see is in some cases plain mistaken, and in most is not so much pragmatic and simple as frustratingly mysterious. Even though while it's not easy it's actually quite simple. It seems to me that there's a need for this message to be put out there in simple terms.
So today I want to introduce you to The Limping Shrink Rules, starting with number one.
So many personal development regimes begin with questions like 'What do you want to achieve?' 'What life would you love?' 'Find the purpose of your life.' This is what we often believe, isn't it? That if only I could know my one true purpose, or achieve this one goal, (lose 10 lb, earn a million, speak in public, have confidence, find my one true love, move into a better home, whatever) then life would be easy, I would be happy, and everything I want would be magically attracted to me.
Now you might have guessed by now that I'm going to tell you that life doesn't work that way. Of course you can make goals and achieve them. You can overcome or bypass or trick your inner resistance to change for long enough to get some of what you want, but it's a hard slog and life is a struggle and when you get to the goal what happens? You make a new one. So this is a life you are deliberately making into a never-ending struggle. I don't think that's what most people really want.
What is the alternative? How do you get a better life without being rich, beautiful, lucky and beloved? How do you get a better life if you are living in a situation that anyone would call difficult, deprived, painful?
The Limping Shrink Rule 1: I choose to love the life I'm in
Tadaaaaaa!
Yes I know, obvious right? I told you it was simple.
Even if it isn't easy.
Notice the 'I choose'. You have the choice. You are at the tiller of the boat of your life, whether you use it or not. Whether you have handed it over to someone else or not. And the choices you make all day every day are the course-adjustments that steer you round in circles or let you flow along held by the current. You have the power to use your choice to feed your yearning to be someone else, or to become more fully yourself. Choose well.
Now it may be that you have to spend some more time setting goals for yourself or working through the idea that you have to be something you're not, before you can commit to this rule. But let me tell you how joyful and freaking obvious it is when you have. All that fretting just falls away. The little things in life become rewarding in themselves.
If you are in a situation where someone is actively making your life worse and you're thinking I'm telling you to suck it up. Well I'm not. What I'm telling you is that this life is the only one you have. If you need to change something about it, change it from a place of love for life. That's the place where good change comes from.
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