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).
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).
| Earning Your Own Respect by Thom Rutledge |
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| DEFEAT ADDICTIONS.ORG © 2009 Defeat Addictions Inc. All Rights Reserved The opinions contained on this website are Mr. X's and in no way reflect those of the financial supporters of this website. All material provided on the Defeat Addictions Website is provided for informational or educational purposes only. Mr. X cannot provide individual clinical or therapy recommendations for persons consulting this site. Consult a licensed therapist or physician regarding the applicability of any opinions or recommendations with respect to your problems or medical condition. |
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