General Interest
Personal Respond-ability
By Rick Law of the Estate, Asset, and Retirement Tax Law Firm at Law Elder Law. Along with his daughter – Attorney Diana Law – Rick is a partner at the multi-generation law firm at Law Elder Law in Western suburban Chicagoland, Illinois. We can choose how we respond to life’s circumstances… This was the invaluable life lesson I learned when at 17 years old, my mentor Don L. Dise gave me the book Psycho-Cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. How we think about things will then determine our actions and our reactions. Our actions and reactions will change our circumstances for the better or for the worse. The bottom line is that we have the power to change our lives by choosing to improve our thinking and responding. We have a personal responsibility to choose our thoughts and our actions. I was reminded of these tenants several years ago when I attended the “Peak Performance 101 Workshop” at the Van Tharp Institute in North Carolina. The focus of the class was on personal responsibility and improving one’s responses to circumstances. “Respond-ability” is Dr. Tharp’s phrase for better living through better thinking and response. These are his “Rules for Being Human.”
- You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period.
- You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in full-time informational school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.
- There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, of experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the life process as the experiment that ultimately “works.”
- A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
- Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
- “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that will again, look better than “here.”
- Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
- What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.