Dr. Phil's Life Laws Series: Law # 4 - You Cannot Change What You Don't Acknowledge


Life Law # 4-You cannot change what you don't acknowledge Your strategy: Get real with yourself about your life and everybody in it. Be truthful about what isn't working in your life. Stop making excuses and start making results.

If you're unwilling or unable to identify and consciously acknowledge your negative behaviors, characteristics or life patterns, then you will not change them. (In fact, they will only grow worse and become more entrenched in your life.) You've got to face it to replace it.

Acknowledgement means slapping yourself in the face with the brutal reality, admitting that you are getting payoffs for what you are doing, and giving yourself a no-kidding, bottom-line truthful confrontation. You cannot afford the luxury of lies, denial or defensiveness.

Where are you now? If you hope to have a winning life strategy, you have to be honest about where your life is right now. Your life is not too bad to fix and it's not too late to fix it. But be honest about what needs fixing. If you lie to yourself about any dimension of your life, an otherwise sound strategy will be compromised.

You must be keenly aware that you can lie to yourself in two ways: You can affirmatively misrepresent the truth, or you can lie to yourself by omission. Failing to tell yourself what is, is just as dangerous as misrepresenting what is. So you have to have the strength and courage to ask yourself the hard questions, and to give yourself realistic answers. I don't say that to be dramatic; I say it because it's true. In virtually every walk of life, I've seen the sad effects of denial, and I'll bet you have, too. It's time to address the denial in your own life.

Perhaps this law, more than any other, seems self-evident. If you are unwilling to acknowledge a thought, circumstance, problem, condition, behavior or emotion-if you don't take ownership of your role in a situation-then you cannot and will not change. If you refuse to acknowledge your own self-destructive behaviors, not only will they continue, they will actually gain momentum, become more deeply entrenched in the habitual patterns of your life, and grow more and more resistant to change.