THE PHOENIX
SELF-HELP LIFE PLAN
In today's busy and sometimes confusing world, our personal lives can often become crowded with responsibilities and things and events that demand our time and attention. As a result, we can easily become stressed out and feel we are close to losing control over our lifestyle. We often experience a sense of frustration when we seem to have so little time left for ourselves. Many of us don't know how to handle or change this situation and we can't see it getting any better in the foreseeable future. Our thinking patterns become negative and, as a consequence, our lifestyle can become boring, unrewarding and chaotic. We lose confidence in our own ability to turn things around and our sense of personal happiness suffers.
The Phoenix Self-Help Life Plan set out in this book seeks to address this general problem by providing you with a program framework within which you can work to a Personal Plan which will assist you to get your life back on track. The Plan's Program is set out clearly, in step by step fashion, and requires you to make a detailed and intimate evaluation of your current lifestyle, to work out a selection of appropriate self-development goals and targets that are right for you and to work over eight to ten weeks to effect the changes you want. Detailed guidance is given along the way and sample documentation is provided to assist you in recording your Personal Plan for life change.
I have devised the Phoenix Plan through my personal attempts, over many years, to take more control over the direction of my own life and to devise a means by which I could increase its quality and emotional comfort. After many fits and starts, the format of the Plan presented in this book reflects the way forward which proved most valuable to me. It is my belief that the Phoenix Self-Help Life Plan contained here will be a valuable and effective self-help tool for all who wish to work for positive life change.
The Plan's Program is free of complicated psychological terms and can be followed by any adult with a desire and determination to work to improve the quality of their lifestyle. The basis of the approach involved in working the Plan is related to rational-emotive cognitive therapy, which stresses the vital interrelationships between our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. In simple terms, what we think determines how we feel and, largely, how we behave : if we change our thoughts, over which we have total control, we can more easily change our feelings and our behaviours. This is explained more fully in Chapter8 and in the section Theoretical Rationale for the Program located at the end of the book in Appendix B.
Change Your Life in Ten Weeks introduces and guides you through the Phoenix Self-Help Life Plan. The Plan itself runs over eight weeks, but requires of you quite a bit of preparatory work before formally beginning it. The first two weeks are used to become fully acquainted with the Plan, to evaluate your present lifestyle, to establish your Personal Plan and to set up your buddy support [more about your “buddy” later]. Then you work through the Plan's Program for the following eight weeks.
Why not give the Plan a try? It might just be the tool that will enable you to get your life to where you want it to be.