Understanding the three rules of psychology simplifies everything that you think about. Your natural clarity of mind comes to the fore, and you can get on with running your business.
Stick with me, this is about as complicated as it gets.
There’s a principle of gravity, with a formula to describe it. What we mostly care about with gravity, though, is how it affects our daily life. We learn as children how much effort it takes to stand up, how much control to sit down – then we are good to go. Unless we are engineers, we probably never give gravity a moment’s thought. We naturally understand that it is pretty much constant and reliable.
In the same way that we have the principle of gravity which explains how gravity works, there are also principles behind human psychology. And, just like gravity, we don’t need a formula to explain them, we just need to know how they show up in life. The biggest secret is – there is no “secret”. This is something you’ve always known, but maybe it’s become obscured by conditioning or habit.
The basic rules of human psychology are these:
1. Life only works one way – from the inside, out;
2. Humans are evolved to succeed – you wouldn’t be here if that wasn’t true;
3. Insightfully realising this for yourself is the key.
It’s very straightforward, but the implications are profound. Simply realising the truth of these three statements means there are a whole load of things you don’t need to waste time thinking about any more. Which makes space for your natural bright, creative, determined, resilient self to get on with what you do best.
To go back to gravity for a moment: We don’t wake up every morning and worry about what level gravity will be at that day. We don’t look out our heaviest shoes on a Tuesday, or carry our lightest bag on a Wednesday. We don’t apply a formula before we stand up and walk down the street. It sounds faintly ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet that is what we are doing every day in how we look our experience of life. When we understand the basic rules of human psychology, many of the complex techniques we thought we needed become irrelevant.
Here’s an example: It really looked to me the other day that someone was deliberately trying to sabotage my project. I had all sorts of ideas about what they were doing, and loads of suggestions for why. I was feeling threatened, angry and upset. Then, something in my feeling reminded me of the three rules above – and I realised: how they behaved couldn’t make me feel any particular way. I didn’t need to change the other person’s behaviour to be okay, I didn’t even need to change my own feeling. My in-built understanding of human psychology gave me a freedom from the circumstances. Without so much thinking on my mind about the other person, I started to see a new direction for my project, and other opportunities came my way too. If I’d stayed stuck in my previous thinking, those opportunities would have passed me by.
We all get lost in thinking at times. Then we find ourselves again. My role with my clients is to consistently point them back to what is true, and what is part of the wonderful, complex, story-telling nature of human beings – just as my mentors do with me.
This is what I’d like you to take away from this article:
– no one and nothing can make you feel any particular way;
– all feelings are okay, you don’t need fixing;
– you’ve got the resources you need to handle business… and life.