Exercise 1
1. Choose a quiet place where you will not be interrupted.
If you are working the technique alone, you will need pencil and paper.
If you are working with someone else, they will need the pencil and paper.
They will question you and record the replies.
2. Write at the top of one side of the page, What I Want.
Under that, write the numbers one through twenty down the page.
3. Write at the top of the other side of the page, What I Need.
4. Fill in all twenty lines of the first side with anything you want. Be honest with yourself. Say the things aloud as you write, and list twenty things (you can write more, not fewer).
5. When you have completed side one, turn the page over and write twenty or more things you need. Write until you have exhausted your answers.
6. Now compare your two lists.
7. Take another piece of paper and write at the top, Why? Go ahead and ask yourself, honestly, why you want what you want.
Then do the same, on the other side of the paper, for your list of needs.
Contemplate, for all answers, what would really happen to you if you didn’t get what you want or need, and what you would really feel if you did (some people I have worked with have included in their “need” list things they already have-pav attention to the question).
Gauge for yourself how important these things are to your well-being.
If they really are not that necessary, then clear them from your mind because they are excess baggage, but if you could fill in twenty lines in the first place, then the excess was already there and your self-esteem would have been consistent with it.
Advertising, concepts of what is deemed successful, and concepts of what is deemed acceptable are all effective means of manipulating the individuality of a person or a people into conformist models.
It’s okay to do what you do because you want to, and sometimes it’s a matter of necessity to don the mask, but it’s honorable to know who you are within the whole of it all and to don the mask only when it is expedient to do so-never forgetting that it’s a mask!
