Twelve Rules for Authenticity

1. Focus on bolstering your self-respect and on loving others.
2. When people occassionally commit self-defeating or anti-social acts, help or guide them away from them.
3. When things are not the way you want them to be, either strive to change the conditions that foster them or temporarily accept that is the way things are.
4. If something is fearsome or dangerous, face it and render it non-dangerous, or accept the inevitable.
5. Accept that human misery is largely caused by the view that we take of unfortunate conditions.
6. Recognize that avoiding life’s difficulties is usually much harder in the long-run.
7. Accept yourself as imperfect, with human limitations and specific fallabilities.
8. Don’t be afraid to depend on others to determine the right way to think or act.
9. Learn from past experiences but don’t become overly-attached or prejudiced by them.
10. Enjoy life despite the random acts that the world throws up at us.
11. Find happiness by being vitally absorbed in creative pursuits, or in devoting yourself to others.
12. Recognizing that you have real control over destructive emotions and the hypotheses that you use to generate them.