Excerpt from Self Matters by Dr Phillip McGraw, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Yours may be a positive, accurate truth or it may be a "train wreck" of misbeliefs grounded in a history of fear, pain, and confusion. Most likely it is a combination of all those things. My job, our job, is to get real about those parts of what you believe about yourself that aren't working for you. You cannot hide from nor exceed the boundaries imposed by what you believe you "know" about yourself on the inside. You cannot play the game of life with confidence and assurance if your personal truth is riddled with fear and apprehension. Your "personal best" will never be better than the one your personal truth dictates for you. If it is distorted and fictional, be assured that it will show itself at the worst and most inopportune times, because that self-critical voice is relentlessly whispering in your ear. This personal truth business is a big deal, a huge deal. If you don't get yours straight, it will ruin even the best-laid plans to revitalize your life and everything in it. As we move forward, don't dare cheat yourself with some deluded thinking because you don't have the guts to tell yourself "out loud" what it is that you really believe on the inside. Unless and until you confront your personal truth you will never, ever have a chance to be the person you can be. You, like every other living person, get mixed and faulty messages from the world and from all of your experiences in it. The result is a distortion of your personal truth. Failing to confront that ill-conceived personal truth is a crucial betrayal of you, by you. Let's look at why I say your personal truth is so very important.

Now I'll just confess that about half of the time, I don't even know what the "experts" who talk and write about our lives mean when they throw around words like "self-realization," "inner self," "actualized self," being "centered," and whatever other buzzwords they manufacture to sound smart. A lot of it is beyond me, I'm afraid, way too fancy and convoluted for this ol' country boy. But to my simple way of thinking, who you are in this world, who you become, all boils down to this personal truth, this set of beliefs you have about you. It is so critical because it sets up and defines what I call your self-concept. If your beliefs about you are an authentic reflection of who you truly are, then you will live with a self-concept that empowers you and equips you to be absolutely the most effective and genuine person possible. If not, if there is distortion instead of accuracy, then you will have a limited and fictional self-concept that betrays who you truly are, and one that will cripple you in all of your pursuits. Not good!

We will talk in more detail about the authentic self and the fictional self in the next chapter. In the meantime, just understand that you have only one "self," but it is one that, like a chameleon, takes on the emotional colors of the history and environment in which it has existed. Your self-concept moves up and down a continuum anchored on one end by an authentic self-image (who you were created to be), and on the other by a fictional and distorted self-image (who the world has told you to be). Where you are on that continuum depends on what your external experiences in life have been, and what personal truth you have created from observing and interpreting yourself across the years.

This personal truth, and the self-concept that flows from it, is the "DNA" of your personality. Know this DNA, and you know your starting place in the journey to reconnect with your life.

As we move forward, I intend to show you how, whatever your DNA is, this came to be. I will then lead you to "deconstruct" those elements that are just plain wrong and have not served you well. I will also lead you through the steps necessary to reconstruct your authentic self-concept in a way to insure your success.

The process will work this way. I intend to demystify all this business about self-concept and how you think, feel, and believe about you. I intend to show you, in plain-talk terms, how that personal truth has and will determine the quality of virtually every aspect of your life, and how to change it by ridding it of distortion. This is a knowable process and one that we can break down into manageable steps. Those steps will involve events that happened externally, as well as events that happen and already have happened internally.

Copyright © 2001 by Phillip C. McGraw