franchise opportunities. Even though each completed business
transaction provides him a commission of $15,000 to $20,000, his
business had limped along, producing an income that left him
scrambling to pay the bills.
I (PL) asked him about the promotional activities in his busi-
ness. From his response, it was quite evident that, although he was
doing some things very well, he was compulsively avoiding use of
the telephone. I suggested that he was suffering from phone pho-
bia and offered to aid him in changing this. He responded with a
lengthy, well-reasoned denial about the phone phobia, including
his assertion that the phone was not important, that he would be
disturbing people, that there are better ways to contact people, how
he sometimes intended to make calls but then got too busy to do so,
and concluding with his hope that his business would turn around
soon. I asked him to consider the possibility that he had created
well-reasoned denial to avoid the uncomfortable awareness of his
phone phobia.
He acknowledged that his hope for a business turn-around was
not a feasible plan and that he was willing to change his perceptions
about the phone from dread and avoidance to excitement. In sub-
sequent sessions, I taught him to change his perceptions about us-
ing the phone with the methods presented in Chapters 8 and 9.
Within a few weeks he reported that he actually felt enthusiastic
about using the phone. Soon his monthly income equaled his previ-
ous yearly income.
At the outset, Sean had only a glimmer of awareness that phone
phobia was his major obstacle. Perfect clarity of awareness is not
necessary here. He did have enough awareness to see the possibility
that phone phobia was the issue and the willingness to work on this.
Acceptance
Acceptance of anything doesn’t mean you like it, it doesn’t mean
you would consciously choose it, it doesn’t mean you would order it
in a restaurant. It just means it is OK. The alternative to acceptance
is condemning it and then trying to change it from that position of
condemnation. The primary disadvantage of such condemnation is
that your mind’s desire to be right creates situations to justify your
condemnation. Additionally, such condemnation wastes energy.
Perhaps a good way to describe what we mean by acceptance is
to describe some examples of lack of acceptance. If you do not
Acceptance 63