When I attended the “Mentoring Novice Teachers” workshop, our facilitator had said a bit about “Choice Theory”. It was sketchy though, so I did some research on Choice Theory to know more about it.
All throughout our lives, we make choices. According to William Glasser, the father of Choice Theory, we make choices that help us get along with people or make choices that harm us or other people. Glasser advised to make choices that are mentally healthy choices, and these mentally healthy choices are the Seven Caring Habits. I have already mentioned these helpful, caring habits in my previous post.
In this blog, I will be listing down the ten axioms of Choice Theory. Here you go…
Ten Axioms of Choice Theory
- The only person whose behavior we can control is our own.
- All we can give another person is information.
- All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.
- The problem relationship is always part of our present life.
- What happened in the past has everything to do with what we are today, but we can only satisfy our basic needs right now and plan to continue satisfying them in the future.
- We can only satisfy our needs by satisfying the pictures in our Quality World. Quality World are the “pictures” in our minds of our own personal, ideal world.
- All we do is behave.
- All behavior is Total Behavior and is made up of four components: thinking, acting, feeling, and physiology.
- All Total Behavior is chosen, but we only have direct control over our thinking and acting component. We can indirectly control our feeling and physiology only by the choices we make in our acting and thinking.
- All Total Behavior is identified in verb forms and named by the part that is most recognizable.