A life time has 2 to 2½ billion seconds depending on whether a person lives to be 67 or 83 years old. It is within this amount of time that getting well and being a winner in the selected arena of life will occur. Getting well is defined in this paper as getting more efficient use of one’s time of life.

            Each person, in the act of “being a people,” is possessed of a variety of conflicting, diverse and divergent qualities of reasoning-feeling. These include the multitude of activities-inactivities with which to spend one's “time of day.” Putting it differently, the man who gets the most of what he wants with his time and in his encounters with other persons is the one who:

 

(1) has decided on his goals and makes a commitment to these objectives;

(2) then specializes in the use of his time toward the end of his perfecting techniques useful in obtaining his goals;

(3) uses these techniques and his time to get to his goal;

(4) uses the fullest range of the other (personality) qualities within himself at appropriate times and as these latter are adaptable toward his goals and then finally;

(5) gives satisfaction to his other life sustaining drives in a manner and at a time that will least detract from the attainment of his ambitions. In getting-well a person becomes a winner.

 

            The first business to becoming a winner is the decisive commitment to the goal. In treatment, this is the commitment to the get-well contract.

             The second order of business to becoming a winner is to improve the capacity to sort and classify one's own Adult qualities of self from ones Child self. This improved capacity to sort and classify Adult from Child is requisite for managing self.

            The best method developed to date for organizing personality qualities is represented by the three stacked circles. Paraphrasing Caesar: “Ommia personae est divisa in partes tres.” In the terminology of transactional analysis: “He who owns his own (transactional) diagram can better become the master of his own destiny!”

 

            Whether he is the initial stimulator or the initial responder in the transaction (a “stroking exchange”) of an encounter, the “me,” in being able to sort and classify, can better determine “what-is-the-best-solution-for-now-for-me.”

            The most important business for becoming winners is the decisive commitment to become winners. This provides the basis for establishing a hierarchy of priorities among the multitude of private and public objectives each person has in mind. Since it is literally not feasible, let alone possible, to be a winner with each and every situation in a day or in a year, it then becomes a matter of selecting which of the objectives and which of the qualities of transactional outcomes (forms of resolution) will have priority on a given occasion. A person decisively committed to becoming a success and winner with his own family will have his priorities in a different hierarchal arrangement than, e.g., the person with a creative genius for building a new system of transmitting (electric) power or the founder of a new psychotherapy system.

 

 

Encounter Resolutions

 

A person's day to day life is filled with a variety of encounters, one after another, with a variety of persons and circumstances. Some encounters are a simple greeting, a single transaction such as “Hi-Hi!”  Other encounters will involve varying numbers of words being exchanged. At the conclusion of each encounter, no matter how many transactions between the parties, the outcome is resolved in one of the four categories of encounter resolutions.

Each social encounter will have a different value for the particular person. An encounter with a spouse or playmate will have a higher personal value than one with a casual office or grocery store acquaintance. Nevertheless, a person experiences the outcome of each encounter with another person, as one of the FOUR QUALITIES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:

 

            “I Am OK AND You Are OK” or

            “I Am OK AND You Are Not OK” or

            “I Am Not OK AND You Are OK” or

            “I AM Not OK AND You Are Not OK.”

 

  

2. Get-Away-From (GAF): This comes from the personal stroking experience concluding with “I-Am-Not-Okay-AND-You-Are-Okay.” This is the social operation of Get-Away-From the other party.

  

3. Get-Rid-Of (GRO): This comes from the personal stroking experience concluding with “I-Am-Okay-AND-You-Are-Not-Okay.” This is the social operation of Get-Rid-Of the other party.

  

4. Get-Nowhere-With (GNW): This comes from the personal stroking experience concluding with “I-Am-Not-Okay-AND-You-Are-Not-Okay.” This is the social operation of Get-Nowhere-With the other party.