Ten Commitments: Life Skills Training
- Jump to Why Ten Commitments?
- Jump to What are the Commitments?
- Jump to What's in The Ten Commitments book?
- Jump to Outcomes
Why Ten Commitments?
To live life you must act. To act you must make choices. To make choices you need guidance. The Ten Commitments are a set of principles to guide your choices and actions. Strictly speaking, action and choices are unavoidable. Every step you take, every move you make involves choices and actions. But guidance is different. You can choose a set of principles to guide your choices and actions, or you can make choices on the spur of the moment, by whim, by feeling, letting yourself go whatever way the wind is blowing. 
In other words, you can choose to be in control of our your choices and actions, or you can choose to let yourself be moved by chance. So the question is this: if you choose to be in control of your choices and actions, how are you going to do it? What kind of guidance do you need? What kind of guidance is going to be practically useful? And what kind of guidance is going to help you make moves?
Why commitments?
If you're facing tough choices every day then you need the kind of guidance that can help you resist temptations to behave in ways that undermine your long term interests: your growth as a person and ultimately your survival. The Ten Commitments give you a set of principles not only that you can apply practically to every choice you face, but that will also enable you to be more successful in life. The Ten Commitments will help you to be a better person, and help your community to grow. 
What are the Commitments?
Here is a brief description of each of the commitments. You will notice that some of the early commitments involve mainly the relationship between yourself and world, and some of the later ones involve mainly the relationship between yourself and others. The ten commitments help you to pay attention to these three areas – world, self and others – and to maintain harmony between them, thus making them allies instead of enemies.
The commitment to loving life:
living life with the joyous, adventurous spirit of youth.
The commitment to reality:
focusing on the facts and keeping your knowledge connected to reality in all matters.
The commitment to reason:
thinking through your life’s challenges logically and imaginatively to find solutions.
The commitment to independence:
taking responsibility for your own thinking and actions, and taking ownership of your life
The commitment to purpose:
acting always with a specific purpose or end in mind, a specific aim or destination.
The commitment to productiveness:
investing your time to create something of value in a job, or as an entrepreneur or as a volunteer.
The commitment to honesty:
respecting the truth in all matters, and matching your actions to your words.
The commitment to co-operation:
looking for opportunities to co-operate with others to achieve win-win solutions.
The commitment to justice:
judging others objectively, based on all the facts and without bias or prejudice.
The commitment to individal rights:
dealing with others by persuasion and trade – never by starting the use of force.
What's in The Ten Commitments book?
Each of the ten commitments is introduced in a number of complementary ways. First there's a visual introduction by means of a street scene from a place called Palookaville. Palookaville is an economically depressed area and a dysfunctional community. Its problems include unemployment, poverty, drugs, alcoholism, violence, pollution, vandalism, xenophobia and more. However, with the introduction of each commitment you can see how the commitments change the behaviour of individual people within the community, and how these changes collectively make Palookaville into Pleasantville. This sends a powerful message. We don't need to wait for authorities to make our communities cleaner, safer or more supportive. We can do this ourselves if we make the right commitments and if we make the right moves.
In addition to the series of Palookaville pictures, each commitment is also introduced by means of a very short story about a guy and his girlfriend. Sometimes he's living up to one of the commitments, sometimes he's neglecting the commitment. Sometimes it's the other way around and she's living up to the commitment or neglecting it. Either way, the stories create a context for discussing the commitment.
For each commitment there are also a range of very specific examples that show readers how the commitment can be kept or neglected. There are also ten statements which describe ten different features of each commitment. You can assess whether their own behaviour matches each of these statements “Hardly ever” or “Now and again” or “Often”. This enables you to discover how strongly you currently practise the commitment on a scale from 0 to 100, which means you can get a sense of your strengths and weaknesses for each commitment.
Finally, there is a space for you to fill in how you have neglected the commitment recently and what moves you can make to strengthen the commitment in question.
The Ten Commitments book also includes a range of self-discovery activities including:
- My dreams
- My aspirations
- My strengths
- My skills
- My worries
- My weaknesses
- My flawed thinking
- My network
- My places
- My interests
These activities are spread throughout the book in between the sections introducing each of the commitments. In each case you are presented with a range of specific examples of dreams, aspirations, strengths, etc., and you can decide how strongly these examples represent yourself.
Outcomes
By the end of the workbook you will have been exposed to a number of important life lessons including:
- the importance of the commitment to loving life
- the importance of the commitment to reality
- the importance of the commitment to reason
- the importance of the commitment to independence
- the importance of the commitment to purpose
- the importance of the commitment to productiveness
- the importance of the commitment to honesty
- the importance of the commitment to co-operation
- the importance of the commitment to justice
- the importance of the commitment to individual rights
- identifying personal dreams and aspirations
- identifying and building on personal strengths and skills
- identifying and overcoming personal worries and weaknesses
- identifying and overcoming flawed thinking
- identifying and building a personal network
- identifying opportunities in the places you know
- identifying personal interests
