How Do You Habitually Treat Yourself? Written by Rosella Aranda
In order to learn how to relieve ourselves of self-defeating patterns, obvious first step is to become aware of what these patterns are. The easiest way to do this is simply to become a casual observer of your own behavior and to take stock of how you treat yourself. Note both negative and positive aspects. Don't make a big chore of this. Simply intend to "hear" what you tell yourself as you go about your business. Notice how you "look" at yourself. Do you ever smile at yourself in mirror? Do you ever greet yourself as someone you're glad to see? After you’ve monitored yourself for a day or two, ask yourself which one of these categories you fall into. 1) You always look at yourself with a hypercritical eye and you often mentally refer to yourself as stupid, lazy, clumsy, ugly, gross, or other demeaning terms. You constantly require outside validation in order to feel even halfway decent about yourself. 2) You maintain a “neutral” approach to your own person, hardly even noticing anything in particular about yourself. You just take yourself, your appearance, and your performance for granted. It’s almost as if you were a non-entity whose job it is to just keep showing up, but you certainly don’t take any real pleasure in your own company. You base your worth primarily on how others react to you. 3) You make a point of it to treat yourself with utmost respect. You speak to yourself in only most courteous and encouraging tones. You actively note and register appreciation for your most likeable qualities and you enjoy your own company. You maintain this outlook despite what others’ opinions of you may be. After all, it is your opinion and validation that matter to you most. Clearly, this last option is what we are striving for. Contrary to what some may think, this is not vanity or egotism. It is self-affirmation. It is creating a friendly “alliance” with someone who will be with you rest of your days. Other people come and go, and among ones who stay, they are primarily focused on their own lives. It is no one’s responsibility but your own to validate your existence. You are only one who can provide yourself
| | Let's Get to the Bottom of Low Self-EsteemWritten by Rosella Aranda
Let’s Get to Bottom of Low Self-Esteem If you suffer from low self-esteem, it’s because you don’t know yourself well enough to appreciate how basically wonderful you are. This is not empty flattery. It is true. Sadly, many of us are totally estranged from ourselves, from what really makes us tick. This ignorance of our true nature results in relentless self-sabotage of both our work lives and all our relationships with people. Whether you call it fear of failure or fear of success, self-sabotage can manifest in any number of ways. These behaviors run gamut from seemingly harmless quirks to extreme masochistic behaviors. Here’s a small assortment: - constant tardiness - clumsiness, accident proneness - failure to keep promises or honor commitments - staying stuck in an unfulfilling job - perfectionism - feeling like a fraud, afraid that you’ll be exposed - feeling empty, hollow despite outward success - workaholism - consistently poor choice of partners - being a jack of all trades, master of none - not knowing what you want to be “when you grow up” - life-threatening addictions - self-mutilation Self-sabotage, no matter how it sneaks in, ultimately results in not allowing ourselves to get what we want. Why? The bottom line is that we feel we don’t deserve it. To overcome effects of low self-esteem, it is not enough to recognize that we have it. We need to understand WHY we have it. We must get in touch with who and what we genuinely are rather than who and what we think we are. We Must Clean Out Our Mental Filter We must sniff out internalized messages from family and society that hinder our progress. This is imperative, for it is through these core beliefs that all other ideas are filtered. We cannot just slap a new behavior or some positive thinking onto a flawed subconscious belief. Until core beliefs are rectified, our progress will be spotty and short-lived at best. We absolutely must examine how these core beliefs came into being. You guessed it. We need to go rummaging through our
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