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Staying calm, composed and maintaining strong self esteem in
today's tough environment can be difficult but is not impossible
if you follow a few simple guidelines. Here are 6 tips you can use
as a starter guide to self improvement. Everything and everyone
else around you can affect your self esteem. Other people can
deliberately or inadvertently damage your self image. Unchecked
people and circumstances can ultimately destroy your self esteem
and pull you down in ways you won't even notice.
Don't let these
influences get the best of you. But what should you avoid? 1 : A
Negative Work Environment Beware of a "dog eat dog" environment
where everyone else is fighting just to get ahead. This is where
non-appreciative people usually thrive and working extra is
expected and not rewarded. In this environment no one will
appreciate your contributions even if you miss lunch, dinner, and
stay at work late into the night.
Unless you are very fortunate
most of the time you will work too hard with no help from others
around you. This type of atmosphere will ruin your self esteem.
This is not just healthy competition, at its worst it is brutal
and very damaging. 2: Other Peoples Behavior Bulldozers, brown nosers, gossipmongers, whiners, backstabbers, snipers, people
walking wounded, controllers, naggers, complainers, exploders,
patronizes, sluffers - whatever you want to call them, all have
one thing in common - an overriding desire to prosper at the
expense of others.
Avoid them and do not be tempted to join them.
They may get some short term advantage with their behavior but
deep down most are very insecure, unhappy and ashamed of their
behavior. For most their self esteem disappeared a long time ago.
Seeing someone like this prosper is sickening but do not join them
- you are better than that! 3: A Changing Environment In today's
fast moving society it is difficult if not impossible to avoid
change.
Changes challenge our paradigms and tests our flexibility,
adaptability and alter the way we think. Changes can make your
life difficult and may cause stress but, if it's inevitable, you
must accept it, don't fight it and in time find ways to improve
your life. Try to manage change and try to avoid multiple changes
at the same time. If a particular change can't be avoided welcome
it. Change will be with us forever, we must learn to live with it.
4: Past Experience We all carry "baggage" - past experiences which
have molded us to who we are today, but some people live in their
past experiences - usually something that hurt and still hurts.
It's okay to cry out when you experience pain but don't let pain
dominate your life as it will transform itself into fears and
phobias.
If something painful happens, or has happened to you,
find a way to minimize the effects. Discuss it with a friend, a
family member or a professional if necessary and move on. Don't
let it continue to dominate your life and dictate your future
actions. Because something bad has happened doesn't mean it will
happen again. Learn what you can from any bad experience and move
on. 5: Negative World View The television news is full of doom and
gloom and it is true that around the world there are many people
suffering war, famine or other natural or man-made disasters.
Whilst I do not suggest you should not care and do nothing,
remember that there are many beautiful positive things happening
too. Don't wrap yourself up with all the negative aspects around
the world. Learn to look for beauty too for, in building
self
esteem, we must learn how to be positive in a negative world. 6:
Determination Theory Are we a product of our biological inherited
characteristics (nature) or a result of the influences we absorb
throughout out lives (nurture)? I believe how we are is due to a
mixture of both nurture and nature and as a result our behavioural
traits are not fixed. Whilst it is true that some things are
dictated by genetics (for example race, color and many inherited
conditions) your environment and the people in your life have a
major effect on your behaviour. You are your own person, you have
your own identity and make your own choices.
The characteristics
your mother or father display are not your destiny. Learn from
other people's experience, so you don't suffer the same mistakes.
Are some people are born leaders or positive thinkers? I don't
believe so. Being positive, and staying positive is a choice.
Building self esteem and drawing on positive experiences for self
improvement is a choice, not a rule or a talent. No-one will come
to you and give you permission to build your self esteem and
improve your self.
It is in your control. It can be hard to keep
positive, especially when others and circumstances seem to be
conspiring to pull you down. You need to protect yourself and give
yourself a chance to stay positive. Improving your self esteem
gives you that protection. One way to stay positive is to minimise
your exposure to harmful influences while using affirmations to
boost the positive influences in your life. Constantly reminding
yourself of the good things in your life will keep the impact of
negative influences to a minimum.
About the Author
John Edmond has 4 grown up and successful children and recently
obtained a creative writing degree. He now writes on a number of
topics including
Building Self Esteem.
John Edmond is 51
and lives in Manchester in the UK and worked in insurance and
finance for many years. He recently returned to education and
graduated university with a degree in Creative Writing and Writing
for Performance. He now writes full time for a number of web
sites.
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The
Significant Emotional Experience:
Many mental and
physical diseases are preceded by a significant emotional
experience (SEE) of a negative nature which may appear in the
person's recent past, or even further in the past, such as during
childhood. If negative, and depending on the intensity, the SEE
has the potential to create or be the source of some emotional,
mental or even physical disease occurring in the body.
Let's define some terms so that we are speaking the same language:
(I borrow the notion of an SEE from the sociologist Dr. Morris
Massey, in the book The People Puzzle.) First event means the very
first time that an experience happens, or the root cause of a
first event occurring (this is also called root cause).
Significant emotional experience is any major, fully associated,
highly charged emotional event wherever it occurs. Emotional chain
is the process that the unconscious mind uses to connect
experiences of a similar nature. (The term used in Time Line
Therapy and The Basis of Personality [1988, Tad James, M.S.,
Ph.D.] is gestalt which means a collection of memories around a
certain subject.)
The potential of a negative SEE to create dis-ease is based on the
trapped emotions which remain in the memory because they are
stored in the body. The work of Dr. Paul Goodwin, a neural
physicist at Alaska Pacific University, implies that the trapped
emotions in the body have the possibility of creating functional
(software, non-physical) boundaries which can impede the flow of
nerve information through the neural network pathways.
Testing Memories for Negative Emotions: You can tell if
there are still any negative emotions in one of your past memories
by going back to that memory, and remembering what happened
looking through your own eyes. (Warning: Do not try this with
memories which contain trauma or phobia.) If, as you remember the
memory, you feel any negative emotions in your body, then there is
a negative emotional content to the memory, and there is trapped
emotion in your body. The trapped negative emotion, if you feel
it, is the basis for dis-ease.
Getting Rid of the Negative Emotions: Now, other than dis-ease,
why get rid of negative emotions which are trapped in one's body?
Well, for example, imagine a salesperson, (s)he has a dream, (s)he's
well trained, knows how to sell, and (s)he wants to make more
money. But every time (s)he goes to close the sale, fear comes up.
That salesperson is not going to do his or her best. Certainly the
closing ratio will not be as high as it could be without the fear.
Now imagine that same salesperson without the fear. Which one do
you thing will do better? Of course, the second one.
Or in a
relationship, perhaps you once got hurt, and so you said, "I'm
never going to let that happen to me again." So every time you get
to a certain point in the relationship you begin to feel those old
negative feelings, and so you end the relationship. More
importantly, each relationship ends in exactly the same way each
time. You may not even remember the source of the negative
feelings, but at a certain point there they are, and the
relationship ends.
Now imagine being without those negative emotions, do you think
that it would improve the relationship? Of course.
Obviously, the
creation of dis-ease requires more trapped negative emotions than
those in the situations we've just discussed. However, the process
is the same--the unconscious mind represses (to whatever extent it
needs to) memories with unresolved negative emotions. It does this
for the "sanity" of the conscious mind. Since the unconscious mind
does repress the memories with the negative emotions in them, the
emotions get stuck in the body and aren't released.
Time Line
Therapy has the potential of releasing the trapped emotion in
memories in a very short period of time. In fact, we usually
release most of a person's negative emotions in the Secret of
Creating Your Future® Seminars which we give all over the United
States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. My experience with
the now thousands of people of all walks of life is that it is
possible to release all of a person's negative emotions from past
memories in as little as five hours. That release of negative
emotions has a profound effect on the person.
This happened
to one of the students in a recent Secret of "Creating Your
Future" Seminar. After the seminar, I learned she had been
severely abused as a child and had, for most of her life, been
depressed. At times she was also suicidal. She had visited
psychologists and psychiatrists on and off for most of her life.
During the seminar, she paid close attention to releasing her
major negative emotions, including sadness and depression, the
trauma from the abuse and a number of her limiting decisions from
the past. Her experience after the weekend was that she was no
longer able to access the feelings of depression. In fact, when I
saw her two weeks later, she came running up to me and said, "Do
you know I haven't been depressed for the last two weeks, at all?
And do you know what else, I seem to be laughing for no reason at
all!" |
