Self Esteem: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence. Gael Lindenfield
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of at least three specific and immediate goals, as well as your long-term wider aims. Like the latter, these should be freely spoken about and always written down and placed where they can be readily and regularly viewed.
| Back up your plans with excellent organization. |
The first step must be to show yourself that you ‘mean business’ by making your self-esteem plans look like professional documents. Type them up if you can, or at the very least write them out in clear legible handwriting using highlighted headings and lists with bullet points or numbers. You should then date them and file them away (unless they can be pinned up for all to see!). I always suggest allocating, at the very least, a special folder or file for personal development work. (Why not stop reading and find one right now – even if it is only a temporary one?) You will then need to mark it Private and Confidential and place it in a safe place – but not one which is so well hidden that you yourself might forget it is there! Use this file to keep your written work in, and as a safe-haven for any other bits and pieces you may want to accumulate while working (for example ideas or observations jotted down on bits of paper at work, interesting photos, cartoons, articles, quotations, etc.).
Triggers
Breaking any habit is hard, but because low self-esteem patterns often have been ingrained in childhood they can be tougher than most to overcome. Because these patterns are often conditioned responses they can sometimes be stimulated by simple associations with ‘everyday’ experiences. I’m sure most people know the feeling of ‘shrivelling’ one size smaller just on hearing a certain word, smelling the whiff of a particular aroma or even experiencing certain weather such as a storm. Even if we cannot completely ‘brainwash’ such responses into oblivion, identifying and naming them does demystify them, keeps us on our guard and prepares us for taking corrective action. (See particularly the strategy called ‘Breaking Self-Destructive Habits’ in Chapter 4.)
Encouragement
Because the process of personal development usually takes place at a ‘plodding’ rather than a ‘breakneck’ pace, it is more likely to be sustained if it is regularly bolstered by support. But in self-esteem-building work such support should, first and foremost, come from ourselves in the form of regular motivational treats. As most people with low self-esteem tend to be mean in the way that they reward themselves, we usually need strong, efficient reminders. (A constructive job for a nagging friend?!)
Experimentation
As with every human learning process, the more individually tailored your development programme, the more likely it is to be successful. For example, throughout this book I suggest numerous exercises and give you many ‘Do’ and ‘Don’t’ lists, but none of these should ever be treated as ‘gospel truths’. I hope that you will be able to use my suggestions as starting points for your own experiments with a whole variety of behaviours and strategies. Although I have worked with people of all ages from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, I am still aware that some of the learning I have had from my experience will not be relevant to everyone reading this book. A suggestion which may prove to be invaluable ‘advice’ to one person may not be even remotely relevant for someone else. Unfortunately the only sure way of testing the usefulness of some of the strategies and guidelines will be through experimentation! Once you have tried them you can then adapt them to suit your particular personality, culture, circumstances, family, organization or relationships.
I know only too well that working in this way may prove to be more difficult than it sounds. When my self-esteem was at a very low ebb, I can remember being insatiably greedy for infallible advice and strict guidelines. In fact, the shakier my self-confidence was, the more desperately I sought magic solutions from esteemed idols. But, of course, the very essence of self-esteem building is about learning to have more respect for your own potential, skills and knowledge. One way to begin is to read and work through this book, always aware that you are your own best guide and mentor when it comes to shaping and selecting the behaviour, values and lifestyle which can build and boost your own self-esteem.
Monitoring
Regular appraisal in any learning programme is essential and, as I have already implied, in this particular field the only judge and jury worth listening to is you. You will always need to build into your action plans time to do regular and thorough assessments of your progress. This is often difficult for people who have been suffering from low self-esteem for a while because they may have lost their ability to make even the simplest self-appraisals. This is particularly true in the area of feelings. When our self-esteem begins to dip, we tend (unconsciously) to adopt defensive psychological behaviours which ensure that we have neither the time, the energy nor the inclination to assess whether or not we like or love ourselves. Some of the most common defences which you may immediately recognize are:
– throwing ourselves into non-stop activity – allowing ourselves to become exclusively passionate and exhaustingly caring for others or a ‘good cause’
– focusing all our emotional energy on a particular fear, phobia or obsession
– deadening our senses with drink or drugs.
If any of this kind of activity is familiar to you, you may need to do some serious healing work before you can begin honestly and effectively to monitor your progress. The next chapter could therefore be a crucial one for you. After all, monitoring our self-esteem should never be a wholly cerebral activity, it must be done by both our hearts and our heads – which can be exceedingly difficult if we are still emotionally crippled with a backlog of buried hurt and pain.
Strategy for Emotional Healing
A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.
Mildred Witte Stouven
Emotional pain is the basic food of low self-esteem junkies. It often seems that the more they get the more they crave. Like any other addicts, the victims eventually cry out for more and more, kidding themselves that they have risen above its power to hurt (‘Go on spit in my face, I don’t care anymore’).
Rarely do psychological wounds receive a comparable amount of healing attention as physical ones. Why in our culture is there such a distinct difference in the way they are commonly treated?
| Emotionally broken hearts hurt just as much as the physically damaged ones and they can be just as disabling and life-threatening. |
The answer, I believe, is not always that people care any less about emotionally hurt hearts, it is simply that in our culture they are very often much less informed about what they can usefully do to help heal the wound. Once the ‘tea and sympathy’ approach has been tried and found wanting, the only other options most sufferers believe to be available are patience, distraction, or costly psychotherapy.
Perhaps any one or a mixture of all these options may satisfactorily ‘cure’ minor emotional bumps and scratches, but they are usually grossly inadequate remedies for the degree of psychological pain which tends to inhabit the hearts of people with low self-esteem. They tend to have had their feelings hurt so often, and so deeply, that they could literally spend a lifetime awaiting the uncertain healing mercies of Father Time. (And in the meantime their self-esteem