EVENTS lead to INTERPRETATION leading to EMOTION leading to ACTION

Making your Happiness Changes Conscious

Becoming conscious means not operating automatically, its about really seeing what is happening and choosing your best possible emotional, mental, spiritual or behavioural response in each moment.

Living our lives unconsciously means we don’t know we’re doing it and this is something we are doing all of the time. Becoming conscious is to realise this is what you do and not dealing with what you are feeling or how you are behaving by becoming unconscious and being asleep to yourself.

To become conscious therefore, identify your favourite ways of going unconscious, be vigilant in noticing them and be committed to facing yourself. Once you take this responsibility you can begin to take control and make your life the way you want it to be.

This means developing your self-witness to what is happening and noticing what you are doing, feeling, or thinking, as you do it and without judgement. Once you can do this you can then begin to wake up to the other possibilities in your life.

Before every journey, first sit for a while. Russian proverb.

I notice that when I travel anywhere that I need to sit and let myself arrive for a few minutes as I can still be on my journey. I’m catching myself up, taking a breather and this I think is what I mean here, that before a journey, during and after its useful to catch our breath. To take a moment, collect ourselves and then if necessary; move on again. Such is conscious change, if we take that moment to think before continued action, then we can begin to make better choices.

Self Esteem

This section reflects how when involved in the processes of change to practice building your self-esteem and confidence and also, to begin breaking the habits that no longer work for newer productive ways that do. Self-esteem is a spiral going both up and down, how you feel affects the things you do and these affect what others think of you, which then affects your self-esteem. Building self-esteem is about thinking good of yourself and not thinking or feeling bad for no reason.

One of the surprising results of making happiness important in your life is how effective you will be at creating what you want and accepting yourself as you are.

Self-acceptance is being happy with who you are, you can call it self-esteem, self-love or self-appreciation but whatever you call it, you’ll know when you are accepting yourself when you feel good. Acceptance is validating, appreciating and supporting yourself, even those parts you’d like to change. You may feel bad now about your flaws, but they are yours and accepting them is more useful than thinking negatively about them or yourself.

Controlling such negative thinking holds the key to being happier and learning how to control your inner critic is a great way to increase self-esteem.
This is about not judging you and others for what happened in the past. I’ve mentioned before about forgiveness and this section too holds part of this: Forgiving. Forgiving others and yourself and getting out of the Blame Game.
Your parents, family, teachers, everybody who ever hurt you, got in your way, were doing their best at that time. This may be hard to acknowledge or deal with, but much the same as with your mistakes or errors of judgement, at that time you were doing your best. We know this to be true, because if people can do better, just like you, they will.

When people behaved badly toward you, though it appeared as malice or pain, horror and pure nastiness, the truth was that those poor souls did not know any better and they deserve your forgiveness, sadness and the letting them go. There is enough pain around without you carrying yours forever. Holding on to pain, grudges and bad shit from your past creates a heavy load that stops you picking up fresher, happier and more fulfilling good memories. Learn to let it go and begin to take that well deserved rest.

Learning to forgive others and yourself will be no picnic, for resolving, accepting and reconciling your past unhappy times through forgiveness will involve some tears.
These tears can begin to wash the stain and sorrow from the past. Even more painful may be for you to acknowledge that these have made you a stronger person, for it was these events that shaped you as you are today. Scary eh? Even scarier is the possibility that once you’ve recognised this, you’ll do nothing about it and stay in that fearful place where old wounds will still cause you pain.

Low self-esteem is recognised as not valuing or as disregarding yourself, the never feeling in charge of your life, feeling like a victim, an outsider and unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

But this isn’t always apparent, the under achiever, the I can’t, I couldn’t, I shouldn’t, I have to or living in negative is the more obvious part of low self esteem, but the confident, take charge, in control, opinionated, always positive is also indicative of low self-esteem. The difference being that the first position denies any responsibility to change their situation and the second takes ‘over-control’ to change their situation.

Self-esteem is about being in charge of your life and taking responsibility for everything that happens in it. It’s about asking what am I doing to create this situation? Rather than getting into any blame game. Self esteem values are can do, can have and I can make my life into how I want it to be.

And you can have this too.

HOW SELF-ESTEEM DEVELOPS

There are two essential components of healthy self-esteem, having a sense of personal worth and a sense of personal competence. These two components develop over time with either good or bad experiences.

The first major component of self-esteem, the sense of personal worth or being worthy of respect, typically stems from being loved or valued by others, most often by parents. For example, knowing that your behaviour and status really matter is enough to cause them real emotion and to gain care from them contributes to this feeling of self-worth.

The second component, a sense of competence, stems from the extent to which we see ourselves as the cause of effects. The essence of self-esteem is the feeling of having an effect on things and being able to cause or affect events. Having quiet confidence in the ability to cope with life’s challenges also contributes to feelings of competence and this is learned.

Generally, self-esteem is viewed as the product of evaluating ourselves against one or more criteria and reaching expected standards on these. Self-esteem is affected by inherited abilities, such as intelligence, physical characteristics and other natural dispositions. These variables include achievements; skills, possessions and successes.Whether we feel liked or loved, being a unique individual, with integrity, of value and worthy of respect and feeling in control of our lives. These criteria may vary in value between cultures and subcultures.

The relative significance of these areas change with age and stages in life, a person’s self-esteem is not static or constant throughout life. For example, children typically value feelings of being liked and loved and hold great value of the feedback received from parents, family members or teachers. During adolescence this attention shifts from adult feedback to acceptance by their peers.

Later, as individuals approach adulthood, these factors begin to change significance, as we become less dependent upon feedback received from others. Instead, we begin to develop our own values, standards and expectations to begin to internalise the source of self-esteem.

This shift from dependence upon external feedback to a more internalised source of self-esteem begins as we evaluate ourselves against our own values. If adults continue to depend primarily upon external sources of feedback from others, this is termed as Pseudo self-esteem instead of healthy self-esteem. Pseudo Self esteem is unhealthy because it is continuing the search for external approval rather than building our own core values to evaluate ourselves against.

Levels of self-esteem are relatively stable during life, though they may be affected as we take on challenges and experience these as successes or failures. If self-esteem is based upon internal sources it becomes more stable than for those who are dependent upon external feedback. 

Healthy self-esteem doesn’t occur by accident, it is cultivated and earned; praise, possessions or self-talk do not build it and one person cannot give another self-esteem.

Healthy self-esteem is the realistic and accurate positive appraisals of ourselves by our own criteria and includes the ability to cope with negative feedback.

If we try to nurture self-esteem by focussing only on positives we need to avoid narcissism which is an over exaggerated positive image rather who we actually are. Narcissistic tendencies include; being self-absorbed, self-cantered, selfish, seductive, manipulative, striving for power and sacrificing integrity for ego. Other characteristics include believing in being entitled to special factors, exploiting others, with excessive needs for admiration and becoming hypersensitive, anxious, timid, insecure and conceited. Such unhealthy self-esteem is about to insensitivity to others and is Pseudo Self-Esteem because it is sought externally rather than upon our own understanding of ourselves.

Self esteem is not developed through saying the positive of ourselves, or saying something as if it is true should not be confused with believing that it is. The core of self-confidence is about feeling we have an effect on people, our lives and being able to affect ours and others life events by feeling loved and knowing that our behaviour and status really matters.

There are five main approaches to building self-esteem;

Cognitive approaches focus on changing the way in which we view our experience; to view things positively rather than negatively. People are taught how to look for positives rather than the negatives of their situation. That they have a choice in how they perceive their experience and this can be either positive or negative.

Behavioural approaches teach adopting specific behaviours to express ourselves confidently so that others relate to in a more positive way. The focus is on posture, voice and how they deal with others. People who see themselves as victims are guided to take a more assertive approach and to ensure they are not treated as victims.

Experiential approaches design activities or situations to enable people to experience their strengths, to relate in more positive ways and to receive positive feedback to develop a more positive sense of identity.

Skills development focuses on the specific skills with the assumption that by operating at higher-levels we achieve success and begin building self-esteem. Skills include goal setting, communication, problem solving, conflict resolution skills and interpersonal skills.

Environmental approaches create an environment that enables individuals to “self-empower themselves and to take responsibility for their self-esteem. These positive environments are where people become involved in the decisions that affect them like goalsetting and receiving encouragement or feedback on progress and then are treated with respect.

The most effective system is probably a mix of these approaches rather than one on its own.

Ways to Self-Esteem

Building confidence

Confidence is internal and is built there. If you get stuck, ‘Act As If’. That is; Acting as if you can. As you think and act, you can. ‘Act As If’ you like yourself and you will.

Reach out

Lend a hand when you can as  by helping others we become more in control of our own lives. Helping out is a useful way to learn how things are done.

Avoid perfection

This will paralyse you and keep you from accomplishing your goals, aim for the ‘best you can do today.’

Take care of your physical appearance

Resist getting sloppy when you feel bad, these are the times to take extra care of yourself.

Find your creative energy

Exercise, listen to music, sit outdoors, meditate, paint (if you feel you paint badly, paint badly but have fun!) write, whatever you feel connects you to creating.

Respect yourself

Make a list of reasons why you respect yourself, your accomplishments, challenges, and experiences.

Develop your self:

Clarify the Who am I really? Take the time to think about your likes, dislikes and what you enjoy doing.  Explore this in your Journal: See Journal section.

Mix with positive people.

Who you mix with will influence your thoughts, actions and behaviour. Negative people with low self-esteem will lower your self-esteem while positive people will raise it.

Always act to your own values

If you feel pulled towards being allied to someone else’s values, stop, think, feel, recognise the conflict and do the right thing by your values.

Be good to yourself every day

Do something that makes you feel good every day.

Create Challenges

Resting on your laurels is good and so is trying something new, do it as an experiment and avoid getting hooked up on being expert or being perfect. Take workshops or courses that develop your positive attitude.

Don’t take stuff seriously

Find humour everyday, everywhere, maybe give up watching the ‘News’ for a week.

Don’t compare

If you do this you’re likely to compare yourself in a negative way and set yourself up for failure.

Stop negative thoughts

Note what you say to yourself when you make a mistake by monitoring your self-talk. Negative messages paralyse or stop you, instead create positive messages to replace your negatives: I can rather than I can’t, let’s try rather than I daren’t.

Practice making decisions

Even if you have no preference, make minor decisions and hold them true, if you go out with friends make your decision first as to where you go and what you do. If they keep to your decision you win, if they decide different you still win, you’re with friends! But, you will have had the practice.

Accept all compliments

Develop grace, don’t dismiss or ignore compliments. If you give yourself the message that you do not deserve or are not worthy of praise you are making this true, give it up, recognise that a compliment received is recognising the worth of the giver.

Begin to listen

Listen to what you say to yourself and what you say to others about you, what you say creates your life. If you begin to hear the words when talking about yourself you can begin to change them to better reflect your reality, the better reality you are creating.

Make the Process Important

When learning something enjoy the journey, like being in a car, a train, look out of the window, the view along the way is part of the journey.

(c)neilbenbow