Personal Development Answers

Here is further material from Paul Blackburn’s , Blockage Buster seminar.

In the previous posting, we were talking about self esteem, and how that should be separated from achievement.

Continuing on with the topic of self esteem, we’ll look at some of the love substitutes that you may have looked for as a child.

Here us the 4.06 minute AUDIO fits in better with your time.

When you were growing up and were still a child, quite unconsciously, you used the three As to obtain what you perceived to be love.

The three As are:

• Attention
• Approval
• Achievement

If as a child, you felt deprived of love, you would have sought it using these three strategies.

You would have sought attention, even if it was negative attention.

With the second strategy, approval, your reasoning would have been: ‘If I am good I will get approval and that means they love me.’

And the third, achievement, is a type of alternative or substitute for approval and/or attention.

So your school results were either very good and you would receive approval, of they were very bad and you would still receive attention.

However, even if you received heaps of attention and approval, these artificial means of getting ‘love’, still left an empty feeling.

Thus you did more of the above to get more love substitutes, but it never filled the void.

In your everyday adult world you may not be aware of the level of your self-esteem.

It is when you need to get out of your comfort zone, when you have to try something new, something unfamiliar, when you have to do something you’ve unsuccessfully tried before, that the true worth of your self-esteem surfaces.

Have you ever caught yourself saying any of the following?

• I can’t do that!
• I’ll never be able to do that!
• I’m no good at that; never have been!
• I’ve never been good at that!
• Mum always said, I can’t do those things
• Dad says, I’m hopeless at ball games
• I’ve always been too weak to do that
• I’ve always hated art; I can’t draw
• I have to do (whatever it is) to prove it to my parents
• I have to prove myself
• I’ll show them how good I am!
• I’ll do it my way, too bad if I stuff it
• I usually stuff it, anyway
• And so on

If you have ever said anything, even remotely resembling the above, there are chinks in your self-esteem.

Seriously.

Here is a quote from Paul I especially liked:

“You are the resource the rest of your life depends on.”

Ummmm.  What do you say to that?

Humbling, isn’t it?

How are you looking after your resource, you?

Here is another (this one is from someone else, but I’ve forgotten who):

“People are like teabags because you don’t know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.”

Cool, eh?

The next one will be the last posting on the seminar, Blockage Buster.
 

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Tags: Self-Esteem //