Developing Self Esteem

Developing Self Esteem

There are many ideas about how to develop self esteem. Most of them
focus on surrounding yourself with positive experiences, hanging out
with great people or flooding yourself with good "self messages."
These all have merit, but they are all superficial and they all fail.
In order to change self esteem, you first have to understand its genesis;
that is, its beginnings. You have to understand its pathway into your
awareness, when it first manifests, how many things contribute to it and
a bunch of other dynamic material. You can't just change develop and/or
improve self esteem by willing it. That fails.
Self esteem evolves out of zillions of little things that each contribute
to it, inculcated one item at a time. Each message we take in starting
from day one in our lives, contributes to the formation of our sense of self.
The biggest contributors to our sense of self are, of course, our parents,
or anyone who parented us during years one-to-five. Siblings, teachers
and more importantly, peers influence us for the duration of our school
years, then after that, partners, spouses, bosses, etc.
Your self esteem develops from all of these inputs, the first group being
the most important time wise because we are most open and vulnerable, but
any of them can potentially be big enough messages and can occur during
any time in our lives. One way to think of this is that the older you get,
probably the bigger the event needs to be to meaningfully influence your
self esteem.
Well, that's a little blurb on how self esteem develop, but it also is not
entirely true. It turns out the quality of the inputted message is just
as if not more important than the quantity. So, in later life, a deeper,
higher quality message coming to you about you can have profound effects.
And, it turns out, if it comes with a good feeling, it can be used
productively to "infect" negative messages, thus changing their charge,
or the strength of their influence over you.
In my ebook on changing self esteem, I take advantage of this ability and
make it conscious. I turned it into a technique that can be used to
neutralize negative messages that you're carrying around, thus improving
or heightening the development of your self esteem. You start by picking
a powerful positive aspect about you. It has to have certain qualities
to qualify, but basically it has to be true, inviolate (no one can take
it away from you), stable and reliable.
When you think of the Anchor Concept, your feelings change. This is
on purpose, because it is the feeling we used to change self esteem, not
the thought, which is indirect, not direct. It turns out our self esteems
reflects our feelings more than anything else. It also turns out changing
our feelings, one thought at a time, changes our self esteems. Picking
the right thought (Anchor concept) is crucial. Pick the wrong one and
the technique goes off course. Pick the right one and Viola! Changes
start right away, no matter how crummy your self image no was/is or how
long it has lasted, etc.

It's not magic, and it does require a thorough understanding of the
genesis of self esteem, which I provide in my ebook. It requires a
little "elbow grease" to develop (repair) a self esteem, but I've had
hundreds of clients in my outpatient private practice extol the virtues
of my technique.

I hope you'll check out what I have to offer. It's a bit of a
counterintuitive approach; meaning, you have to "think small" to make
it work. This, by the way, is also what makes it easy to do.

Dr. Griggs.

http://www.drgriggs.org
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com