Saturday, January 30, 2010

Improving Self Esteem

Improving Self Esteem

Most people think to improve their self esteems by doing fun things, by
hanging out with "up" people, by feeding themselves with positive thoughts.
Improving self esteem is much more complicated than one might think.
You could surround yourself with great people and activities, and for a
short time you might feel better. Then, the activities subside, and
you're left with you. Most people feel just as crummy about themselves
at this point as before the "activities and people." Sometimes people
feel slightly worse, because the "good stuff" is over and nothing changed.
First you need to understand how self esteem forms before changing it makes
any sense. Most people think, "Think positive" about yourself, and presto!
The result is a wonderful sense of self. Wrong. It took millions of
inputs from others and yourself about you over a very, very long time to
create what you call self esteem. In the ebook I wrote about this very
specific process, I describe when this starts, the kind of messages that
embed themselves into our awareness, how and when and why they do that,
but most importantly, what to do about it.
The average of all those messages is what we loosely call self esteem.
I call it an epiphenomenon; meaning, what emerges out of a group of smaller
phenomena that make it up. I give some visual metaphors to explain the
concept in detail, because you have to understand this one critical aspect
of self esteem formation in order to change it.

The second important idea in changing self esteem is the Anchor concept.
This is the one positive quality about you that is absolutely good, true
and unshakable. Some people have trouble finding such a trait, but I show
you how and what the qualities the Anchor Concept has to have to make it work.
It doesn't matter what the Anchor Concept is, how big it is, or how relative
it is to anything else. But we use this Anchor Concept in the technique of
repairing self esteem.

There's another misnomer going around about self esteem. To improve it you
have to "think big." This means accomplish a lot, make a million dollars,
marry and most beautiful/handsome person, hang out with high status people, etc.
This is also wrong. It matters not if you are hobnobbing with Donald Trump
or sitting alone in your living room in your pajamas. "Externals" are
relatively irrelevant to the process, although they can be used to "stir up"
issues that need to be resolved. As above, you can do this (hang out with
high status folks if it makes you feel better for a time), but when the party
is over, you're still in your own head with just you--same crummy sense of self.

The answer is to "think small." This is very counterintuitive, but if you
think about how your self esteem was created--one impression at a time--it begins
to make sense. You change the epiphenomenona of self esteem by changing each
phenomenon that created it, one at a time. This is thinking small because
you are aiming at each input, feeling, memory or association, one at a time,
which changes the big experience of self esteem, one small input at a time.
You focus on the little picture to fine tune the big picture, not the other way
around. You change your self esteem from the inside out, not from the outside in.
This is where the Anchor Concept is used.


My ebook digs into this in considerable depth and instructs you exactly how to fix
a crummy self image.

Dr. Griggs

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

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