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How Are You Treated By Others?
Self-acceptance begins in
infancy, with the influence of your parents and siblings and other important
people.
Your own level of self-acceptance is determined largely by how well you feel
you are accepted by the important people in your life.
Your attitude toward yourself is determined largely by the attitudes that you
think other people have toward you. When you believe that other people think
highly of you, your level of self-acceptance and self-esteem goes straight
up.
The best way to build a healthy personality involves understanding yourself
and your feelings.
Let the Light Shine In
This is achieved through the
simple exercise of self-disclosure. For you to truly understand yourself, or to
stop being troubled by things that may have happened in your past, you must be
able to disclose yourself to at least one person. You have to be able to get
those things off your chest. You must rid yourself of those thoughts and
feelings by revealing them to someone who won’t make you feel guilty or ashamed
for what has happened.
Understand What Makes You Tick
The second part of
personality development follows from self-disclosure, and it’s called
self-awareness. Only when you can disclose what you’re truly thinking and
feeling to someone else can you become aware of those thoughts and emotions If
the other person simply listens to you without commenting or criticizing, you
have the opportunity to become more aware of the person you are and why you do
the things you do. You begin to develop perspective, or what the Buddhists call
“detachment.”
Be Honest With Yourself
Now we come to the good part.
After you’ve gone through self-disclosure to self-awareness, you arrive at
self-acceptance. You accept yourself for the person you are, with good points
and bad points, with strengths and weaknesses, and with the normal frailties of
a human being. When you develop the ability on a conscious level to stand back
and look at yourself honestly, and to candidly admit to others that you may not
be perfect but you’re all you’ve got, you start to enjoy a heightened sense of
self-acceptance.
Do An Inventory of Your Accomplishments
A valuable
exercise for developing higher levels of self-acceptance involves doing an
inventory of yourself. In doing this inventory, your job is to accentuate the
positive and minimize the negative.
Think of your unique talents and abilities. Think of your core skills, the
things that you do exceptionally well that account for your success in your
profession and in your personal life right now.
Think About Your Future
Think about your future
possibilities and the fact that your potential is virtually unlimited. You can
do what you want to do and go where you want to go. You can be the person you
want to be. You can set large and small goals and make plans and move
step-by-step, progressively toward their realization. There are no obstacles to
what you can accomplish except the obstacles that you create in your
mind.
Action Exercises
Here are two steps you can take
immediately to put these ideas into action:
First, sit down with your spouse, or a good friend, and tell him or her about
something that is troubling you and is still causing you
unh appiness.
Lastly, develop perspective on your problem by standing back from it and
imagining that it was happening to someone else. What advice would you give to
that person?
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