What brings true happiness?
ByHave you ever thought you had what would bring you happiness? You were satisfied, however, something was still missing. You felt unfulfilled.
Value judging is the only thing that will injure or destroy your Self-Esteem. It is comparing your values with the values of others to find their agreement or disagreement. Most value judging, about 90% of it, is done on a nonconscious level; you don’t even know you are doing it. However, you feel it! Some examples of value judging include: name calling, sarcasm, labeling, controlling, put downs, comparison, criticism and putting people on a pedestal.
You are born with intact Self-Esteem. That is your birthright! Gradually, your Self-Esteem can be taken away from you by significant others: mothers, fathers, teachers, adults, and peers. You’ll never reclaim it until you have somebody who is genuinely interested in you. This individual helps you reclaim your Self-Esteem and make it a skill. Once you have a skill, no one can take it away from you!
When my father was a boy, he lived in the small town of Sugar Notch, Pennsylvania. From age seven to seventeen his father was on welfare. For most of his early life he felt like a nobody. He lived in an unintact Self-Esteem environment. His mother and father felt like nobodies, and his two sisters felt like nobodies. Then in the ninth grade, a teacher said, “Bill, I believe you can win the Latin metal.” Now he never raised his hand in class, never spoke up in groups, yet here was a teacher who believed he could win the Latin metal. With her help, he did! Then as a senior in high school, a teacher said, “I believe you can win the public speaking contest.” He didn’t believe her. She said, “We’re going to practice, rehearse and drill until you get that skill.” That was the beginning of his journey of doing qualitative research to discover the answers to these questions: “How come I hurt so much?” “How come other people hurt so much?” and “What can be done about it?”
When we first started studying Self-Esteem, people ridiculed and abandoned the idea as a “throw-away concept.” Now, they’re two of the hottest words in the English language because everybody is going through pain. The economy, relationships, marriages, families, teenagers, baby boomers and senior citizens all giver us great opportunities to see the differences between self-image and Self-Esteem. Self-Esteem is the bottom line for the future; for family and business relationships. When you live by self-image, you are guaranteed pain, because you base your life on comparison and value judging. When you have Self-Esteem, which is the self-respect you feel for yourself, then you have “freedom.” It does not matter if you are young, or old, or somewhere in between, we all have inside feelings. No one can know what you are feeling inside unless you let them know. Things may appear “perfect” on the outside, while you may be “dying” on the inside.
Tomorrow we will talk about the worlds number one epidemic and what you can do to keep it out of your life.
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