This week, we are going to deal with our emotions and on how to develop our self-image and self-confidence. My interaction with various kinds of people in the course of my career, has made me come to rather sad conclusion: Everybody among us have a problem of lack of self-confidence. People come to the Institute where I work with a variety of symptoms: Some of these people are depressed, some have phobias, some can’t sleep and some have marriages that have failed. But despite the differences in their problems, it often turns out that they have a basic lack of self acceptance. When my colleagues and I can help them gain a more realistic and positive self-view, many of their problems just seem to take care of themselves.
We’ve all have had feelings of inferiority or inadequacy at some point in our lives. Why is this the case? I believe the origins of self doubt lie in childhood and adolescence, when we venture away from our parents and begin to associate with our peers. When I conduct my seminars, I am always touched by the emotion people feel about early childhood experiences of rejection, even ones that occurred 50 years ago. Those early failures can make an indelible impression on us, and thus the key to independent living is coming to terms with our childhood. Since our culture assigns worth to adolescence in unfair ways, we’ve got to recognize that some of our early failures may have been misleading. Some of us begin to dislike aspects of ourselves very early on, as the result of humiliating failures at several tests. There are five tests that society commonly uses for judging individuals. They are:
In this unit, we’re going to examine all these tests. You might want to read the following with a note-book to jot down your thoughts as you go on.
Without question the most highly valued personal attribute (at least nowadays) in our culture is physical attractiveness. Children don’t have to be too old to discover whether they are good looking or not, and it can make an enormous difference in how they view themselves. Some studies show that if you are beautiful as a child, you get more attention and better treatment, not only from children, but also from teachers. This happens as early as nursery schools.
As adults, we need to look back at some of our earliest experiences with our bodies. We probably jump to negative conclusions much too soon before we realize how little our looks have to do with who we are. Even now, many of us continue to have a great deal of confusion about our body, and thus about ourselves. For one thing, we don’t have a clear idea as to how our bodies look like. And this problem seems to be getting worse.
In 1985, the magazine "Psychology Today" surveyed 30,000 people about their body image. The study was designed by psychologist Thomas Kash. He made some interesting comparisons with a similar study taken 13 years earlier by the same magazine. This is what he found: In 1972, 15% of the men and 25% of the women were dissatisfied with their overall appearance. But in 1985, 34% of the men, and 38% of the women didn’t like their looks. Most of the dissatisfaction seemed to center upon weight. 41% of the men wanted to weigh less, and a startling 55% of the women thought they were over-weight. While 20% of the respondents didn’t like the way their faces looked, fully 50% of the men and 57% of the women were dissatisfied with their mid-torsos. Despite the fact that we are in an age of obsessive shaping up, and trying to look good, we are becoming more and more dissatisfied with ourselves. Perhaps the most important finding by Dr. Kash was this: There is little connection between how attractive people are, and how attractive they feel they are, particularly among women. A woman who seems quite unattractive can be quite content with her body, while another who is highly attractive can be so obsessed with every little flaw in her appearance that she feels ugly.
To help overcome this major obstacle to self-confidence, the rule is this: Determine to integrate your body and your spirit. Such an integration requires five steps:
Apparent | What can you do | Is this really all that |
flaw in | to overcome it? | important, or have you just |
appearance | magnified the effect? | |
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————— | ——————— | ————————————— |
————— | ——————— | ————————————— |
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Although this test can be useful to a certain extent, the negative effects of failing at this test can be tremendous. In most countries, the major part of educational funds is spent, either on gifted students — students with high IQ’s, or on students with low IQ’s — who are mentally handicapped but trainable. Between these two extremes are students with mid-range IQ’s, students who are often called "Average." These children are made fun of by their peers and are often overlooked by their teachers. As a result, they hold an image of themselves as stupid, and this image can last long beyond their school years. The problem with IQ tests is that they are not completely accurate. They don’t take into account certain factors that may be holding the student back from better performance. The factors which could lead to poor test performance include slow motor co-ordination, a lack of fluency in the language of instruction, and a restrictive family atmosphere. This is often the case with students who have recently moved in from a different city or country, or those with a history of family abuse. These students aren’t stupid, they’re just disadvantaged. But most people don’t take their background into consideration before passing judgment. In order to come to terms with failures at the Intelligence test, you need to realize that this test doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. It does not present a comprehensive picture of who you are as an individual. According to Howard Cardner, a Harvard University psychologist, Intelligence tests focus mainly on your Verbal and Mathematical abilities. Cardner feels that represents only a portion of our intelligence. It doesn’t take into account the so called our Right-Brain abilities (Music, Art, etc.), our co-ordination, our spatial perception, our physical senses, our inter-personal skills, or our ability to understand ourselves, our dreams, fears and frustrations. And, all these are important factors in our overall potential. You may not be good at Math, for instance, but you may have an aptitude for design or negotiating, or sales, or one of thousands of other careers. Rest assured that your future can never depend on the result of one test. Life presents many tests and we can’t excel at everyone. That’s what makes it interesting.
When you were growing up, if your parents had a bigger house than others, and if you had more money than others, your self esteem was elevated. If your parents were prominent in the community, and all your teachers knew they were important people, you had clout. If on the other hand, you had a parent who was known for some scandal, or if your parents were poor, it was hard to hold your head high.
But, we were misguided if we let our parents’ social status cause us to feel either superior or inferior. Unfortunately, it is hard to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings in those formative years. And some of us still have that problem today. In order to establish our sense of self worth as independent of our status, it’s important to keep things in perspective. You’re not defined by your parents, your possessions, or your social standing. Your value comes from who you are as an individual.
Some teenagers are popular and others are not, and it’s not always easy to see the reason. It has a great deal to do with status and beauty, but there’s certainly something more. It has also to do with the very fickle, and sometimes meaningless standards that adolescents use to judge each other. It has to do with our desire to please others. It has to do with isolated failures, like our getting embarrassed before a crowd once, and from then on being ridiculed for it. One of my patients, Ramesh, described a difficult period in his early years. Although very good at football, he failed to make the team because of a prolonged illness. This, coupled with rather average looks, made him the odd person among his friends, who began to ignore him.
When we are that age, we are looking for someone to tell us that we are OK. Our sense of self esteem is just being formed and the experience of that football season made Ramesh feel that perhaps he was not OK. He didn’t receive the affirmation (of acceptance and worth) he was seeking and his self confidence suffered. Things like these should not happen to children, but they do and the impact is enormous. Looking back at the many forces that shaped our self image, it’s not surprising that a majority of us have entered adulthood unsure of ourselves. But the self doubt doesn’t need to be permanent as Ramesh’s case illustrates. To counter the negative effects of the popularity test, we need to look back as Ramesh did. When we analyze the early standards by which we were judged and then learn to judge ourselves, we can make corrections in our faulty thinking. We’ll recognize that our early failures may have been misleading.
Some of us grew up with the idea that we have value for only what we do, not who we are. Without question, there are many of us who define ourselves with what we do. We try to position ourselves with others by the kind of work we do, how much our children are achieving, and how well we’ve done financially. In other words, we are what we produce. This philosophy is a dangerous trap, which can result in addiction to work and even greed.
We probably began confusing our personal value with our production very early in life. We learnt from authority figures that it was not enough to merely be someone, but we had to a great deal to be accepted. For example, I have a client who is a stunning success in his professional life, but something of a failure in his personal life. He tells about growing up in a home, where work was the be all and end all of life. His parents, especially mother, laid an enormous amount of importance to work. This man found that his worth was always tied to production. So, he naturally worked very very hard because it was the only way he could elicit praise from his parents. But eventually, it all backfired. After he was married, he assumed that his wife would value him for the same reasons for which his mother had liked him. So, he continued to lead the life of a hurried "Workaholic". He took it for granted that his wife would know that he was doing all this to please her, and that she would love him back for working so hard, but that was a fatal assumption, because she really preferred him home watching television, or simply sitting on the couch with her. He eventually got divorced. It was a hard lesson, but finally this man began to value himself as a person rather than as a worker.
In her book, cardiologist Ray Rosemen mentions ten signs indicating whether a person is a workaholic or a "Type A Person," as she put it: (Place a tick in the box, on the right, if you feel you fall in any of these categories)
If you have workaholic tendencies, your relationships may suffer because you always put projects above people. Typical workaholics have few friends beyond their spouses. People who are addicted to work, are really not as effective as they like to think. Many studies show that such people do more but accomplish less. They give the appearance of doing a lot of work, but in the long run, they often don’t accomplish as much as the slow but steady worker.
High achievers are committed to results whereas the workaholic is simply committed to activity. Driven workers usually seem to flatten out on their careers. Dr. Charles Garfield says that one can almost predict the professional trajectory of the driven person. They rise quickly on the basis of their initial effort, and then they level off when all their time is spent managing the details of their careers instead of delegating these details to people they trust. Workaholics can never meet their own standards. No matter how much they accomplish, it’s never enough. These people are caught in a tragic bind. They can never feel a value when they are relaxing, and they can never do enough work to supply their need for confidence.
Here are 7 guidelines for curing workaholic tendencies:
The driven, obsessive worker needs to shift the basic criteria for self value, away from doing and having towards being. When that foundation is established for our worth, we begin to display a balance between work, play and love. There is a simple mindset that can help you avoid the traps of the production test. You need to realize that you have worth simply by existing. This might sound like an invitation to laziness, but when you feel valuable and loved by virtue of who you are, rather than what you do, the added self-confidence makes you want to accomplish even more.
The above discussion should help you reevaluate your self-worth in a new light. Try to reflect on the areas in which you were criticised, and try to clear your mind of these hang ups. It is important to make your mind free of all these negative thoughts from the past. To help you accomplish this I have described a few exercises later in this unit.
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