Empowering
You to Love
Yourself
Revised Edition
By Suzanne E. Harrill
© September 7, 2008 Suzanne E. Harrill
Empowering You to Love Yourself
A Simple Self-Esteem Guide
Revised Edition
ISBN 978-1883648-32-9
Published by
Innerworks Publishing
167 Glengarry Pl.
Castle Rock CO 80108
www.InnerworksPublishing.com
This is a revised edition of,
Empowering You to Love Yourself
Original Copyright © 1995
ISBN: 1-883648-01-7
All rights reserved. No part of Empowering You to Love Yourself may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review.
For teaching purposes, you may copy the Self-Esteem Awareness Inventory, Eight Keys for Building Self-Esteem, Twelve Steps of AA Rewritten for Building Self-Esteem, and quotes of 50 words or less. Please give credit.
This book is dedicated to:
My husband, Rodney
And my three daughters,
Lindy, Janna, and Sarah
Table of Contents
Introduction and Acorn Analogy
PART I - Getting Started
Learn To Love Yourself
The Self-Esteem Awareness Inventory
PART II - What Is Self-Esteem?
Myths About Self-Esteem
Characteristics of High Self-Esteem
Reasons Why People Have Low Self-Esteem
Recognizing People With Low Self-Esteem
What Keeps Low Self-Esteem Alive?
PART III - The Eight Keys to Loving Yourself
1. Accept Yourself as You Are Right Now
2. Look Inside Yourself, Not Outside
3. Stop Value-Judging Yourself
4. Separate YOU From Your Behavior
5. Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
6. Know You Are Doing Your Best
7. Know You Are Worthy of Unconditional Love
8. Take Responsibility for Your Life
PART IV - Guiding Beliefs
Things You May Have Been Taught That Are False
Things You May Not Have Been Taught That Are True
Updating Limiting Guiding Beliefs
PART V - Ways to Make Positive Changes
Change Negative Self-Talk
Creative Visualization
Create a Support System
Update Guiding Beliefs
Journal Writing
Practice Self-Care
Grow Spiritually
Affirmations
PART VI - Tying It All Together
Summary of Ways to Build Self-Esteem
Symptoms of High Self-Esteem
To Summarize
Introduction
It is almost universal to have issues with appreciating our innate goodness and worth. This book will expand your awareness by presenting many simple, yet deep, concepts and techniques to help you change how you feel about yourself and thus improve your experiences of life. It starts with your mind. When you consciously change your thinking, it impacts how you feel and consequently affects your choice of actions.
Much of our self-esteem is unconscious to us. Without knowing it, we repeat patterns and beliefs that were common in our childhood, both from society and from our family of origin. Many of the beliefs passed on to us are not the total truth. In fact, many are false, yet still influence us today, and many perpetuate low self-esteem. People with low self-esteem get random results in life because there is little responsibility taken for what happens to them. They feel that these circumstances are the effect of other people's moods and behaviors and outside circumstances. They keep repeating unwise habits, patterns, beliefs, and attitudes without much thought. Like a cork bobbing up and down in the ocean, people who suffer from low self-esteem are bounced around in life. Living this way seems normal because friends and family live the same way. There is limited power of aware choice, so it is common to feel powerless, like a victim of life's circumstances.
Each of us alone must take charge of our individual lives and determine the limiting patterns from which we want to free ourselves. It is empowering to know yourself and grow in awareness. Where do you start? It is helpful to observe yourself and think about what you see. Self-inquiry adds to the process where you question how you are living your life, your personality, and your relationships. You have to answer your own questions. Doing inner work becomes a way of life.
As you build your self-esteem and grow in confidence, you also grow in your inner powers, such as feeling inner strength and having positive attitudes. You are more able to use the power of free-will-choice. With choice, you see new directions to take, which increases your sense of well-being, satisfaction with your relationships, and actualizing your potential.
Even when we are seasoned travelers in self-discovery and have done much inner work, unconscious patterns can still catch us off guard. We still grow in awareness and it changes us. Expanded awareness more easily allows us to see our issues and break out of old patterns; we grow in our ability to make wiser choices to ensure better results in our futures.
Each of you can only begin to heal from where you are today. Step by step you can gather new information by reading, taking classes, and by journaling. As you write about your problems and issues, receive counseling, and talk to people more aware than yourself, you receive support. You also gain insights into your situations. Once you have more insight, support, and understanding of your issues, you begin taking risks to change your habits, beliefs, and patterns.
Let me give an illustration from my life. One of my secrets is that I can easily lose my power and become passive if someone is negative, critical, or verbally rude towards me. Because I do not come from that intention, I can easily deny that anything negative is going on. Yet, I experience many bodily sensations, such as a knot in my stomach, a racing heartbeat, or a feeling that I want to hide and be by myself. I now know to pay attention to my body awareness because it clues me in that I need to spend time alone with myself to figure out what is going on below the surface of my awareness. Later I may make a choice to confront someone or it may simply be enough to know that I am working on changing my passive reactions and will do it differently the next time it arises.
I remember one situation and how I dealt with it. A woman who sold my books said she would not pay for one of the orders because she had no record of it being delivered. My first response was to feel powerless and that I must be wrong. I could not verbalize anything to support myself, so I quickly got off the phone. I watched myself repeat a common pattern, backing off when a dominant person insists they are right and wants their own way at the expense of mine. I do not like power struggles, so early in life I learned to retreat. Being the adult that I am now, I knew I did nothing wrong and that I must stand up for myself in order to get paid. What did I do next? I spent time by myself to identify what I was feeling: taken advantage of and angry. I figured out a couple of limiting guiding beliefs that I needed to update. One such belief was, It is safer to withdraw when another is angry because I am unable to find my voice. I changed it to, I speak my truth and stand up for myself even if I feel fearful and the other person gets angry. I then went through my last year's records to find the UPS slip and track down when it was delivered and who had signed for it. In this case, it was fairly easy to back myself with data. It was difficult for me, however, to call the woman back and tell her the details which proved I was right. I felt short of breath and anxious as I dialed the number, just as I did as a child. I continued saying supportive, positive things to this inner child of the past, "You can confront this woman, you haven't done anything wrong. Take some deep, slow breaths and feel your inner strength." I ended up making the call, confronting politely, and getting paid.
Later, I continued my inner work. I set aside time to think about myself and this situation, journaling, saying affirmations to myself, and updating more limited thinking patterns. This empowered me and got me back on track, into my adult self. Clues to why I had this fearful, passive response were gained by looking at how my parents communicated, handled conflict, disciplined me, and how they dealt with the strong emotion of anger. I am not about blaming my parents; after all they had parents too. I also am a parent and had good intentions; even if some of the time I passed on negative stuff to my children. It serves no one to blame another for our problems; in fact that attitude actually keeps us stuck being a victim and maintaining our low self-esteem. The responsibility and power for healing and changing patterns, beliefs, and behaviors resides within each of us today.
When new to self-discovery and self-inquiry, it is not easy for us to look at our family of origin as contributing to some of our problems. Why? It is usually many little things from childhood that affect us as an adult. It is common to discount the effect of the past by saying things to ourselves like, “What right do I have to complain when other people have it so much worse?
In observing myself, I noticed that many times I resonated with the pain of someone who had experienced blatant traumas. Over time I learned that when we over-identify with another's pain, we have hidden pain within ourselves. I learned to feel and address the emotional pain within myself, in spite of the fact that my childhood looked so much better. Obviously, there was more pain in my family system than met the eye, and it affected me very deeply.
Yes, I acknowledge that there were many positives that my parents gave me; such as, love, tremendous will power, and appreciation for my traits and abilities. They gave me autonomy to make my own choices in life, encouragement to be creative, and permission to think and question life. At first I felt disloyal to my parents when looking at the things that caused pain; yet, over time I grew to simply see the whole picture, the positive and the negative without judgment.
May this book inspire you to change your thinking, improve how you feel, and learn new ways of living. The focus is on self-healing and taking personal responsibility for your own life. Taking positive risks will help you begin clearing away unwanted patterns and behaviors and you will grow to uncover your true nature, discovering your spiritual essence. Who you really are is so much bigger than the family and issues into which you were born. You have the power to get back to basics, being your true Self.
Let us begin with the Acorn Analogy on the following page which summarizes the teachings of this book.
Fortunate Blessings,
Suzanne
The Harrill Acorn Analogy
Deep inside you know how to be you,
just as an acorn knows how to be a mighty oak.
The acorn does the best it can do
at each stage of growth along its life path.
Even if the early start was less than perfect
the eager oak accelerates its desire to grow
every time that it receives nurturing from nature:
sunlight, rainwater, and soil nutrients.
YOU are like the acorn, doing your best under
the conditions in which you are growing.
Nurture yourself with awareness, acceptance,
love and self-respect, then watch
you grow into your true Self!
How I Wrote The Acorn Analogy
It is an interesting story how The Acorn Analogy appeared. Many years ago, when my youngest daughter was four years old, I would meditate for twenty minutes before picking her up from preschool. I was asked to present two teacher in-service trainings the following month. During one of my meditations I saw myself handing out real acorns to the teachers and explaining, in a more expanded way, the ideas summarized in the analogy. I went to the first training with my acorns, which my daughter enthusiastically helped me find, but did not hand them out. Why? Because I listened to my negative self-talk which stopped me. Guess what happened? The next week, right before the second presentation, I had the same exact vision of giving out the acorns. I looked up and said, “I get it.” For years I handed out acorns whenever I gave a talk. Acorns are a great symbol, reminding us that inside each of us is our full of potential, true Self waiting for self-nurturing to grow and actualize. Pick up the next acorn you see.
Part I: Getting Started
Learn to Love Yourself
It was a rude awakening to find that many of our problems stemmed from low self-esteem and not loving ourselves. I first came in contact with many of the ideas presented here when I taught a college course in 1979 in Thibodaux, LA. Part of the curriculum was building the self-esteem of the students. We used materials written by the late L.S. Barksdale. While teaching my students, I found I was learning as much, or more than they were about self-esteem.
One thing that really impacted me was that I am the only one responsible for loving me. No longer could I be the victim of other people’s moods and low self-esteem, expecting unconditional love outside of myself. To this day, I must remember to put into practice all that I will teach you. I still have to override some of my first responses to people who are having a bad day and are rude or angry. I may feel hurt initially, but, I “catch” myself more quickly now and change my internal responses. This was not the case when I was new to the journey of self-discovery.
The process of healing low self-esteem begins with a decision to love yourself. If you are reading this book you have already made this decision. We will begin working with your mind. Even though your thoughts, feelings, and behavior are all interrelated, it is helpful to start by looking at your thoughts and beliefs. Again, you can begin improving how you feel about yourself by changing your thoughts and beliefs.
It is time to take the Self-Esteem Awareness Inventory on the next page. Simply answering the questions will begin to raise your awareness about self-esteem.
The Harrill Self-Esteem Awareness Inventory
Rate yourself on each with a scale of 0 to 4 based upon your current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors: 0 = I never think, feel, or behave this way. 1 = I do less than half the time. 2 = I do 50% of the time. 3 = I do more than half the time. 4 = I always think, feel, or behave this way.
Score Self-Esteem Statements
_____1. I like and accept myself as I am right now, today, even as I grow and evolve.
_____2. I am worthy simply for who I am, not what I do. I do not have to earn my worthiness.
_____3. I get my needs met before meeting the wants of others. I balance my needs with those of my partner and family.
_____4. I easily release negative feelings from other’s judgments and focus instead on living my life with integrity and to the best of my abilities.
_____5. I always tell myself the truth about what I am feeling.
_____6. I am incomparable and stop comparing myself with other people.
_____7. I feel of equal value to other people, regardless of my performance, looks, IQ, achievements, or possessions.
_____8. I am my own authority. I make decisions with the intention of furthering my own and others’ best interests.
_____9. I learn and grow from my mistakes rather than deny them or use them to confirm my unworthiness.
____10. I stop my critical self-talk and replace it with a nurturing, kind, encouraging voice.
____11. I love, respect, and honor myself.
____12. I am not responsible for anyone else’s actions, needs, choices, thoughts, moods, or feelings, only for my own.
____13. I do not dominate others or allow others to dominate me.
____14. I have good physical and emotional boundaries with others.
____15. I feel my own feelings and think my own thoughts, even when those around me think or feel differently.
____16. I stop using “shoulds” and “oughts,” which are value judgments that put me or another down. (It is irrelevant what I should have done or should do. It is more important to know what I am willing to do and not do.)
____17. I am responsible for changing what I do not like in my life. I f ace my problems, fears, and insecurities and take appropriate steps to heal and grow.
____18. I am a person of my word and follow through on the things I commit to do.
____19. I forgive myself and others for making mistakes and being unaware.
____20. I believe my life counts. I find meaning and have purpose in my life.
____21. I deserve love and happiness even when others blame or criticize me, for I cannot control what others think about me.
____22. I take care of myself on all levels: physical, social, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
____23. I spend quality time with myself on a regular basis.
____24. I release unreal expectations for myself and others.
____25. I choose to love and respect all human beings regardless of their beliefs and actions, whether or not I have a personal relationship with them.
How to Use This Information
The Self-Esteem Awareness Inventory is not a test or a precise measure of self-esteem. Instead, it identifies beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that contribute to your self-esteem. The 25 statements can be used to update beliefs that have limited your self-esteem. Use the statements as affirmations, positive statements, to change and improve how you talk to yourself. Repeat the statements to yourself often, emphasizing your low scoring answers. Over time improving your self-talk will help change old, outdated beliefs that keep you stuck in low self-esteem.
It is unwise to compare your answers with anyone else’s, that is, unless sharing opens healthy discussion between the two of you.
Save your answers and date it. Answer the questions again every few months to notice your progress and the areas you still need to emphasize.
Another idea is to write your low-scoring statements on 3x5 cards. Read them out loud to yourself daily. Tape them in places you will see often: refrigerator, desk drawer, bathroom mirror, your purse or wallet. You will see growth and improvement as you work on your lower scoring areas. Be mindful of not judging the speed of your progress. Grow and expand your awareness at your own rate.
If many of your answers are low, you will notice quick improvement by working with these 25 statements and applying the information in this book. All of the parts of you are interdependent so a gain in one area strengthens your entire self.
A side benefit in working with the inventory is to notice where other people have self-esteem issues. You can grow in compassion as you learn to identify when another is struggling with self-esteem issues. This makes it a little easier to forgive negative attitudes and behaviors in others as well.
Part II: What Is Self-Esteem?
What Is Self-Esteem?
Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. You consciously and unconsciously send thoughts, images, feelings, and opinions about yourself to yourself. These can be accurate and helpful or they can be false and damaging.
“Self-Esteem, on a subtle and often unconscious level, is an emotion, how warm and loving you actually feel toward yourself, based on your individual sense of personal worth and importance. It is how you feel about yourself.”
L.S. Barksdale, Building Self-Esteem
What is HIGH Self-Esteem?
High self-esteem is a feeling of total acceptance and love for yourself as you are. It is respecting and valuing yourself as a worthwhile human being. It is honestly seeing your good and not-so-good points. And, it is taking responsibility for your life, making choices to learn and grow, and taking care of and nurturing yourself so you can become all you are capable of being.
High self-esteem is a quiet, comfortable place of enjoying and accepting who you are. It is knowing your innate worth comes from the Source of your being.
How Do You Build Self-Esteem?
Besides working to improve your beliefs about yourself, as we discussed with the Self-Esteem Awareness Inventory, there are more things you can do. To build self-esteem it is important to listen to what you say to yourself. Flip the negative thoughts and self-talk to positive ones. You benefit from consciously thinking, feeling, and saying positive, honest things to yourself in your mind with your self-talk. More ideas unfold as you read the book.
Myths About Self-Esteem
Myth #1: Self-esteem is earned. (False)
Truth: Self-esteem is your birthright and cannot be earned. It is a gift from the Source of your being to be accepted by you with no strings attached. You are a valuable, worthwhile human being, a part of the greater whole of life.
Myth #2: Good looks, good jobs, and high a I.Q. insure a person has high self-esteem. (False)
Truth: Society praises certain traits which often are not all that healthy, like youth and strength and winning. What happens when a beautiful woman ages if she bases her worth on her physical characteristics only? Is she any less worthy? NO! What happens when an athlete can no longer make big money because of physical injuries? Is he/she any less worthy? NO! High self-esteem is an inner experience. People who base their sense of worth on their physical traits or on high achievement hoping to gain attention or appreciation from others suffer when it ends. Emotional well-being depends more on what is going on within a person and how well one knows oneself. It depends on how aware one is of his or her needs and how to get them met in healthy ways. Emotional wellness includes how to connect to other people and much more. Do not assume good looks, jobs, or I.Q. automatically give one healthy self-esteem. By the way there is nothing wrong with being all you can be, attractive and high achieving, however, the motivation needs to be from the inside not from the outside in.
Myth #3: Having high self-esteem is being narcissistic. (False)
Truth: To heal low self-esteem it is important to know yourself. It is necessary to focus on yourself for a while to get to know who you are, to heal and make peace with the past. You must make wise choices and open to your creative potential. Narcissism is a diagnostic term used by mental health professionals to classify a person for treatment purposes. It is an infantile state where a person is stuck emotionally in the past and unable to think beyond self or relate well with others. With high self-esteem a person is responsive to others, as well as self.
Myth #4: When you love yourself too much, you will take advantage of and hurt others. (False)
Truth: When loving and respecting yourself, you automatically love and respect others and want to act responsibly. You grow into seeing everyone as an extension of yourself and work towards knowing when it is appropriate to put your needs before another’s and vice versa. It is important to be responsible to yourself and at the same time responsive to others.
Myth #5: It is bad to love and think highly of yourself. You will become obnoxious and brag about yourself. (False)
Truth: It is good to love and think highly of yourself. It allows you to grow and heal, take risks, and express your potential. A person who loves him/herself is better able to understand and forgive those who brag about themselves and push themselves and their ideas on others (both symptoms of low self-esteem). High self-esteem is a quiet comfortable place of being with self.
Myth #6: If you love yourself too much, you will not be able to love others. (False)
Truth: You can only love others to the degree that you love yourself. You cannot give what you do not have.
Myth #7: High self-esteem comes from being appreciated and admired by others. (False)
Truth: High self-esteem comes from an internal validation of self, not from an external validation of self. Any time you depend on others to gain good feelings about yourself, those feelings evaporate when the others are not around, are having their own problems, or have low self-esteem. Do not turn your power to experience love over to others. Rather, turn inward and receive love from the Spiritual Source of your being. It is good to enjoy love and appreciation when others do give it, just do not get dependent on their appreciation or recognition.
Characteristics of High Self-Esteem
To empower yourself in building your self-esteem, it is useful to know where you are headed. The following is a partial list of characteristics of high self-esteem:
Remembering to honor yourself from within (positive self-talk,
feeling inner worth) and detaching from the negative comments,
judgments, and opinions of others.
Spending time with people who accept, encourage, and support
you, rather than people who are superficial, critical, or whom
you have little in common.
Learning from mistakes and being able to say, “I made a mistake, I’m sorry.”
Taking responsibility for your own perceptions and reactions and not projecting onto others.
Ability to listen to your inner self and act on this guidance.
Growing in self-respect, self-confidence, and self-acceptance and not expecting it to come from others.
Honestly assessing your strengths and weakness without excessive pride or shame.
Recognizing areas of yourself needing improvement and areas needing acceptance.
Growing in awareness and taking positive risks.
Balancing activities with quiet, quality, alone time.
Accepting consequences of your choices, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.