Now that you know how to change your thoughts from negative to positive, the next thing that has to happen is that you have to become aware of it. We are habituated to think negatively. The trick is to pay attention to what you’re thinking. And whenever you catch yourself beating yourself up emotionally, telling yourself you can’t do this, that the situation is hard, that you are bound to fail, replace those negative thoughts with positive ones.

Another thing you want to be aware of is you behavioral and environmental cues. If you are in an environment where you continually find yourself thinking negatively, it might be in your best interest to reduce your exposure to that environment. If you find yourself behaving in a certain manner, where afterwards you end up beating yourself up emotionally, telling yourself you’re no good, then I would like to suggest to you that it’s be healthy for you to stop doing those behaviors.

We’ve discussed affirmations, we’ve discussed awareness, now let’s add visualizations to the process. I find visualization to be an insufficient description of what I’m talking about. When you say “visualization, what most people will think is just seeing themselves doing some behavior. That works, but there are things you can add to it that make it work better, and I’d like to suggest that you use all of your senses. Not only sight, but sound and taste and touch-an example is sports psychology. Every professional sports team, most major college athletic programs have somebody on their coaching staff whose job it is to get people mentally prepared to play the game. If you’re on a baseball team, and you play third base, what a sports psychologist would do, is they would get you into a place where you could visualize being successful at playing third base. But they wouldn’t just say “see yourself make the play”, they would suggest to you that you hear the sound of the bat as it hits the ball. Feel the ball as it hits your glove. Hear the air as you throw the ball across the diamond to the first base. Hear the sound of the ball hitting the first-baseman’s glove. Feel the feeling of being successful as you throw that person out at first base. Incorporate all of your senses-what does the ground feel like beneath your feet?

Another thing that can help you feel better about yourself is if you start to achieve some of the things you’ve set out for yourself. Goal-achievement is a wonderful way to begin to feel better about yourself. On our website, Optimismisaskill.com, there is a document that you can download that will help you begin to create a plan to achieve some of your goals. Very simple process. First identify: what is the goal you are trying to achieve? Second is for you to identify the steps necessary in order for you to achieve that goal. Third, identify the resources available for you to help you achieve that goal. Fourth, you want to identify a start date: when are you going to start- and I would suggest to you- give yourself some credit, and write the date that you first download that document- because you’ve thought about achieving the goal, you’ve started the process.

Another thing that’s very important is for you to identify when you want to achieve the goal by-have a “date accomplished”. If you don?t have a date in mind that you’d like to have the goal accomplished by, then you don’t have a goal, you have a dream. And lastly, identify any possible barriers that might prevent you from achieving your goal, so that you’re not blind-sided by them.

Now, your goals may be very large; you may not be able to accomplish them all in a short amount of time, but having a list of things you can do to help you achieve that larger goal, and then doing one or two of them, and checking them off; what that does is that it allows you to put your head on your pillow at the end of the night feeling like you’ve actually achieved something, feeling like you’ve gotten closer to achieving that goal. I like to tell my students: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

Another thing that fosters healthy self-esteem is keeping your word. All too often, we say things that we don’t mean, and then when we don’t come through, what we do is we beat ourselves up, which feeds back into the negative self-talk cycle we discussed earlier. For some of you, these are going to be new behaviors, and I’ve found it very useful to use support when attempting new behaviors. What I’d like to suggest to you is that you find some people who have your best interests at heart, and share with them what you’re trying to go through. So, let’s say you’re trying to improve your negative self-talk. Tell your friends! Tell your family. Tell the people who love you that this is what you’re doing. And help them be on the lookout for this, and whenever they catch you downgrading or degrading yourself, have them call you on it. “Hey, you just said you couldn’t do this! Is that really the energy you want to put into this effort?”

There’s a saying that practice makes perfect. We’re humans; “perfect” is an unattainable goal. But practice does make progress. This new behavior of loving yourself, treating yourself well, being kind to yourself- it’s going to take practice. It may feel phony at the beginning because of all the practice you’ve had at NOT loving yourself. But practice makes progress, and eventually, over time, the new behavior of loving yourself and being kind to yourself will become your normal, everyday default mode.

Let me give you an example of what I?m talking about regarding practice. Think of something that you are really good at right now. Playing music, cooking, playing sports-ask yourself this question. Are you better now, than when you first started? My guess is, you’ll probably say yes. Now ask yourself another question. Why? Why? Probably because you practiced. You spent time visualizing yourself being good at it, you spent time thinking about being good at it. What you have been doing all of this time is planting those positive seeds that create the positive reality.

Now that you have the raw material to create positive change in your life, we have to discuss how to avoid self-sabotage. Many times we have tried to improve our health and tried to improve our situations and stations in life, but something seems to go wrong.

In our next podcast, we will discuss how to overcome the tendency we have to self-sabotage.

host: jim mclelland - music: anna huff - transcription: colleen mclelland - engineering: dave huff

Buddhists believe that to be born human is to be born into an exalted state. And they believe that because humans have a higher capacity for reason than any other animal. If being born human is an exalted state, and it’s a miracle to be born healthy, how is it that people have become so dissatisfied? I’m not sure where it started, this low self esteem, how it came to pass that so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. It can go back thousands of years. Let’s just say it can go back to the beginning of organized religion. Back to a time when priests were the only ones who were allowed to read. In essense what the church was saying was “God’s very complicated and you couldn’t possibly understand Him. But tell you what, you give us some of your land, maybe give us some of your livestock, and we’ll tell you everything that you need to know about God.”

Again, the underlying message is that you are not intelligent enough to know what God has in store for you.

The underlying truth is that we are all gods, we are all THE god. It serves those in power for us to believe that we are NOT as powerful as we really are. But in reality, we are creating our very existence, every moment of every day.

Today you can see the suppression of our self esteem the way governments treat us. In essence, what they’re saying is that we’re not smart enough to understand our brothers and sisters around the world.

“Those people over there, they speak a funny language, they eat funny foods, they dress strange, they treat their women differently than we treat our women. You couldn’t understand THOSE people! But tell you what, you give us a portion of your yearly income, and we’ll tell you everything you need to know about them.”

Even more insidious, the messages we get through the media every day. Every day we are bombarded with messages that we’re not good enough, we’re not beautiful enough, we’re not smart enough. We are bombarded with messages that if you don’t have this product you’ll never have any friends. All day long, we are told you are not good enough, you’re not smart enough.

Here’s a challenge for you: watch some television. And over the next twenty-four hours, see if you can find a commercial that tells you that you’re fine just the way you are. It won’t happen.

So how does this continual bombardment of negativity regarding ourselves affect us? It creates a massive gulf between us and any other human beings we come into contact with. If we’re walking through our day, believing and knowing that we are not good enough, that we’re not special- anybody who comes up to us and suggests otherwise is automatically a suspect. They must want something from us, or they’re not intelligent enough to know what’s really going on, and therefore, they’re a mark to be played. Now imagine the stress that comes with living with somebody twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week that you do NOT like. Now imagine that person is you. That kind of stress makes people physically ill. If you look at the word “disease”, it’s in the spelling of the word: dis-ease. Dis-ease, not at ease.

You can’t love other people more than you can love yourself. If you’re walking around full of self-loathing, what happens is that you treat other people poorly, you treat other people with disrespect, you treat other people with disdain, sometimes in an attempt to make yourself feel better about yourself. As if somehow treating other people poorly boosts you up, as if cutting off other peoples’ heads makes you taller.

So you’re walking around now, not liking yourself, not trusting anybody else, and with that kind of hostility that you’re projecting out into the world, what you are also doing is that you are calling that back into yourself. So you’re walking around with this wall up, not letting anybody get too close, walking around thinking that the world is horrible, projecting that energy out there, and now you’re starting to attract other people who feel that way. Which only validates that you’re no good, the world is no good. And another thing that it does is that anybody who doesn’t feel this way, anybody who is trying to feel healthy and happy- they don’t want to spend too much time around you! So what happens is that now you are left with only people who are of a like mind. All the peaceful people are on the other side of the street from you. All the people who are hostile, they’re on your side of the street, and if you don’t look for the other people, it’s easy to convince yourself that everybody is hostile, and everybody’s out to get you.

And when you think that way, and when you behave that way, that’s the kind of world you create.

Racism is a global application to self-loathing. Low self esteem is the root of all evil. It allows you to treat other people poorly. It allows you to think of them as “less than”. It allows you to try and fill that hole in your soul with demeaning behavior towards whoever you choose to put at the bottom of your particular ladder. You get to treat them almost as sub-human.

I heard a Gandhi quote: “Become the change you want to see in the world”. That’s how healing your self esteem affects the world. You feel better about yourself, you start to treat other people better, they start to treat other people better, and before you know it like ripples in a pond, you have peace!

I spent eight years working in the addiction and recovery field, and one common denominator seems to run throughout all of the students and clients that I’ve dealt with. There’s a hole in our soul that we try to fill with money and power and sex and drugs, and it simply doesn’t work. The only thing that does fill that hole is loving ourself, being accepting of ourself, treating ourselves well. Treating ourselves as if we were the best parent in the world, and, at the same time, we are also the child of the best parent in the world.

How, then, to begin to heal ourselves? Let’s start with something we’re already doing all the time, and something that we’re very good at. Let’s start with affirmations.

We create our reality every day. We think things into existence. The average person has about seventy thousand thoughts in a day. And seventy-five percent of those thoughts are negative. So thoughts creating reality, thoughts being energy-what the average person is doing is creating negativity, creating dysfunction, creating disease in their life seventy-five percent of the time.

Examples such as “I’m not good enough”, “this is hard”, “I can’t do this”- these are the type situations that set up failure in our lives. There are the type thoughts that set up sabotage. Other examples are: “there’s not enough”; “the world is a hard place to live”.

Thoughts equal energy. Everything man made existed first as a thought. Take a look around you. Everything man-made existed first as a thought. The car that you drive- somebody sat down and wrote on a piece of paper where the stick shift was going to go, where the cup holder was going to go. And eventually, through thought and action, there you have your stick shift and your cup holder. Manifestation is simply taking thoughts and putting action to them and creating something where nothing existed but thought before.

In order to heal our self esteem, it’s important that we begin to change our self-talk. You can try and change your behavior, but without changing your self-talk first, the first time something goes awry, you will fall back to the old self-talk “Well, see, I knew that wasn’t going to work” . This, again, sets up self-sabotage. This defeats any efforts that you might have put into changing your behavior. Self-talk cycle is a three-step process. The first step is our self-talk, the things that we say to ourselves, whether they’re good or whether they’re bad. Our self-talk leads to our self-image, who we believe ourselves to be. Our self-image then leads to our behavior. An example might be: “I can’t get a job. Nobody’s going to hire me.” If you say that to yourself enough, you will come to believe that you are unemployable. What happens then is, you don’t find work. Or maybe somebody kicks your butt and says “Hey, get up and go find some work!” If you do not believe that you’re employable, what happens is you’ll go look for work, and the first time something goes a little bit wrong, first time things don’t break the way you think they should go, your self-talk begins to tell you “See? You’re unemployable.” You don’t get the job. Then that behavior feeds your self-talk, and it becomes a vicious cycle that some people never break out of. To change the negative self-talk is a very simple process. It’s called “Affirmations”, and there are three “P’s” associated with affirmations-very simple formula. The three “P’s”? are:

• Personal
• Present tense
• Positive

The first P, Personal, you have to affirm for yourself. You can’t affirm for anybody else.

The second P is Present tense, as if you are doing it now. Remember, thoughts equal energy, and when you are thinking about something, you are actually doing it, just like the person who thought about the cup holder before he actually created the cup holder. Thoughts are the first step in the process. So, merely thinking about it, you have begun the process.

The third P is Positive. That’s the fun one, because that’s where you get to think about what you want to have happen. It is infinitely healthier for you to think about what you want to have happen, rather than what you don’t want to have happen. An example of the three P’s of Affirmations: if I were to give a speech in front of a room full of people, I might say to myself: “I am good at speaking in public.” “I” is the Personal, “am” is the Present tense, and “good at speaking in public” is the Positive.

Do this enough, and what it does is it overwrites the negative programming that many of us suffer from. I pick up affirmations from music, from lyrics; I pick up affirmations from movies, I pick up affirmations from things that I hear people say. What I just described was intellectual affirmation. Thinking yourself into being able to do. And that’s beneficial, but that’s like driving in a lower gear in your car. A way to move into overdrive is to add emotional affirmations into your intellectual affirmations. Emotional affirmation is very simply recalling a feeling that you have had in the past where you felt good and whole and complete and healthy. Marrying that energy with your intellectual affirmations - when you bring your intellectual and emotional energies together - all I can say is I really hope what you’ve been focusing your energies on is something that you want, because it’s coming. It’s coming quick.

End of Part 1

host: jim mclelland - music: anna huff - transcription: colleen mclelland - engineering: dave huff