Create An Identity That Sets Your Success on Cruise Control!
Self Image. Most people do not know how important this really is and how it can be changed and improved. There is no owners manual for our brains. We are not presented with instructions and guidelines when we are born.
We have our parents experiences of life, and what we have learned from them, to guide us on our life path. And, we have our own life experiences to teach us what works and what doesn’t.
Some children do not even have two parents available to them, because of fragmentation of the family in today’s society. Some of us grow up with one or no parents to guide us. Our peer group becomes an important and significant influence on how we progress and we hope that we make good choices in this area.
When there is no plan or rule book, usually we learn from life, the school of hard knocks as they say. But who determines what we learn from any one experience, how do we know that we are taking the right lesson from the situation.
Who is there to make sure that we are making the right decisions? And are we checking with them?
.
We see every day that any two people can learn and take away different meanings from the same occurance. So there are meanings we accept as truth that really have no basis in fact, just that we believe it to be that way. Many of us carry around burdens that exert tremendous pressure and weight upon our daily actions.
The first 20 years of life can be quite disconcerting for many, they were for me. The lessons we take during this period will many times stick with us the rest of our lives. And, many of these are negative in nature.
What can we do, if anything, to correct these early mistaken judgements about ourselves?
Overcome them with positive thought? Crowd them out by focusing on what’s good about our life? Evaluate them to see if they are based in fact, or just our imagination in overdrive? There are solutions to many of these situations. And . . .
Some of these problems can only be treated by professionals. That is not what I am professing to be here, this is for educational purposes only.
If you have depression or some type of clinical problem, I recommend that you see your health provider and make sure that there is no physical reason or deep mental reason for your pain, at which time they only should be involved.
In many cases we can build our self image from our future actions and intentions, and not be saddled with an unchangeable past history of personal assumptions. More on Self Image here.
For those people that can help themselves, then there is an exercise that helped me many years ago when I needed to have something positive in myself to believe in.
I made a list of attributes that I aspired to have in my identity, my self image. The person I wanted to be and grow into. I read it every day, sometimes several times a day, until I began to feel comfortable with who I was turning into.
I still have a long way to go and there are many traits I still have yet to install into my life, but I work at it, and I make progress daily, trying to live up to my self image description, and I feel much better about myself than I once did.
What I love about this though is that I am a much happier person now, my self image, my self esteem has grown by leaps and bounds, and behaving in this new way has made my journey towards successful living more fun. I happily achieve instead of achieve to be happy.
I feel more powerful and positive whenever I attempt some new thing that I have never done before. I look differently at each opportunity I am presented with, and attack them with gusto, with confidence, instead of indecision and doubt.
So here’s some homework. (Oooooh, I always wanted to say that. LOL!)
Make a list of personality, character traits, habits you want to create, and start living them. Internalize these new traits and practice them daily. Here are some examples of affirmations and positive self talk.
Act as if you already are that person, and soon you will be doing less acting; you will realize that you are that person!
From Tony Robbins:
See it as it is.
Then,
See it how you want it to be.
Then,
Make it the way you now see it!
‘See’ yourself as you would like to be! And then go be that way!