seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Japan
seen from Japan
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from Philippines
seen from Russia
seen from Australia
It could take as much as six to eight months for your new rule to take over completely. As long as the new rule is useful to you and you can see it taking you in useful and interesting directions, don’t give up. You may find it helpful to review your progress regularly and to set yourself targets. What have you achieved in the last week, or month? What do you want to aim at in the next week, or month?
Melanie Fennell, “Overcoming Low Self-Esteem”
Make a list of as many good things about yourself as you can think of.
You may at once be able to list several. Or you may be hard put to think of even one or two. Give yourself plenty of time, and don’t worry if your task is hard at first. You are trying something new, a fresh perspective on yourself, a shift of emphasis. Take your list as far as you can, and when you feel you have come up with as many items as possible for the time being, stop. Put the list somewhere easily accessible – it may even be helpful to carry it with you. Over the next few days, even if you are not actually working on it, keep it at the back of your mind and add to it as things occur to you. Be pleased even if you can only find one or two things to begin with. You have made a good start in freeing up your thinking and taken the first crucial step towards acknowledging and accepting good things about yourself.
Ask yourself: What are your Rules for Living? In what ways are they unreasonable and unhelpful? What alternatives would be more reasonable and helpful? How can you test-drive them?
Melanie Fennell, “Overcoming Low Self-Esteem” (Rules for the Living)
It’s helpful to ask yourself a question that Christine Padesky, a cognitive therapist, suggests: ‘If you were not ____ (your old Bottom Line), what would you like to be?’ For example, ‘If I were not incompetent, I’d like to be competent.’
Melanie Fennell, “Overcoming Low Self-Esteem” (Bottom Line)
Find a new helpful rule which as far as possible...
...allows you to enjoy the payoffs of the old, unhelpful one, but eliminates its disadvantages. The new rule will probably be more flexible and realistic than the old one, more able to take account of variations in circumstances, and to operate in terms of “some of the people, some of the time”. It will inhabit the middle ground rather than the extremes. So it will be phrased in terms of ‘I want…’, ‘I enjoy…’, ‘I prefer…’, ‘It’s OK to…’, rather than ‘I must…’, ‘I should…’, ‘I ought to…’, or ‘It would be terrible if…’. You may find that the new rule starts with the same ‘if…’, but ends with a different ‘than…’. For example, replace ‘If someone criticizes me, it means I have failed’ with ‘If someone criticizes me, I may or may not deserve it. If I have done something worthy of criticism, that’s not failure – it’s all part of being human, and there’s nothing wrong with that.’
[M]ove towards the point where you can begin to say, “Uh oh, there’s another one of those [negative thoughts]”, and to see them as something you do, rather than a true reflection of yourself.
Melanie Fennell, “Overcoming Low Self-Esteem”
[Q]uestioning your thoughts may not be enough in itself to convince you that things are not as bad as they seem. You need to act differently, too, to learn how things really are through direct experience. Experimenting with new ways of doing things (...) allows you to build up a body of experience that contradicts your original predictions and supports new perspectives.
Melanie Fennell, “Overcoming Low Self-Esteem”
