How Are You Treated By Others?
By: Brian Tracy
Self-acceptance begins in infancy, with the influence of your
parents and siblings and other important people.
Your own level of self-acceptance is determined largely by how
well you feel you are accepted by the important people in your life.
Your attitude toward yourself is determined largely by the
attitudes that you think other people have toward you. When you believe
that other people think highly of you, your level of self-acceptance
and self-esteem goes straight up.
The best way to build a healthy personality involves understanding
yourself and your feelings.
Let The Light Shine In
This is achieved through the simple exercise of
self-disclosure. For you to truly understand yourself, or to stop being troubled by
things that may have happened in your past, you must be able to
disclose yourself to at least one person. You have to be able to get
those things off your chest. You must rid yourself of those thoughts
and feelings by revealing them to someone who won’t make you feel
guilty or ashamed for what has happened.
Understand What Makes You Tick
The second part of personality development follows from
self-disclosure, and it’s called self-awareness. Only when you
can disclose what you’re truly thinking and feeling to someone else
can you become aware of those thoughts and emotions. If the other
person simply listens to you without commenting or criticizing,
you have the opportunity to become more aware of the person you are
and why you do the things you do. You begin to develop
perspective, or what the Buddhists call “detachment.”
Develop unshakable self-confidence and become
unstoppable in everything that you do. Brian Tracy
explains how to become fearless in your work and
personal life in the Science of Self-Confidence.
Be Honest With Yourself
Now we come to the good part. After you’ve gone through
self-disclosure to self-awareness, you arrive at
self-acceptance. You accept yourself for the person you are, with good points and
bad points, with strengths and weaknesses, and with the normal
frailties of a human being. When you develop the ability to stand back
and look at yourself honestly, and to candidly admit to others that
you may not be perfect but you’re all you’ve got, you start to
enjoy a heightened sense of self-acceptance.
Do An Inventory Of Your Accomplishments
A valuable exercise for developing higher levels of
self-acceptance involves doing an inventory of yourself. In doing this
inventory, your job is to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative.
Think of your unique talents and abilities. Think of your core
skills, the things that you do exceptionally well that account for your
success in your profession and in your personal life right now.
Think About Your Future
Think about your future possibilities and the fact that your
potential is virtually unlimited. You can do what you want to do and go
where you want to go. You can be the person you want to be. You can
set large and small goals and make plans and move step-by-step,
progressively toward their realization. There are no obstacles
to what you can accomplish except the obstacles that you create in your
mind
Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these
ideas into action:
First, sit down with your spouse, or a good friend, and tell
him or her about something that is troubling you and is still causing you
unhappiness.
Second, develop perspective on your problem by standing back
from it and imagining that it was happening to someone else. What
advice would you give to that person?
Third, think continually about the good experiences and
accomplishments you have enjoyed in the past. Remind yourself
regularly that you are a pretty good person and you’ve done a
lot of good things in your life.
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