Accepting
Yourself Unconditionally
Did you know that 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.”
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.
