Give yourself permission to recreate your world
George Chingarande | Monday July 14, 2014 16:17
Self Esteem
By definition, self esteem is the valuation that one places upon oneself. It is both a judgment and an attitude. We firstly judge ourselves and then based on that judgment, we develop attitudes towards ourselves. This judgment and attitude is vitally important because you are the most important asset in your life. Everything that you will accomplish will be accomplished through you, or at least with a significant role played by you. If you judge yourself wrongly or develop wrong attitudes towards yourself, you undermine your chances of succeeding. It encompasses feelings of worthiness, pride and accomplishment. Self esteem has a protective function as it protects us from anxiety. The origin of most people’s problems and indeed of their failures is their poor sense of self esteem. This poor sense of self esteem manifests itself when people despise themselves and consider themselves as unworthy of being loved or unworthy of success in general.
Anything and anyone who makes you feel unworthy and unloved is an enemy against your present success and your future’s. The opposite is also true: Anything and anyone who makes you feel worthy and loved empowers your life. This has very important implications. Firstly, it is important that you pay attention to the selection of your friends and the people you keep company with. If your desire is to fly with eagles, then walking with turkeys and swimming with ducks is counterproductive. Secondly, be very wary of people who profess love towards you, but hate themselves. You can never give what you do not have. In principle, the people who don’t love themselves nor have a healthy sense of self respect are hardly in a position to love and respect others. Seeing yourself and others as lovable and valuable is the foundation on which success can be built.
Self esteem is therefore one of the most important seeds that needs to be cultivated. Experiences in a person’s life are a major source of self-esteem development. The positive or negative life experiences one has, creates attitudes toward the self that can be favourable and develop positive feelings of self-worth, or can be unfavourable and develop negative feelings of self-worth. In the early years of a child’s life, parents are the most significant influence on self-esteem and the main source of positive and/or negative experiences a child will have. There is one thing that you must never forget and that you must always strive to achieve- you owe it to the world to give the person next to you at any given time the experience of a lifetime.
You must develop the habit of continuously asking yourself, “how can I give the person I am talking to or the person I am working with a memorable experience?” The more you give people memorable experiences the better your and their self esteem becomes and the greater your chances of succeeding in life become. Imagine what the world would be like if every salesman gave his clients memorable events; if every nurse gave her patients times to remember and if every supervisor gave his colleagues memories of a life time.
The second seed of greatness that we need to nurture is the seed of creativity. Creativity is a phenomenon through which something new and different is born. It can be an idea, a joke, a work of art- anything. When we are born, we obviously have no life experiences; no story to tell, no imaginations and no dialogues. Imagine if you could dry water, an underground sky, a heavy feather or a tall dwarf. These are very uncommon phenomena or some might say totally non- existent. The challenge that you have in this life is to create a tall dwarf or to produce dry water. If you succeed at that, then you will also succeed in the game of life and you pass the creativity test. Creativity, in a sense, involves the juxtaposition of things that normally don’t belong together. Often we are encouraged to think outside the box. This exultation misses the ball altogether. Creative people begin from the premise of there not being a box out there in the first place.
The urge to create is as much a part of human nature as the urge to eat, drink and sleep. We are all guilty of suppressing this urge. Guilty, because when we suppress it, we undermine our greatness. There is abundant greatness in creativity. As we go through life we become conditioned to the input that we get from people we spend time with. We become conditioned to the habits and idiosyncrasies of the significant others in the environment. At work we tend to conform to the established way of doing things and the acceptable patterns of behavior.
Conformity and conditioning stifles creativity. We need to get creative and make a new patterns for our life, where we actively visualise and create our future in advance. How we picture ourselves will determine how our plot unfolds. Visualising living in the future we want, tells our mind that we are there now. It is creativity that gave us the DNA strand and creativity that led the primitive caveman to produce fire; and yes, it is creativity that gave us the light bulb. Today we take all these things for granted because they are everywhere, but once they were not there. This is also true of greatness and the potential for greatness. It is everywhere,
∆10 but it needs someone to unveil it. There is great potential in the things that we take for granted. Creativity may be difficult to define but whatever creativity is, give yourself permission to find it, explore it, imagine it and get lost in it. Above all, give yourself permission to recreate the world.