Changing Your Self Perception and Feeling Good about Yourself
How do you feel about yourself today? Are you thinking that if you could just lose weight you would feel happy, or life would be perfect? Are you wishing you had enough money to go buy that hot new car that will make you the envy of your mates? For many of us, our body image or our possessions help define what we think of ourselves. We live in the future rather than in the present.
When this attitude of “life will get better when something happens” affects the way we live our life, we need to challenge those thoughts. As we learn to love and appreciate the person we are now, we will find our focus is not on what we can be but on who we are now. This is the perspective we want to have and we need to have. If we don’t love ourselves now, we potentially can keep looking to what the future might do to help us to improve ourselves. We need to embrace the person we are now and see that the resources to be better or to do better don’t lie in external things, but are already inside us.
Unless we want to lose weight for ourselves our weight loss attempts probably won’t be successful. We should approach a promotion or new job with the self-confidence we are capable of doing the job, rather than the significance we feel it gives to us in the minds of others.
We can hinder our own development and achievements if we try to live in the future. By embracing the opportunities we have today and the people we are today, we are more likely to achieve our goals and ambitions in the future. Our self worth is not dependent on what we do, but unless we learn to enjoy the person we are and appreciate that person, we are more likely to base our self worth and self esteem on our achievements.
The danger of this approach is that if we fail in our expectations, it undermines the way we think about ourselves. Our self-esteem remains weak and we usually feel less incentive to keep trying new things. If we base our self worth on accepting ourselves as we are today, every achievement can be celebrated and we can deal with challenges as growth experiences.
July 30th 2022
