Mindfulness in Second Life: Mindful Thought: Self-Esteem part 3

Hopefully over the past few days you've gained a deeper understanding of what self esteem is and how our opinions about ourselves are formed.

Today we gonna talk about the #1 factor responsible for building or diminishing our self esteem:
our very own thoughts

You see it is not our external situation that creates our self worth,
it is not the amount of money in our bank account or the number on the scale.
Those things contribute but where it comes down to is, our self esteem is based on what we tell ourselves,
and how we speak to ourselves is directly linked to how we feel.
When our self talk is neutral or positive it isn't generally a problem,
but when our thoughts are self critical, self defeating, automatic and repetitious, they have the power to significantly diminish our self esteem.

We've grown so custom to hear this thoughts we don't challenge them, even though they may not be true.
Out of habit we just keep repeating them over and over.
For example if we lack confidence in the area of dating and romance due to a past projection,
we might repeatedly think of our self as inadequate.
And if so it is unlikely we ask anyone out again.

If we challenge that believe and re-frame it with a more balanced and compassionate one,
where we congratulate our courage for taking that risk and we remind our self there are other fish in the sea and we have plenty to offer the right person,
that kind of healthy self talk will raise our self esteem.

We want to challenge our tendencies to over generalize, to see things in black and white
or focus on the negative while discounting the positive,
so instead of telling ourselves we are foolish for making a mistake,
we might remind our self we are human, it is ok to trip.

This can be hard to do at first so a helpful practice is to consider:
What would you tell a friend who said the same thing?
We tend to be far more kind and compassionate to our friends than we are to ourselves.
So reflect on those self critical or self defeating thoughts
and replace them with a kinder more balanced one.

The more often thoughts go by unchallenged the stronger they become,
so we want to pay attention to our inner critic,
and as we began yesterday start to question the validity of our thoughts.
Once we've done that we can take the next step and re-frame them.
The more we take attention of our self critical believes the more skilled we become in catching and re-framing them,
when that happens we begin to see the person we deserve to see when looking in the mirror,
and we feel a kind affection for ourselves in our heart.

Jim Kwik: How to End Negative Self-Talk