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The Keys to
Self-Acceptance
By: Brian
Tracy
Psychologists
today generally agree that your level of self-esteem, or how much you
like yourself and consider yourself to be a valuable and worthwhile
person, lies at the core of your personality. Your level of self-esteem
determines:
Your level of energy and the quality of your personality how much you
like other people and, in turn, how much they like you your willingness
to try new things and to venture boldly where perhaps you have never
gone before the quality of your relationships with others-your family,
your friends and your coworkers and how successful you are in your
business, especially if you are in sales.
But before you begin enjoying the wonderful effects of high self-esteem
in your life, you have to learn to accept yourself unconditionally. And
even before you achieve self-acceptance, there are other steps you have
to take.
Self-acceptance begins in infancy, with the influence of your parents
and siblings and other important people. As a child, you have an
overwhelming need for love and approval and acceptance from the
important people in your life. A developing child requires this
emotional support the way roses need rain. Healthy personality growth
is absolutely dependent upon it. A person grows up straight and strong
and happy to the degree to which he receives an abundance of nurturing
in his formative years, prior to the age of five.
Someone once said that everything we do in life is either to get love
or to compensate for the lack of love. Almost all of our problems, as
both children and adults, can be traced back to “love
withheld.” There is nothing more destructive to the evolving
and emerging personality than being unloved or unaccepted for any
reason by someone whom we consider important.
As adults, we always strive to achieve what we felt we were deprived of
in childhood. If you grew up feeling, for any reason, that you were not
totally accepted by your parents, you will be internally motivated
throughout your life to compensate for that lack of acceptance by
seeking it in your relationships with other people. To the growing
child, perception is reality; reality is not what the parents feel
toward the child, but what the child feels that the parents feel. The
child’s evolving personality is shaped largely by his
perception of how he is seen and thought about by his parents, not by
the actual fact of the matter. If your parents were unable to express a
high degree of unconditional acceptance to you, you can grow up feeling
unacceptable-even inferior and inadequate.
It’s quite common for a youngster to grow up in a household
where he or she feels a lack of acceptance by one or both parents,
especially the father. When the young person becomes an adult, the
psychological phenomenon of “transference” takes
place. The individual goes into the workplace and transfers the need
for acceptance from the parents to the boss. The boss then becomes the
focal point of the individual’s thoughts and feelings. What
the boss says, how the boss looks, his comments and everything that he
does that implies a feeling or an opinion about the individual is
recorded and either raises or lowers the individual’s level
of self-acceptance.
Your own level of self-acceptance is determined largely by how well you
feel you are accepted by the important people in your life. Just as the
Law of Correspondence says that your outer life tends to be a
reflection of your inner 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.
However, if you believe, rightly or wrongly, that other people think
poorly of you, your level of self-acceptance will plummet.
The best way to begin building a healthy personality involves
understanding yourself and your motivation. Toward this end,
I’d like to introduce what is called the “Johari
window” and explain its effect on your personality.
The Johari window provides a view into your psyche. According to this
theory, your personality can be divided into four quadrants, like a
square divided into four smaller squares.
The first part of this window is the box in the upper left-hand corner.
It represents the part of your personality that both you and others can
see. This is the open part of your personality. The lower left-hand box
of this window into your psyche represents the part of your personality
that you can see but that others cannot see. It is a part of your inner
life.
The upper right-hand box of this window represents the parts of your
personality that others can see but of which you are unaware. You have
somehow blocked these parts from your consciousness.
Finally, the lower right-hand box represents that part of your
personality that is hidden from both you and other people.
It’s the deeper, subconscious part of your personality that
represents urges, instincts, fears, doubts and emotions that are stored
away below a conscious level, but that can exert an inordinate impact
on the way you behave, often causing you to feel and react in certain
ways that sometimes even you don’t understand.
One of your goals is to develop a fully rounded personality, to become
a fully functioning human being with a sense of inner peace and outer
happiness.
A measure of your maturity is often manifested in the way you treat
different people. When you are at your very best and your self-esteem
is at its highest, you’ll find that you are genuinely
positive and friendly toward everyone, from the taxi driver to the
corporation president. When your personality is completely together,
you treat everyone with equal respect.
The way to move toward a higher level of personality integration and,
therefore, a higher level of peace and personal effectiveness, is to
expand the area of your personality that is clear to both you and
others. And you do this 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.
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.” You can stand back
from yourself and your past and look at it honestly. You can
“disidentify” from the intense emotions involved
and view what has happened to you with greater calmness and clarity.
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.
One of the keys to happiness is to “live in truth”
with yourself and others. And one of the ways to live in truth is to
stop trying to be perfect and to see yourself honestly, as you really
are. Attempts to achieve needless perfectionism, and an intense, often
unconscious desire to impress people with how good you are, are real
time wasters and energy killers.
There is a joke that cuts to the heart of this issue: “When
you are in your 20's, you are very concerned about what people think
about you. When you are in your 30's, you don’t really care
that much about what people think about you. And when you get into your
40's, you discover the real truth: Nobody was even thinking about you
at
all.” 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. The real difference between optimistic people and pessimistic
people is that optimists are always looking for the good in every
situation, the opportunity in every problem, while pessimists are
always looking for the down side and the problem in every opportunity.
When you honestly analyze yourself during this inventory, you will be
amazed at how extraordinary you really are and how incredible your
potential is for accomplishing the things that you really desire.
Begin your inventory by recalling your accomplishments. Think about all
the things that you have achieved over the course of your lifetime.
Make a list of them. Think of the subjects you passed and the grades
you received. Think of the awards and prizes you won. Think of the
people you have helped and the kind things that you have done for
others. Think of the adversities that you have triumphed over. Think of
the goals that you have set and achieved. Look at the material parts of
your life; think about all the things that you have managed to acquire
as the result of hard work and disciplined effort.
Now, to increase your level of self-acceptance, 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 of the results that you have
achieved by applying yourself to the challenges of your world. Think of
your earning ability and your ability to accomplish your goals. Think
of your ability to make a contribution to your company and to your
family and to the world around you. Think about all the things that you
have to offer to your world.
Finally, to boost your level of self-acceptance, 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.
Here’s an important fact to keep in mind when it comes to
self-acceptance. What we work for more than anything else is respect.
The British author E. M. Forster once explained, “I write to
earn the respect of those I respect.” Almost everything that
we do, or refrain from doing, is somehow associated with gaining, or at
least not losing, the respect of the people whom we respect the most.
And only when we feel that we are respected by those we respect do we
accept and like ourselves to a great degree.
One way to raise your level of self-acceptance, then, is to pick a role
model, someone you admire and look up to and want to be like, and then
pattern your life and your work after that person’s. Many
businesspeople have become top executives by selecting a role model who
had already reached the top and then patterning their lives along the
same lines. Everything you do that you feel is consistent with what
someone you admire would do increases your level of self-acceptance.
A second way to assure a higher level of self-acceptance is to develop
good work habits and to work efficiently and effectively toward the
accomplishment of high-value results. The most respected people in any
organization are those who can get the job done. Your level of
self-efficacy, in other words, your belief in your ability to do what
is expected of you, has an incredible effect on how much you accept
yourself as a good and valuable person.
A third way to increase your level of self-acceptance is to be very
aware of your image and the way you appear to people. If you want to be
respected and admired by others, you need to act like a person who is
worthy of respect. And remember, everything counts. Everything you do
or don’t do can either contribute to or take away from your
image and the impression you are making on others. When you know that
you look absolutely excellent on the outside, your level of
self-acceptance shoots up.
A fourth way to raise your level of self-acceptance is to take complete
responsibility for the various parts of your life. Refuse to make
excuses or to blame other people. Never complain; never explain.
Volunteer for assignments and responsibilities, and then carry them out
without comment.
The key to achieving a feeling of mental well-being is having a sense
of control, a sense of self-determination and internal mastery. This
sense of self-control is tied directly to your willingness and ability
to accept full responsibility for every part of your life. When you
criticize others, or you make excuses for things that you did not do
well or complete on time, you actually feel more negative about
yourself, and your sense of self-acceptance declines. When you take
charge of every part of your life, you feel terrific about yourself,
and your level of self-acceptance and self-esteem goes up. A fifth way
you can build up your level of self-acceptance is by interpreting
events in a positive way. Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of
Pennsylvania calls this your “explanatory style.”
He concludes that high-performing men and women have a tendency to talk
to themselves in a positive way and to explain things that are
happening to them and around them in a way that allows them to stay
optimistic.
Look for the silver lining in whatever cloud may be hanging over your
head right now. Look for the lesson or opportunity in each obstacle or
setback. Look for reasons to excuse others and let them off the hook,
rather than becoming angry or upset. Play mental games with yourself to
keep your thoughts on the things you want and off the things that you
fear or that make you unhappy.
A sixth way to raise your level of self-acceptance is to become a
habitual goal setter. Write down clear goals and a plan for what you
want to accomplish and then work your plan every day. Develop of clear
sense of direction for your life. Work on track and on purpose. Know
exactly who you are and where you are going. Each step that you take
toward the accomplishment of a predetermined objective raises your
self-esteem and improves your level of self-acceptance at the same time.
Finally, a seventh way to raise your level of self-acceptance is to
practice the Law of Indirect Effort, or reverse effort, and realize
that everything you do or say to another person rebounds and causes the
same effect on you. Whenever you are warm and friendly and courteous to
another, you improve your own level of self-respect and
self-acceptance. Whenever you do something nice for another person, you
tend to feel better about yourself. Whenever you do or say anything
that causes another person to like himself more, you find yourself
liking yourself more as well.
One of the great riches of life is the self-acceptance that leads to
self-esteem and maximum performance. By being aware of and practicing
these recommendations, you can increase your self-acceptance to the
point where you can confidently move forward toward the realization of
your full potential.
About
Brian Tracy
Brian Tracy is the most listened to audio author on personal and
business success in the world today. His fast-moving talks and seminars
on leadership, sales, managerial effectiveness and business strategy
are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that people can
immediately apply to get better results in every area.
For more information, please go to www.briantracy.com.
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