LIVING WITH JOY - Chapter 6
VI. Self-Respect,
Self Esteem, and Self-Worth
What is required to feel good about the self is not the same from person to person. What you require for self-esteem is not necessarily what another person requires. It is important to discover what makes you feel worthy, confident and happy about who you are.
Self-respect at the highest levels comes from honoring your soul. This means speaking and acting from a level of integrity and honesty that reflects your higher self. It means standing by what you believe in (you don't, however, have to convince others to believe in it), and acting in a way that reflects your values. Many of you criticize others for not living up to a value system you consider right, but on closer examination you may not be living up to it yourself. You have seen the person who is always telling everyone how they should act but he himself does anything he pleases. Self-respect means acting out your values and what you say you believe in.
Many of you have one set of values you say you believe in, but you act from another set of values. This leads to a lot of internal conflict. For instance, you may believe in monogamy deep inside, and yet the person you are with is asking for an open relationship. You decide to go along because you want to hold on to this partner. You believe in one set of values, but you are living by another, and there will be a lot of conflict and potential pain around this issue.
How can you know if the values you "think" you want to live by are yours? You often cannot know until you try. You might think that a good person gets up early in the morning, yet you always sleep late. Many of you have values you think you should live by but don't. The best thing to do is to try out these values— get up early in the morning for awhile. Often, what you think are your values turn out to be "shoulds" given to you by others, and when you actually live them you find they don't work for you. Ask yourself what you value. What do you think good people do? Are you following these values? It is difficult to feel good about yourself if you are living in a way that goes against your underlying values. It is important to examine your values and either live by them or change them.
Self-respect means coming from
your power, not your weakness.
When you complain that someone or something is making you sad or angry, ask yourself, "Why am I choosing to experience that feeling or to react in that way?" Blaming others will always take away your power. If you can discover why you are choosing to feel hurt by their actions you will learn much about yourself. Some of you are afraid that if you stand up for yourself, you will lose someone's love. Some people are quite good at convincing you that you are in the wrong when you do stand up for your beliefs. Thank them silently for providing you with the opportunity to become strong, for often strength is developed in the face of opposition. Self-respect means standing by your deepest truth and knowing your innermost feelings. It means making yourself and not another the authority of your feelings.
Some of you live or associate with people who belittle you and make you wrong. You can end up focusing so much on their feelings that you lose track of your own. A woman was married to a man who constantly made her wrong and criticized many of her actions. She became so focused on his feelings that she never asked herself for all the years they were together how she felt about the way he treated her. She was always trying hard to please him, trying to anticipate his moods and whims so she would not be made wrong. Yet, everything she tried ended with him being angry at her. She began to feel she had failed or was in some way a bad person. She spent so many hours analyzing his feelings that she lost touch with her own. Many of you try to please people and as you try to please them, focus more on how they feel than how you feel.
Self-worth means paying attention to how you feel. You do not need reasons why you choose to do something. You do not need to prove anything to another person about your worth. Validate your feelings; do not analyze and question them. Do not go over and over them asking, "Do I really have a reason to feel hurt?" Let your feelings be real for you and honor them. Many of you make other people your authorities. When they tell you you are bad, you believe them. When they tell you everything is all your fault, you believe them. I am not suggesting that you ignore what other people say, either, but instead honor what you feel about the issue. It is one thing to be open to constructive criticism and another to constantly try to do what others want you to do when you don't want it for yourself. Creating self-esteem and self-worth involves honoring your own feelings and path and direction. It means honoring yourself with your words, actions and behavior.
Self-esteem means believing in yourself, knowing that you did the best you knew how, even though two days later you could see a better way. It involves making yourself right rather than wrong and allowing yourself to feel good about who you are. Some of you try very hard all the time, pushing yourselves, rushing around and feeling that whatever you do, it is not enough. Trying and working hard to get things done is not necessarily the road to joy. Respect yourself by following your inner flow. Rest, play, think, and take time to get silent. Doing those things that nurture you are ways to increase your self-esteem.
How you treat yourself is
how others will treat you.
Do not wait for other people to respect you or treat you in a more positive way. They will not until you treat yourself with respect. You do not have to be around
people who do not honor you, respect you or treat you well. If you do find yourself around those kinds of people, act with dignity and remember that they are not respecting you because they do not respect themselves. You can telepathically send out a message about how you want to be treated. Others only take advantage of you and take you for granted if you let them.
You do not need to get angry or demand your rights, for that only creates a power struggle between you and others. Keep your heart open. They most likely cannot recognize their own greater selves and so it is not possible for them to honor yours. You do not want your self-esteem to be based upon how others treat you or view you. No matter how good you feel about yourself, there will always be those who do not treat you in a respectful way, for they have not learned how to treat themselves in a loving way. The relationships you have with others can only be as good as the relationships they have with themselves. If they do not know how to love themselves, that sets a limit as to how much they can love you. No matter how hard you try, how many nice things you do, they cannot give you the love you seek. Forgiveness is the key to feeling good about how others are treating you. Then, release any anger you may be feeling, simply let it go and focus on other things.
Some of you feel your parents are responsible for your lack of self-esteem. You cannot blame your parents, as it was your reaction to them that created any lack of confidence. Two children may come from equally abusive or negative parents and one will grow up feeling good about himself and the other will not. You make the decision to feel bad. Rather than feeling sorry for yourself about your childhood or feeling like a victim of your upbringing, realize you chose to put yourself in that situation to learn something that would assist your soul's growth. You may say, "I have a pattern of men abusing me because of my abusive father." You came to earth to learn something about love and if you don't learn it from your father, you will choose men with similar patterns to teach you what you need to learn. For instance, you may have experienced your father as abusive, and then found that you attracted similar types of men until one day you decided you would no longer be treated that way. One of the lessons you came to learn in this lifetime may be to love and honor yourself, so you created situations in which you were challenged to do so. As soon as you decided to do so, the pattern ended.
Every situation in your life
is a learning experience
created by your soul
to teach you how to gain
more love and power.
Children respond in different ways to the same upbringing, as you can see when you observe how different brothers and sisters may be even though they have the same parents. Some children respond to the negative energy around them by becoming loving and gentle. Some are so sensitive that they cannot stand feeling the negative energy and shut down the part of them that feels. Some respond by feeling that they must be hard and put on an outer image of invulnerability. Self-esteem comes from being willing to acknowledge who you are and love yourself just as you are right now. It is difficult to change until you accept who you are. When you honor yourself and your feelings, others cannot affect you.
You are a worthy individual, no matter what your past, no what matter your thoughts, no matter who believes in you. You are life itself, growing and expanding and reaching upward. All people are valuable and beautiful and unique. Every experience you have had was meant to teach you more about creating love in your life.
There is a fine line between respecting the self and being selfish. Some of you feel you have every right to get angry at others because they hurt you. Honor the feelings of others, but do so in such a way that you also honor your own feelings. To accomplish this you will want to come from a high level of speaking and thinking. Speaking of your anger, yelling and screaming, only puts you in a power struggle with another person and closes both your hearts. When someone does something you do not like, open your heart before you speak. If you choose to make a statement, offer it as something you feel rather than something someone did. You can say, "I feel hurt," rather than "you hurt me." A powerful way to state it is, "I am choosing to feel hurt." Every feeling you have you have chosen.
Self-worth is knowing
that you are choosing your feelings
at every moment.
When you communicate t honors their deeper being, you always feel better about yourself. You may have noticed that when you got something off your chest by expressing anger or hurt, you often felt worse afterwards. At the very least, there was a sense of incompletion. You cannot leave a situation until you have done so with love. Those situations you leave in anger will be there for you to resolve in the future. It may not be with the same person, but you will create another person and a similar situation to allow you to resolve it with peace and love.
It is important to respect others. If you do not feel respected by others, you may have put yourself in that situation to learn how to have compassion and gentleness in your treatment of other people. Being sensitive to other people's feelings is different from trying to please them. Be willing to see their needs and desires. Do you speak curtly to others without paying attention to their feelings? Do you speak with annoyance or irritation? ’Watch the energy you put out to other people, for whatever you put out you will get back. Become more aware of your effect on other people, for the more you respect them, the more you will receive respect. Honor their worth, their time and their values and you will find them honoring yours.
Some people honor other people all the time and feel they do not get back what they give. In this case, often they do not feel they deserve to be treated well and allow people to take them for granted. It is easy to respect yourself when those around are respecting you. The challenge is to respect yourself when those around you do not. First forgive them and then let go of any need for them to validate you. When you need to be validated by others to feel good about yourself, you take away your power.
It feels good when other people believe in you, trust you, and support you. Yet, if you want to be powerful, it is important not to need other people to do so as a condition of believing in yourself. The need for constant validation makes other people the authority and not your own deep self. Your truth may not be the same as other people's truth. The only wrong is when you do not honor your truth and when you accept what is true for another even though it is not true for you. Some people believe in reincarnation and some people do not. It may be that their belief in reincarnation makes life more joyful and easier to live. It may be that the belief that there are no other lifetimes makes this one more important and real. Whatever belief you hold, it is important that you honor it and be open to new ways of seeing things if they create more joy in your life. Do not automatically accept something unless it has the ring of truth for you. Honor your truth, believe in and stand up for yourself, but have compassion for other people.
Remember that you count, you are important, and that you have a unique and special contribution to make to the world. Know that you are a special being. Your dreams, fantasies and goals are as important as anyone else's.
SELF-RESPECT, SELF-ESTEEM, SELF-WORTH
PLAYSHEET
Think of a pattern you seem to be experiencing with people over and over. Write it here:
Get quiet, relax and go within. Ask your deeper, wiser self to show you what you are learning from this. How is it teaching you to respect and love yourself more?
What soul qualities are you developing from this situation? For instance, you may be developing the quality of compassion, honesty, speaking your deepest truth, peace, self-love, humility, harmlessness, taking responsibility for your actions, etc.