Beyond the Power of Your Subconscious Mind (12 page)

When it came my turn to ski the run, I pushed off from the top, made a few awkward turns, and heard my inner voice screaming, “I’m going to kill myself!” At another level, however, I was aware that our whole week was about turning off that voice of fear and doubt (what Tim calls Self One) and trusting that my inner self (Self Two) knows
exactly
what to do, if we can keep Self One out of the way.

So, I gently told Self One to “shut up!!” and I surrendered to the
trust
that Self Two would know perfectly what to do. I skied the rest of that run as well as I have ever skied an expert run, and with my boots completely unbuckled, which is the complete antithesis of any conventional teachings or instruction.

Self One is always clamoring for attention and is the little voice that loves to judge everything. By becoming aware of how distractive and destructive Self One can be, when he now comes knocking on my door, I gently (not too ) tell him to “buzz off” and re-center myself in the present.

Whatever you clearly visualize and imprint into your subconscious mind, you will actualize into your present reality.

As I am finishing these thoughts, I am watching the 2010 Winter Olympics at Whistler, British Columbia. Visa keeps showing an advertisement where alpine skier medalist, Julia Mancuso drew a picture of herself when she was nine years old. The picture was of Julia winning the Gold Medal in women’s skiing. From the time she was nine years old, she looked at that picture almost every day. In the 2006 Winter Olympics at the age of 21, Julia Mancuso won the Gold Medal.

Need we say more?!

The bottom line is we are what we visualize, think, and believe.

10

Building Personal Power

by Lee Pulos, Ph.D., ABPP

In the Foreword to this book, Lee Pulos, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, writes,

Of the thousands of patients I have seen over the years for a variety of issues, I would estimate that at least 95 percent of them had an issue with self-esteem, a sense of worthiness or unworthiness, which can influence the inner sense of deservability for love, success, health, or prosperity.

Because of the importance of self esteem and its relationship to this overall book, I asked Lee if he would please write the chapter on this subject.

Lee writes:

Self-esteem is the immune system of the mind and of the spirit. Self-esteem is our experience of feeling competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and feeling happy and worthy and deserving of happiness. People who have the greatest sense of self-esteem are those who feel they are doing their life’s work. Genuine self-esteem is still feeling good about ourselves when things are
not
going right.

Self respect has to do with our value as a person; an inner certainty, a sense of happiness, a feeling of success about life and feeling worthy enough to attract, allow, and receive love into our life. People with a lesser sense of self-estimate, or esteem, find it easier to give love than to receive it.

If you have a healthy immune system, does that mean you will never get sick? Of course not. But you will be less susceptible to illness, and you will experience a faster recovery. Having a high level of self-esteem doesn’t mean you will never be anxious, miserable, depressed, or overwhelmed on occasion. The advantages of having a strong sense of self and worthiness is that you have good psychological shock absorbers. If you are attempting to achieve a goal and hit a wall, you will persevere. You may not always succeed, but you will succeed more often than you fail. A top manager in one of the executive seminars I was conducting said to the group, “I have been knocked down five times—but I got up six.” The average CEO has had 3.2 major failures before succeeding.

Persons with a low sense of self-esteem will go through the motions of persevering but will fail more often than they succeed. Our self-esteem generates a certain level of expectancy and expectancies become self-fulfilling prophecies.

While our sense of self-esteem shows up in different areas of our life, it shows up most prominently and consistently in the area of relationships and love. If a person doesn’t feel they are lovable, they will find it hard to believe someone else loves them and will usually find ways to sabotage the relationship in some fashion. Have you ever tried to tell or convey love to a person who doesn’t feel lovable? There isn’t much you can do to convince them.

Our self-esteem, of course, will vary in different areas of our lives and our effectiveness level, performance, or success will correspond to our self-esteem in that particular area. For example, you may have high self-esteem as a manager and communicator of ideas, and your performance or effectiveness level will correspond to your own self-estimate. You may have low self-esteem with mechanical things or replacing parts and putting gadgets together. You and your friends may lovingly call you a “klutz” in that area. You may have average self-esteem as a parent or spouse, and your competence in that area will correspond accordingly.

If you take all the areas of your life and make a bar graph of high and low effectiveness levels, you will probably end up with a zigzag profile. Psychologists would average that out and come up with what is called a “g” factor, or general level of self-esteem.

Utilizing certain exercises to change limiting beliefs in specific areas of your life and, of course, re-educating and re-programming your subconscious with affirmations, visualizations and/or self-hypnosis will also work in improving your effectiveness level in these different areas.

Thus, self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves. Our self-concept is broader than self-esteem and is the umbrella, so to speak, which subsumes our beliefs, ideals, and our body image, which is an important part of our self concept. It includes our liabilities, assets, limitations, and capabilities; self-esteem is one of its major components.

The importance of self-esteem was first drawn to national attention over forty years ago following the publication of
Psycho-Cybernetics*
by cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Maxwell Maltz. In his book he described how he would volunteer one morning a week to do cosmetic surgery on prison inmates in the local penitentiary. After two years or so the warden called Dr. Maltz into his office and pointed out that the men whose nose jobs and facial disfigurements that were improved through plastic surgery were not committing more crimes and returning to jail following their release from prison. Dr. Maltz realized by changing their body image, which, as I noted earlier, is a very important part of self-image, the convicts felt better about themselves. He went on to describe self-esteem as “the most important discovery of the 20th century.” However, this is not necessarily true of everyone.

In later writings, Dr. Maltz described two female patients who had radical cosmetic surgery on their faces. In assessing themselves after the bandages were removed and the swelling disappeared, both women looked and looked at themselves and very sadly and disapprovingly said, “I don’t look any different. Not much has changed. I still feel the same about myself.” That was when Dr. Maltz realized that self-image, for most people, was internal and not the external trappings of what we call beauty.

Along the same lines I remember an almost painfully candid interview during which Elizabeth Taylor described herself as “short, pudgy, awful thighs. I hate my nose, my eyes are too far apart, and I don’t like the shape of my face. I wish I could change my whole appearance at times.” That self-description from one of the most beautiful women in the world. No wonder she had such a series of self-destructive behaviors: eating binges, drug and alcohol abuse, a number of accidents and multiple surgeries, eight marriages and so on. Self-esteem is an inside job.

What I would like to segue into now is to describe some of the qualities of low self-esteem. As we become aware of certain qualities, with awareness comes the potential for change, the opportunity to begin scraping off some of the psychological barnacles that we all have, to varying degrees, on our cruise ship of life.

The first quality is that of
victimhood.
Victims have little or no confidence in themselves. They feel sorry for themselves, and feel they have been wronged in life. They also feel unappreciated, misunderstood and treated unfairly. Victims rarely want to be responsible for anything. They will try to get you to do things for them. Victims frequently try to manipulate people through guilt to try to get people to be their rescuers. But they will never be able to do enough for them. They always feel let down so they can blame other people or circumstances for their failings.

Victims give their power to the past: “If I had different parents, if my dad had more money . . .,” blame, blame, blame, which is a cheap hit of power, the only power they have since they give it away.

A brief sidebar here. Some people may feel that low self-esteem is found mostly in people on the lower rungs of the ladder of life. Two years ago I had a new patient walk into my office dressed all in black leather, chains, and an angry, mean expression on her face. As I took her history she told me she was a Dominatrix. I gulped. She went on to say that men pay her good money to abuse and insult them and do demeaning things in her apartment. She assured me there was nothing of a sexual nature in her work. I wondered out loud, what kind of men would subject themselves to such humiliating behavior. She said that one of her clients was a supreme court judge, two were successful business men, and one was a lawyer. That shocked me. She went on to say that these men suffered from the Impostor Syndrome. They had gotten to the top of their profession or vocation but didn’t feel they belonged there, and to use her words, “They have low self-esteem and they come to me so I can cut them down to size to where they feel they belong.” It was quite an eye-opener for me and another day in my office where my patient became my teacher.

Let us move on to the second quality of low self-esteem, which is
Martyrhood
. Our culture, the Judeo-Christian ethic that so many of us have been conditioned to and raised by, emphasizes the virtues of learning through pain. “No pain, no gain.” Our culture has also revered struggle and suffering, and every major religious teacher is exemplified by their virtue of struggle, hardship, and sacrifice. This has been conditioned into our collective, or consensus, consciousness so that some people don’t feel right about achieving or succeeding without first going through struggle, hurt, mini-failures. and so on. But let us look more clearly at some of the qualities of martyrhood so we can identify them and if they apply to us, then do what we can to eliminate them.

The first quality of martyrhood is feeling
unappreciated
, i.e., “Nobody knows the trouble I know, nobody works as hard as me, you don’t appreciate the difficulties and obstacles I have to overcome,” and so on.

Martyrs almost always feel they are being mistreated or misjudged. They have a sense of hopelessness and almost always feel misunderstood.

Another quality of low personal power or self-esteem is around the feeling of
undeservability,
which can hold you back and stagnate you in the past. Undeservability also puts future successes out of reach and more or less slows your momentum into the future. It freezes you in the past or takes you back to where you were rather than where you are going.

It is important that you silently introspect and look at this very crucial issue of deservability since it has been demonstrated time and time again to hold people back and lower their sense of worth, initiative and drive. Time and time again, while taking history in my office, I hear the words, “I don’t deserve. . .,
”
“I am not worthy of . . .” whatever the issue—and these are often well educated persons with good jobs and families.

The next quality of low self worth and esteem is
shame
. No emotion wounds as deeply as shame. It is at the root of many human conflicts. People who have been treated with ridicule, contempt, disdain, betrayal, abuse or abandonment, or received excessive punishment as children experience an almost continuous low-grade sense of humiliation and unworthiness. Also, children and adults who have never been appreciated or shown empathy and understanding end up almost apologizing for their existence. The depth of the shame should determine whether this issue is best dealt with professional help.

Because of strong feelings of self-doubt and self-mistrust, people who are metaphorically on “shaky stilts” frequently apologize for themselves or for their opinions or even for their existence, and will bend over backward to please in order to avoid any kind of rejection. Along the same line, people with a low estimate of themselves are fearful of change. They have a very narrow range in their comfort zone and will rarely make changes and step outside the box to challenge or confront a person whose ideas they may not agree with.

Because of their inner insecurities, like attracts like. People with low esteem levels usually end up with each other. You will rarely see a person with high self-esteem be in a partnership with or marry someone who doesn’t value themselves. Relationships and marriages sometimes break up because one of the partners decides to be “more than.” He or she will take courses, read books, and attend seminars. As they grow and develop more emotional muscle and inner strength, they sadly discover that they have little in common with their partner, who chooses to stay inside their narrow but safe comfort zone. Often, they move on.

As mentioned earlier, people with low self-esteem seek a sense of self-worth through trying to be popular and by being people-pleasers. They will acquire lots of toys and material acquisitions and will try to improve their worth with cosmetic surgery or sexual exploits and conquests. These do make us feel better, temporarily, and changing a part of one’s body image can contribute to a higher sense of worth. But again, self-esteem is best changed from the inside out, not the other way around.