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.