 This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. I'd like to welcome everyone today to today's class on self-esteem. Over the next 45 minutes or so, we're going to go through some topics that are brought up in McKay and Fanning's self-esteem book, including the nature of self-esteem identifying and disarming the critic, creating an accurate self-assessment, identifying cognitive distortions, developing compassion, shaking the shoulds, handling mistakes, responding to criticism, goal-setting, identifying your core beliefs, and just generally how we can help build self-esteem in children. Over the past few weeks and for the next few weeks, I'm doing a lot of these classes based on books that you can get online from Amazon. And some of them are also in your local bookstores. And why is that? Because what we can go over in an hour is not going to be enough in many cases to give you the tools that you need to actually implement them in group. So what we're going to do is provide a really high-level overview of some of the things that are being talked about. And if it rings true with you and you want to learn more, you can go get the book. If it's a good refresher and you don't need the book, well, then that's awesome. So my goal is to really get those creative juices flowing. A lot of us do self-esteem groups and we've done the same self-esteem groups for 5, 10, 15 years. It's always good to have new material. So I'll also talk about different ways that you can use some of the activities in group, as well as in individual, as well as homework. So the nature of self-esteem is how you feel about yourself in contrast to who you think you should be. One of the activities that I have my groups do to begin self-esteem workshop is to identify all the characteristics of who they want to be, their ideal self. And then I have them make a list of all the characteristics of who they are right now, what characteristics they have. And then we compare and contrast. The next thing we do is we go through the who I should be characteristics and look at of those shoulds, which ones are really important? Let's rank order those puppies and figure out are we putting too much stress on our self or are we thinking we should be something that we're not going to be? I am not going to be 5, 10. I would love to be 5, 10, but I'm 5, 4 and that's the way it's going to be. So I need to let go of that concept that I'm going to be taller. The more rejecting we are of ourselves, the more distressed we experience. We need to have a good relationship with our self before we can have a good relationship with anybody else. When we have a bad relationship with our self, when we're constantly criticizing our self, then where do we get that validation and love and belonging from? Guess what? Other people. So we're constantly looking for external validation. We're looking for other people to tell us we're okay. So self-esteem is really about developing the capacity to be our own best friend. In order to develop healthy relationships, you know, we have to know what's important to us. When we make that list of who I should be, we're identifying a lot of characteristics that are important, at least we think are important at this point in time. And we can use that as a barometer when we're identifying, you know, what kinds of people do I want to surround myself with? We may have very different opinions than a lot of other people. Does that make them bad? No, that means they have different opinions. When we're surrounding ourselves with our close circle of friends, it's probably going to be with people who share similar interests. If you have 15 interests and they share three of them, you know, great. And the other 12, you know, so you're different. But it gives you an idea about what you're looking for instead of just going, you know, hey, you've got a pulse, you've got a heartbeat, you can tell me I'm okay. So we're going to be best buds. That's not how to form a healthy relationship. So the first thing we need to look at is this pathological critic. We all have it or had it. You know, some people have tamed this guy and he doesn't talk much anymore. But most people in the back of their head have this pathological critic that tells us what we should do or what we should have done. And he's really good with hindsight and he looks back and he goes, well, you should have known better. So we need to look whenever we use this word should. It's a buzzword. It's a trigger word. It's one that says stop. Who says we should have? And is it realistic to say that we should have been able to predict it? Should is one of those words that almost always puts additional stress on people. So I like them to really start focusing over the course of a week or a month on how often they use the word should. Now, sometimes you're going to use it like I should do laundry today. But if I don't get to it, it's not a big deal. It's not the end of the world. So there are times that you're going to use this word that are not necessarily devastating or harmful to your self-esteem. You can change the word should to I would like to if you want to go from a strictly CBT perspective and start changing your verbiage. The origin of the critic, when we're little, we are exposed to conditions of worth. We're given praise for things that we do well that other people think we should do well because our parents think we should behave in a certain way. So when we behave in the way that they expect or they want us to behave, we get praise. We get luxuries. We get some freedoms. When we don't behave that way, if you've got somebody, you know, paying attention or lording over you or whatever you want to say, then there's generally a punishment involved. And this doesn't go away just when we move out of mom and dad's house. We have conditions of worth put upon us when we are in school. If you do your paper to these certain conditions, then you'll get an A. We have conditions of worth put upon our work at our job. If you do these particular behaviors, then great. If you just come up and come to work and sit there and you've got a pulse, you may be a wonderful person, but you're going to lose your job. So we need to look at conditions of worth. Yes, we can't have a job without a job description. We have to have rules. We have to have expectations. Part of it comes from identifying, and we'll talk about this a little bit later, whether we're taking the conditions of worth and implying them globally or we're looking at specific characteristics. So why do we listen to the critic? Because we always have. When you were little, you didn't think to challenge mom or dad and go, why should I do that? Or maybe you did, but generally there were probably negative consequences. So we've learned through time often not to challenge the critic as we grow up and as we become more free and we become more independent. A lot of times we don't challenge that. We still hear that parental figure in the back of our head. We still hear your best friend in high school. Whoever those critics are, the hecklers in your gallery, you still hear them. And we want to be appreciated. We want to fit in. We want to be part of something. So a lot of times we listen to the critic instead of going, weighing the options and saying, okay, where I want to go from here. Is this getting me closer to where I want to be or further away? The role of reinforcement really plays in here and the book encourages people to look at what behaviors do you do now are reinforced and what behaviors are punished and what behaviors that you want to develop, how and are those reinforced and is that really what you're looking for? You know, if one of the characteristics that you have in your ideal self is to be a powerful CEO, okay, so what are the rewards for that? And are those rewards important to you? Most people don't take it to that second step when they're setting their goals. They're like, yeah, I want to be a CEO. I want to be powerful. I want to earn a big paycheck. But then when they start looking at, you know, why is this important to me in, in terms of in relation to my other goals, it may not make as much sense. Catching your critic, we need to teach people to listen for that heckler. I mean, think about basically life is you're on stage and you've got a heckler in the gallery paying attention to when that person talks and instead of automatically changing direction, catching that person and going, no, you know, I don't know that I believe what you're saying, or I hear what you're saying, let me think about it. Cause sometimes the critics have a point, you know, sometimes they tell us something that we may not want to hear, but they may have a point and we can take that and do something with it. Other times we hear that critic and we go, you know, this isn't something that's important to me. Maybe, you know, when I was growing up, this was something that my family told me I should do, but now that I've formed my own identity, this isn't something that's as important to me now. Unmasking the critic's purpose, what is your critic trying to do? What is your critic trying to tell you? And figuring out where you want to belong, because your critic is basically saying, if you want to be part of this group, if you want to be accepted, you need to do these things. Now, the paradigm shift is to say, well, what if I form another group who accepts me for who I am? Hope there's a concept. What if I accept myself and I don't need others to tell me I'm okay? Well, that's a new concept too. At that point, we start talking back to the critic and going, I hear what you're saying, and that may be a good choice for you. However, it's not for me. And hopefully, you know, you can do this all in your head. But if you have these negative thoughts coming up, if you have these heckler moments, even being able to say in your own head, not right now, I need to do something else, or I can't deal with this right now, and shut the credit down, then you can go back and reexamine whatever was going on later. Accurate self-assessment is another huge part of self-esteem. A lot of people have never really sat down and looked at their good qualities. They're so busy focusing on how to fix their bad qualities or the qualities they don't want. They haven't focused on their strengths. So let's look at those strengths. What do you bring to the table? Because everybody brings something. Listing your strengths and weaknesses. So let's start listing those. And then let's have a paradigm shift and look at weaknesses in terms of areas that you can improve, things that you can learn about, or areas in which you realize this is not something that's a strength of mine. So I'm going to rely on someone else who has that strength. When I used to write grants, I was the main grant writer. I could take a grant idea and I could see how it would interface with our organization and I could write this beautiful global meta concept laden proposal. But when it came down to actually implementing it, once the grant was already written, I was done with it. You know, all the nitty gritty details. I am not a detail person. And I realized that. So I made sure that the people that were in my team were able to handle or help me handle the details. You know, if I had to handle the details, I needed somebody that I could count on to go, you missed something. And I miss things. It happens. So understanding your strengths and weaknesses and accepting accepted. Wow. Accepting them just as fact. It's what they are. It's not good. It's not bad. It's just easier qualities. And, you know, nobody's perfect. So using that and developing a new self description that's not so laden with criticism. You know, identifying your weaknesses and figuring out how that fits in the big scheme of things. I personally am not at all skilled when it comes to like handyman type things, when it comes to woodworking. So is this important to me? Not really. You know, I know that there are other people that have those skills and have I tried it? Sure. Have I found it to be exceedingly frustrating? Yes. So as far as a use of my energy, I've decided that that's not a necessary part of my self description to be able to completely remodel a house. So helping people develop a self description that is realistic and it's based on their strengths and maybe, you know, honing in on some weaknesses and developing those a little bit more celebrate strengths, focusing on things that people don't normally sell celebrate like optimism, you know, when we think of strengths, most people list, you know, I'm punctual, I'm smart, I'm funny, but we look at some of the things like compassion and creative. And there's a whole list of different strengths that people have that are necessary. One of the things I like to do with these self assessment groups, when we start talking about strengths and weaknesses, but especially strengths is identifying some of these more vague concepts like compassion. All right, compassion, how is that a strength in what way is that helpful to you in your personal relationships? In what way is that helpful to you in your mental health? In what way is that helpful to you in your work relationships? Because you know what, most of the time, if you can be compassionate with others, it's going to mean that you can get along better at the work in the workplace. It's going to mean that you can be a stronger asset to a team. Helping people connect the dots and draw all the lines back to why is this important? Why is this a good characteristic? Why is this something I should celebrate and enhance? Cognitive distortions. Oh, we've talked about those a bunch, but we want to talk about combating them. Magnification and exaggeration. If we're talking to somebody who has low self-esteem, what do you think they magnify and exaggerate every single mistake, every single flaw? So we want to help them figure out, you know, how big of a deal is this really? One of the things that I have them do is, you know, especially if I'm working with a group of adolescents, but it can work the same with adults if they're willing to kind of play along for a while. But I have them look at something and, you know, it can be a chair, it can be the rug, it can be any myriad number of things. And tell me what it is they see. I have them describe it to me. And then I give them a magnifying glass and I have them look at that same thing. And, you know, they describe it to me. It's going to be a very different description. And then we talk about, you know, when you pass somebody on the street, the average person you interact with at work, your, you know, average friend, maybe not your bestest best friend that you tell everything to. But the average person sees what you see without the magnifying glass. Only you see those things that you saw when you had the magnifying glass, because nobody else is looking that closely, unless you let them all or nothing thinking, we've talked about this, encourage them to find the middle ground. If it's always find exceptions, if it's never find exceptions, if somebody's talking about something in terms of really extreme ideas, have them argue the other point or have tell them, ask them what would be a middle ground, what would be a compromise? So you have this concept over here and this concept over here, what would be a middle ground? The availability phenomenon. And this activity I do if people have access to computers, because it's a lot more powerful if you've actually got data in order to back it up. The availability phenomenon means we remember things that are most recent in our mind and seem to be more dangerous, like plane crashes. We focus on the one plane crash that may have killed 250 people and that's a tragedy. However, there were probably 20,000 planes that flew that day that didn't crash. We don't focus on that because the media brings our attention to that one. When we talk about officer involved shootings, we focus on that one and extrapolate and go, you know, they must be pretty free and loose with the gun when we don't take into consideration sometimes that, you know, maybe there were 40,000 officers on duty that day and there was one officer involved shooting. And those don't happen every day. So we need to look at how often does this really happen in the big scheme of things? How threatening is it? How frequent is it? Even something like, you know, I want to have blue eyes and everybody's everybody else has blue eyes. Let's take a look at that. Let's look at the data and see what proportion of people actually have blue eyes. And, you know, yeah, there may be some people that are very salient in your life that have blue eyes. But let's look at how often it actually occurs. Emotional reasoning, encouraging people to think before they make decisions, am I making these decisions? Am I judging things based on how I feel? I feel scared. So this must be threatening. Or am I basing it on fact? I feel scared. Let me look around and see if there's anything to really be afraid of. Remember when you were a kid and, you know, you are afraid of the things in the dark or you didn't like walking in front of windows at night that were open because you couldn't see out. You just saw your own reflection. You know, as kids, we all find something spooky. That's emotional reasoning. You know, how likely is it really that there's a monster under your bed? You know, you feel like it's a scary situation. So you're saying this is threatening. This is scary. But in reality, when we look at the facts, there are no monsters with kids. Once you show them under the bed, you know, every night and there's a whole lot of other ways to handle it, but over time with the availability phenomenon, as they go through five, 10, 15 nights, if you're looking under the bed and going, Nope, nothing there. They start to go, Oh, you know what? There's nothing there. And it becomes more salient in their mind that every time I've looked, there hasn't been anything there. Overgeneralization, encouraging people to not use the all word. All people who, you know, dress in black are going to become school shooters. No, that's not it. Let's not overgeneralize about people or about situations. Every time I go to make a public speech, I end up getting sick to my stomach and not being able to do the speech. Okay, let's look at that. You know, have there been times when you've been able to speak in front of people, maybe not 50, maybe it was just five, and then, you know, let's talk about what may be happening. The other thing that happens with overgeneralization a lot of times is you create a self fulfilling prophecy. If you expect that every other time this has happened, this has been the outcome, then a lot of times we will inadvertently create that same outcome again. So encouraging people to look at their thought patterns. Do they have a mental filter? Are they always looking for the negative? You know, if somebody has a mental filter that's rose colored and they can only see the positive, most likely they're not going to be in our office. But if they have a mental filter and they see the negative in everything, then it's important to help them balance that with, okay, you see the negative. What are the positives? I encourage my kids to do this when they see the negative in someone or something. I said, okay, that's a negative that you identified. I'm not going to invalidate that, but tell me two positives, you know, tell me two potential positives about this situation or about this person. And, you know, we do that on each other too, because having two teenagers in the house, they can fight like cats and dogs. Personalization and blaming. Personalization, it's all my fault, blaming, it's all your fault. When something happens, generally, it's a little bit of everybody's fault. Encouraging people to look rationally and objectively at what the situation was. What was your part? What was the other person's part? And what could you do differently the next time? And global labeling. We give examples of ways people may globally label things like I'm an idiot or I'm stupid. I make mistakes a lot. And, you know, I could say I'm an idiot or I could say that was really a silly thing for me to do. That's very different. I am versus a silly thing. And generally, I use the stupid word, but, you know, we're not perfect. Which takes us to compassion. What is compassion? This is can be 15, 20 minute group in and of itself. Having people talk about what is compassion? What does it look like? What kinds of activities are compassionate? What are, you know, where do random acts of kindness fit into this? Does compassion mean we have to be nice to everybody all the time, regardless of how they act towards us? You know, you can put these different ideas out there for discussion. And then you can start taking it back all the way around full circle and go, OK, now, these are all the things you identified as compassionate activities or compassionate things to do for people. How often do you do them for yourself? Creating a compassionate world, we brainstorm ways to spread compassion, being the change in the world, making the choices and doing the things that we would like to see everyone do. But guess what? If we model it, maybe others will catch on. And if not, that's OK. Because we did it because it made us feel good and it made us feel good about ourselves for being kind. We talk about the problem of worth. A lot of people don't think that they're worthy of compassion. They're not worthy of cutting themselves a break. They are their own worst critic going back to that pathological critic. So talking about what makes you a worthwhile individual. Sometimes we'll role play and I'll say, OK, we're going to you're going to step outside your own body right now and you're going to I'm going to interview you and you're going to tell me all about your best friend who is you. So you're going to pretend you're your best friend and you're going to tell me all about you. And we'll do this little video segment to help them identify what their best friend might see as their positive qualities. And then developing compassion for others. I like doing this as a two session activity myself because we've talked about compassion and what compassionate activities look like. We talk and then in the second session I asked them to spend the time between sessions looking for examples of compassion in the world online. There was an article that came out today that I saw my Facebook feed. I have a soft spot for pitbulls all dogs. But these something happened and these two pitbulls were terrified and the officers that were responding just gave them both hugs that gave the little pitbulls hugs big pitbulls and it helped calm them down. They weren't being vicious. They were scared to death and the officers took the time instead of judging and going to that's a pitbull you know stay away to be compassionate towards this animal who was terrified. You know I tend to see a lot of those animal things probably because that's what Facebook feeds me but encouraging people to find examples of compassion for others encouraging them to find those memes. I love finding memes that are positive and uplifting and demonstrate compassion for self or others and we share those in the second group and we talk about how if it's a meme talk about how you could personify that how you could do that in your daily life not only for yourself but for others. And what that makes you feel like when you do something nice for other people or other animals or you know whoever the case may be the shoulds so we can spend a lot of time talking about how values are formed and when we're young like I talked about earlier our parents and you know maybe our church and our school and the media tell us what we should think and a lot of times as children with you know dichotomous thinking we go okay this is what they say we should think so we're gonna think that and we don't question it as we get older we form the ability to think more abstractly and start questioning these things but we don't so this is where we start questioning and people keep a list or running journal of all the times they say something they should have done or they should be and we talk about those in group and people will share that yeah I feel that way too and we'll talk about where does that come from and is this something that is important in your life because should told you hostage should be means you're not there yet should have means you didn't do it so should is in this limbo land which means you can't fix it necessarily so I will or you know looking back of something you should have done you know in retrospect I could have so next time I will we talk about healthy versus unhealthy values body images a big thing that comes up in my adolescent groups focusing on body shaming you know what does the media teach us about body image and what are your values about body image and weight and appearance and of those which promote health and happiness in you and which promote unhealthy and unhappiness in you that can get into a pretty heated discussion it obviously tends to go better if it's a all female or all male group coeducational groups especially with adolescents wouldn't advise it but even among adults I found that some of these hot button issues in self esteem tend to be more openly discussed in groups that are only male or only female so we encourage people to challenge and revisit their should they go over that list and they said I thought that I should have so you know what do I really think and then atonement because like I said sometimes should make sense I should have written a thank you card for that okay yeah in the back of your mind you can hear your grandma saying you should write in a thank you card within 48 hours of getting a gift and yada yada and I and I didn't so I need to atone for that that gets rid of that should because again the critics said you should have and you can say all right you know I'm going to learn from that I didn't that's important to me so I'm going to make it right and then the should goes away because you did it but there are going to be times when people make mistakes so what do we do reframe them learning if you make a mistake at the job you learn from it if you must make a mistake and something you say to someone you can apologize for it and learn something from it you know maybe you said something that was insensitive and it was a mistake obviously to say something that was insensitive to someone so you can apologize for that but then what can you learn from that experience partly you probably don't want to say that again and how hurtful it was but you also might learn something about yourself about what prompted you to make that statement in the first place and you might learn something about yourself in terms of behaviors that you don't normally notice you know with the election and everything just having passed I've become much more aware and maybe hypersensitive some would say to people name calling and you know so I don't want to see that on my on my wall I don't want to see that on my Facebook boards I don't want to hear that around my house but then I also have to look at my own behavior and go have you never engaged in name calling and I can't say that I have never engaged in name calling so it's for me to learn that you know what that's not okay and move on from it so taking mistakes and turning them into learning activities turning them into ways to make yourself better again people can keep a log of different mistakes or they can share their most embarrassing moment or there's a lot of different ways that you can look at mistakes making sure that there's a certain amount of awareness people may not be aware when they make mistakes so you know in order to learn from them you have to be aware that you made them if somebody's always covering for you and you don't know that you made a mistake then you're not going to ever change your behavior so it's important that whether it's ourselves or our children or our employees or our clients when there's a mistake and you know if it's not one that we made you know we may cover for them we may try to smooth things over whatever we do but then we've got to go back to that person and go hey we need to have a little chat here if you do it then obviously you have to have a little chat with yourself about you need to become more aware of your own behavior and how that affects other people which leads into raising your mistake consciousness the other thing with raising mistake consciousness involves understanding that other people make mistakes too that's a new concept for a lot of our clients they're so busy beating themselves up and focusing on the things that everybody else does right they don't see the mistakes and I'm like you know what I wonder how often that person focuses on their own stuff so much they don't see your mistakes you know we may be more sensitive that goes back to that whole concept of personalization we may be more sensitive to our mistakes and think it a big thing them a bigger deal because they're very salient for us whereas somebody else may not even really notice you know when you're giving a speech maybe you have everything planned out and you forget a segment and you just add lib most people probably didn't even notice unless you stopped and went wow I forgot but if you just kept going most people probably didn't notice the mistake responding to criticism we all make mistakes we all are going to receive criticism some of it is constructive and some of it is on point but not constructive so being able to hear criticism take it in mull it over take what's important take what's useful and leave the rest you know there's been a lot of criticism lately you know flying around the media and and Facebook and whatever else but reading it taking it in and going this is important to me this is not or this is resounds with me this does not and figuring out how to respond to that do we need to respond to every criticism no we do also do we need to understand where that criticism comes from one of my favorite groups that we used to do when I worked in the residential facility it was a Sunday night group and we would put all the residents together in a big circle and there would be one person in the hot seat and people would go around every person in the house would get a chance to speak and they would talk about where they saw that particular person whoever was on the hot seat in their readiness for change pre contemplation contemplation preparation action and why it had to be objective and it had to provide feedback of a nature that the person was able to do something about it's not you've just been lazy this week because that's not objective useful feedback so people learned how to give constructive criticism the person in the hot seat was not allowed to respond after the group they could go talk with their counselor and process it if they were really upset but they were not allowed to respond to anyone in the group for 24 hours they had to mull it over when a lot of times when you deal with people with addictions their immediate reaction is to lash out to defend to blame their self-esteem is low anyway they can't take criticism they're already feeling unlovable so part of this activity was to help people learn to hear the criticism and let that initial wave of adrenaline and reactivity go away so and then they could process what they had heard and go you know that person's got a point that person's got a point these six over here now I don't see what they were saying and they learned how to take the constructive do something about it and leave the rest and we would talk about well these six people who you say have no basis in their in their statements why do you what made them make those statements what brought them to that those observations which is another way we can help them see different people's perspectives and understand why some people may have different reactions to situations asking for what you want identifying what your needs are differentiating needs from wants you know I want a Ferrari I don't need a Ferrari I need some reasonable reliable method of transportation to get around town I want a big juicy hamburger do I need it no and you know I need something to sustain me so talking about the difference between wants and needs and having people identify what their needs are but also what their wants are everybody has wants we all have things that we strive for and that's great that's okay I don't want to tell them not to want anything that's part of motivation is working towards something but we need to identify what is it is it that you want how do we put this in priority in comparison with everything else and how will you know when you've achieved what you wanted goal setting and planning so we take those wants and we create goals from them which a lot of people have never learned how to create good goals or smart goals small measurable achievable realistic and time limited people need to learn how to set good goals because if you set goals and you fail if you set bad goals and you fail then it hits your self-esteem negatively if you set good goals you're almost guaranteed to succeed you may have to adjust them here and there and go well it's going to take a little longer than I thought but you can have incremental successes we talk about making a commitment and identifying blocks to achieving goals goes back to that decisional balance exercise again what are the things that might prevent you from achieving your goal what are the reasons you might not want to achieve your goal what were the benefits to the old behavior and it's important that people identify you know what benefits the old behavior had if you're trying to one of your goals is going to the gym every day that's great and you can identify a lot of positive reasons for going to the gym but what are some drawbacks to going to the gym I really enjoy sitting on the couch and watching TV for an hour after work going to the gym sometimes you're sore afterwards there have the person identify the reasons that may block them or be unmotivating to achieve their goals and then figure out ways around it core beliefs in order for people to develop a self-esteem develop a value system they have to understand what their core beliefs are about the world and about themselves so in this process we identify basically those shoulds again these are their core beliefs and help them identify ways to develop new core beliefs what is it that they want to do you know back in the 1950s one of the core beliefs was women were supposed to stay home 10 the house have 2.4 children a dog and a white picket fence or you know whatever the it was supposed to be back then today's landscape is very different we have different core beliefs but we still have some people from the 1950s who hold on to those old 1950s core beliefs and you know that's part of their belief system and that's how they were raised and who they are so am I going to tell them they're wrong for believing that way no you know that's that works for them great doesn't work for me so what are my core beliefs surrounding as a woman what I should do or what I want to do as a woman as an entrepreneur as a mother and defining those so people can say this is important to me because some of this will ring true for you and you'll think back to acceptance and commitment therapy when people are really working on defining their values and what they're working toward so children we've talked about what we're doing with our clients but how can we prevent self-esteem problems how can we build self-esteem in children the power of parents we have a lot of power and it's not just taken away the TV kids see what we do kids hear what we say and if we say if we are constantly using global labels like you're a bad boy or you're a bad girl they're going to internalize that we have the ability to say you made a mistake with this I still love you how can we fix it or what can we learn from it we can teach children how to identify what's important we can teach children how to deal with criticism we can teach children how to be their own best friend parents are mirrors so one of the activities that I encourage my adult clients to do if they've got children at home is to mirror self-esteem for your children if you're constantly walking around talking about how fat you are how ugly you are how miserable you are guess what they're hearing that and they're picking up on that they're learning to be self-critical if you're constantly talking about negatively about other people guess what children are hearing that and they're picking up on that another thing we can do is just look at our kids take a look and go wow you are an awesome creation and you know I did part of it but they did a lot of it my daughter couldn't be more different than me on so many different levels and I look at her every day and I'm just stunned at the strengths that she has my son is the same way so telling them regularly these things about you are awesome these are the things I appreciate listening to them when they say whatever their ideas are instead of shutting them down if or when they say that they're upset instead of going you really shouldn't be upset about that listening to them validating their feelings imagine that validating their thoughts and their feelings and going okay now where do we go from here my daughter is you know kind of in turmoil with her best friend right now her best friend is not one of my favorite people you know so as a mother I can see what's going on and I can see what's hurting hurting her you know making her heart hurt and it kills me however that's a decision she needs to come to on her own about what she's going to do about that relationship so when I'm listening to her I'm hearing her say all these negative things but I'm also hearing her say all these positive things and as a parent it's my job to help her weigh the pros and cons encourage the language of self-esteem that positive affirming language the language that says okay I made a mistake I'll learn from it nobody's perfect helping kids create some sort of a mantra that they can tell themselves because we've talked before about how adolescents everything seems like it is a mountain there there are no molehills and adolescents everything seems like something people are going to remember forever so we talk about how to talk nicely about themselves how to remind themselves of their strengths and how to handle when they feel like they've done something wrong or made a mistake but we also talk about how to be nice and compassionate there's that word again to other people discipline you wouldn't think this would come in a self-esteem class would you but it does we don't want to say life is a free for all go for it kids want structure and there are going to be some things that you know as parents we've got to set limits on candy if your child is six years old and they come home with a great big old bag of Halloween candy and they want to eat it all that night it probably not the best thing to do so helping them learn discipline and self-control so they can learn how to make choices that are thoughtful instead of just impulsive and reactive encouraging autonomy you know by the time the kid gets to be 10 11 12 then you can look at them and we're going to stay with the Halloween candy analogy you can look at them and go okay what do you think are the consequences if you eat this whole bag of candy right now and encourage them to make educated decisions obviously as parents we have to protect them from harm but there are sometimes that you know you can give them a little bit of wiggle room because it's not going to be totally detrimental and again model self-esteem model positive self-talk model identifying your strong characteristics but also model identifying that you have weaknesses you make mistakes you have character defects but they those things don't define you self-esteem really begins in childhood when we impose those conditions of worth I mean it's just it's what happens in parenting I would love to think that we could provide unconditional positive regard to children from the time they're you know breathing until the time they move out but at a certain point there are going to be times where we institute conditions of worth where we institute rules and we tell somebody you need to behave this way I don't approve of you behaving another way but we also need to talk about it in terms of behavior it's not that I don't approve of you as a person I don't approve of that behavior encouraging children to separate the difference so they can say I'm a good person even if I make a mistake it's imperative to help people separate strengths and weaknesses from who they are yeah you have amazing strengths but if all those strengths were to go away who are you and why are you amazing self-loathing and rejection contributes to dysphoria so what are all the things you don't like about yourself and let's talk about how to fix those let's talk about why you don't like them and let's look at how important that is to you in terms of your values and your goals part of self-esteem development includes values identification before you can get there you have to know where there is you can draw you know on a map I'm a big fan of maps I don't know why I guess because they're visual representations of getting from point A to point B or you can identify on a lot on a picture of stairs you know sometimes people look at it better and can conceptualize steps but identify what your values are and those are you know the endpoint these are the things that you want to embody people need to understand their wants versus their needs so they're not pursuing something that isn't getting them closer to their values going back to that Ferrari again you know if my wants are to have a happy healthy family I need transportation to buy food I need transportation to get to work but I don't need a Ferrari that may be a want and that can be filed away on would be really nice but it's not something I have to have to be happy and then reminding people of cognitive distortions when they start feeling frustrated angry anxious whatever dysphoric emotion they're expressing have them go through a checklist of cognitive distortions and say are any of these in play right now once they get used to that once they've kind of mastered most people use the same four or five whatever works or doesn't work for them then they'll be able to start doing it more automatically without having to look at the list and go okay I am using emotional reasoning right now how do I counter emotional reasoning I identify the facts in the situation so it's a long process self-esteem is one of those sort of ambiguous things that we help people work toward but ultimately it comes down to what is going to make you feel good about you what is going to make you feel like I'm all that and a bag of chips thank you very much and and that those are the things that you can work toward if you're looking for visuals you know I like to use metaphors in my visuals so I have had people before I take a picture of literally a bag of chips with the chips filling out and I have people identify strengths on the chips because that's where they want to be and you know it can work in an art therapy class it can work for something for adolescence and sometimes it can work in an adult situation so there are a lot of different ways you can go about communicating the same concepts now in the book by McKay and Fanning they do give you examples and activities to use for all of these different concepts so you can also go on books dot Google dot com and I believe there are excerpts from the book on there so you can see what some of the examples are that they gave and it's another resource it's another place that you can turn to when you're having a brain freeze about I've got to do a self-esteem group today what am I going to do or I need to do a group on identifying values what are some activities that might be fun for this group because we don't want to just sit there and lecture the whole time we don't want to just sit there and go all right now everybody share I like to do activities I like to do things where people can apply it to what's going on with them but they also have fun because it makes group go by a lot faster for everybody are there any questions if you enjoy this podcast please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube you can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at all see us dot com slash counselor toolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by all see us dot com providing 24 7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors therapists and nurses since 2006 use coupon code counselor toolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month