 Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. This podcast was created to provide you the information and tools Doc Snipes gives her clients so that you too can start living happier. Our website, docsknipes.com, has even more resources, videos and handouts, and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. Welcome back to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery. We're going to continue talking about improving self-esteem. One part of improving self-esteem is developing a more accurate self-assessment. If you've got low self-esteem, you probably don't feel very good about yourself. So you're going to start out by doing something called taking a self-concept inventory. And that's basically listing who you think you should be and all the things that you hold yourself to versus who you are right now, the traits that you actually have. And then you're going to look at the difference. But you're not going to stop there. What I want you to do is, once you look at the difference between who you are versus who you think you should be or who you want to be, then I want you to go through that list of who you think you should be and cross off the things that just really aren't that important to helping you move towards those people and things that are important to you. For example, if you have on there that you should be a marathon runner, well, running marathons is great. It's good for health. It's good for a lot of very different things, but is running a marathon really that important? Or is your current level of physical fitness, taking care of yourself and being as healthy as you can be, what's more important? So what we really want to look at is that ideal self often has some extreme notions of who you think you should be. And when you fail to live up to those and when you fail to accomplish everything on your should list, then you start feeling bad about yourself. So I want you to go through and mark off the things that are really irrelevant at getting you toward who you think or getting you toward the things that are important to you right now, how you define happiness. And then for the things that are left, look and see if there are any that can be moderated. Like I said, if one of your goals was to be a marathon runner, well, that might not be in the cards. What about running 10Ks? That's something that's a little bit easier to do, something that's a little bit more moderate, or just going to the gym and being in your best physical shape, as opposed to something that only a very small fraction of the population can do. The next thing that you can do is start listing your strengths and weaknesses. The world kind of goes around because there's a balance. Certain people have certain strengths and other people have counterbalancing strengths. My strengths are not math and, you know, science is kind of right there in the middle. But I can tell you that calculus and trigonometry and all that stuff, those are not my strengths. Now, I could get upset about it, but I don't, because I know that that's not one of the things that's my strength. Same thing with home improvement projects. I can find my way around a Phillips head screwdriver pretty well and a hammer. But when it gets much more complicated than that, that's not one of my strengths. Could I go to classes? Could I learn to become the next female Bob Vila? Sure, I could. But in the big scheme of things, that isn't really integrated into my self-concept and whether I can be happy or not. Whether I am an excellent handyman has no bearing on the things that are truly important to me, because I know there are other people out there that have those strengths that I can, I can hire them. And likewise, the strengths that I have, other people don't have. So it's a balance. Instead of looking at yourself as trying to have to be everything to all people all the time, focus on what you do have. What strengths do you bring to the mix? Take both of those things, your new self-concept inventory, now that it's been modified, and a really good listing of your strengths and weaknesses. And develop a new self-description. Who are you? Because a lot of times when you did your initial self-concept inventory, that listing of who you are right now was probably overly harsh. You probably forgot a lot of your strengths and minimized a lot of your accomplishments and focused on the things that you hadn't done. So now this new self-description has a much more objective tone to it. And you can look at who are you really right now, and who is it that you want to be? You can't be everything to all people all the time. So getting back down to what we keep talking about with becoming the person you want to be in order to get closer to those things and people that are important to you. You can't be everything to all people. So who is it that you're going to focus on? What is it that you're going to focus on? And then start celebrating your strengths. Recognize what you bring to the mix, whether it's your, maybe you're good at organization and you're good at planning. Awesome. Some people are better at implementing. Maybe you are a good cook, but you are not a great baker. What is it that you bring to the mix when you get together with your friends, when you are with your family, when you're at work? Because your strengths make you unique and make you special. The next step is to start identifying core beliefs, because your self-concept was built on your core beliefs about who you should be. So going back to that list of shoulds again, and we're going to keep saying that word over and over again, and it's a bad word when we're talking about self-esteem, because it often holds you to a standard that you're probably not going to meet, or it makes you focus on what you're not instead of focusing on what you are. We all have room for improvement. There's no doubt about that. But is it better to focus on how short you fall, or is it better to focus on how strong you are and how good you are right now, knowing that you've got room for improvement? So identifying those core beliefs goes back to asking yourself, who says that I should be perfect at math? Who says that I have to be the best at all things all the time? And you're probably going to go back growing up and look at media, look at your parental influences, look at your teachers, and you're going to find some of that. Now did they intend to put these extreme beliefs on you? Probably not. Children, when they're very young, think in all or nothing terms. They think in extreme terms. So if you form some of these core beliefs when you're in elementary school and you never asked yourself again, you know, is this really something that's important to me, then you're probably holding on to some unnecessarily extreme core beliefs. Does that mean you have to get rid of them? No. But I would challenge you to modify them. And instead of saying I have to be the best at everything all the time, focusing on I need to be the best that I can be with the tools that I have, or I need to really focus my attention on succeeding and excelling in this one area that is my particular strength instead of trying to be a jack of all trades. When you're looking at these core beliefs, remember, I said some of them are going to be extreme. Some of the cues that these might not be helpful core beliefs to have or might be things that you need to check are terms that make them either magnified or exaggerated. And generally, these are self talk statements that you tell yourself that are magnified in the negative. That is the worst thing that ever happened. Typically, people with low self esteem, magnify and exaggerate the bad things and minimize the good things. So if you got a promotion at work, you might say, well, any, anybody would have done that. Or, you know, you just get that for being there for a certain period of time. It's nothing special. But if something bad happens, you focus on it and take all the blame for it and call yourself a loser or useless or think that you're going to get fired. So you want to look at your accomplishments and you want to look at what you magnify and what you really focus on. Everybody makes mistakes. You know, people will get written up at work. That happens sometimes, not all the time. But do you want to focus on that? Or do you want to focus on the successes that you've had and what you've been able to do? I mean, think about it. If you're an employer, if your employee is constantly screwing up, you're probably not going to keep them around. If your employee screws up once, but the majority of the time, they're a good employee, you know, you're going to discipline them and move on. So if you go through a situation and you get written up or you get in trouble, it happens. But that employer is holding you as an employee, keeping you as an employee because overall that employer sees what a good employee you are. So why don't you take that person's perspective and say, oh, you know, yeah, I'm generally a really good contributor to this relationship or to this agency or whatever. I made a mistake instead of blowing that out of proportion. All or nothing thinking. Have words like always, never every time. When that happens, counter it by looking for exceptions. Every time I apply for a promotion, I get turned down. Well, let's look and see if that actually is true. And if it is, then you can go and ask your supervisor why that is. You can look at your own work ethic and see if you can figure out why that is. But a lot of times you're going to find that there are exceptions, you know, every time I apply for a job, I get turned down. Well, if you've ever been employed, that's not true. Maybe the jobs you're applying for now are in higher demand. So you look for exceptions to the rule and you look for other explanations for why it's happening. Is it all about you? Or is it, you know, just you're applying for jobs or promotions that are in higher demand now? The availability phenomenon or heuristic means you focus on one thing or a couple of things that are really, really powerful. And forget about all the other things. So it seems like it's worse off. People have this in relationships. People have this in supervisors have this a lot when they're doing their evaluations. You tend to remember either the really important things. So if somebody screwed up really big, that's going to stand out when you're doing their evaluation or when you're thinking about your relationship. Or you're going to think about the stuff in the most recent past. So instead of giving them an evaluation or evaluating your relationship over a year or five years, you're going to tend to focus on what's happened in the past three months or so, which can be really skewed depending on what's going on. So it's important to make sure that whenever you're making a judgment about something, you look at not only what's going on right now, but make sure you broaden your, your view of the situation to look at how have things gone over the past year, you know, maybe for yourself, you the past couple months have been really not so good for you. You've made some mistakes. You've had a lot of problems. But when you look over the past year to three years, overall things have gone really pretty well and you've been doing a good job and have healthy relationships and all that stuff. So don't get caught up focusing on one or two things that stand out or one or two things that happened in the most recent past. Emotional reasoning is another thing that can get you caught up. If you feel like you should be living up to some standard and you're not and you start telling yourself that you're worthless because of that, you're reacting out of emotions. You're reacting out of fear of rejection instead of saying, you know what, logically, I'm doing the best I can right now. Accurate self assessment is necessary to form the foundation of self esteem. It's important to recognize why you're lovable. It's important to recognize your strengths and celebrate them. And then look at that list of things that you have in your ideal self, the person you think you should be, and identify goals that are worth working on, goals that are worth your energy that are going to help you get closer to those people and things that are important. So like I said, you're not going to be able to do everything all the time. I would love to be able to fix things around my house and replace light switches and stuff. That would be great. But in terms of the things that are most important to me, knowing that I only have a limited amount of energy, that doesn't rank up there. I'll just hire somebody for that. Cognitive distortions, you know, unhelpful thoughts tend to lead to negative interpretations of events. So when things happen, you get written up at work or you have a breakup or you make a mistake and you're really embarrassed, walk the middle path, try to find some good out of it, try to figure out a way to laugh at yourself, ask yourself, you know, in two or three weeks or months, is this really going to be a big deal? And examine the evidence if you think this is the worst thing in the world. That's how you're feeling right now. So let's look at the evidence, you know, what really realistically could happen from this event and what does it mean about you as a person? What is the objective evidence? Does it mean that you're a bad person? My guess would be no. My guess would be it means that you're a good person who made a mistake. So you want to examine the evidence that supports your feelings and beliefs that keep you telling yourself unhelpful and hurtful things. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast app, join our Facebook group at docsnipes.com slash Facebook, or join our community at docsnipes.com. Welcome to this week's book review. Each week, I review a book that I believe would be helpful to the general public and or clinicians. I'm never paid to do the reviews. However, in some instances, I may receive a small commission if you purchase the item, which helps defray the cost of our podcast and providing the free educational videos. The cost to you, however, remains the same. Today, we're going to be talking about self-esteem. And this is the fourth edition. I actually started out using this book when it was back in the third edition. And I absolutely love it. It's a very comprehensive guide to helping people improve their self-esteem. In the book, you're going to learn how to uncover and analyze negative self-statements. So talking about that internal critic, create new, more objective and positive self-statements, let go of judgmental self-attacking thoughts, and act in accordance with what matters to you most. So the book is 300 and some odd pages, and it goes on for a while. But what it does is walk you through step by step, understanding what self-esteem is, because it's kind of one of those terms that we talk about, but we may not really know what it is. And why just telling yourself that you're okay may not work? Well, the key is you have to believe it. So he starts talking about why people don't believe they're okay, even if they tell themselves they are. Then he introduces you to the pathological critic and encourages you to explore why you listen to it and learn how to disarm it. It moves on from that point to creating a balanced self-description, accepting weaknesses and embracing strengths, recognizing that we're not perfect, but nobody's perfect. So embracing yourself and cherishing yourself as you are. He moves on from there to identifying and combating cognitive distortions that keep you feeling bad, because a lot of times when we start looking at our weaknesses, we magnify them. And when we look at our strengths, we minimize them. And that keeps us feeling bad about ourselves. So McKay goes into great detail about how to combat some of those cognitive errors or thinking errors. He encourages you to explore your thoughts about compassion and developing self-compassion. One of the reasons that many people have difficulty developing self-esteem and being kind to themselves is because somewhere along the way they were taught that having compassion for themselves or being kind can be seen as weakness or failure or something negative. So he really challenges you to look at your beliefs about self-compassion and self-acceptance. He explores how to reframe mistakes and accept fallibility, because again, even though we know we've got strengths and weaknesses, we're also going to make mistakes. So accepting those and learning from them and not turning them into something huge, but accepting that everybody makes mistakes. Then he talks about what to do with the constructive and destructive criticism that you receive sometimes on a daily basis to help you respond in a meaningful way. And basically, it boils down to a bunch of techniques that will help you learn how to take what's useful and leave the rest, accepting that sometimes criticism is not as much about you as about that other person's stuff. And then he ends with helping you clarify what you want and need and using your skills to get those needs met more effectively. So creating win-win situations and learning how to assertively communicate with the people that are important to you. This book is written in really plain language with practical tools, which is one thing that I love about it. You can read three or four pages, get something really useful and insightful, and work with that for a while, then come back the next day or the next week and read another three or four pages. So it can be really useful for self-help or as a tool to guide individual or group therapy sessions. Visual learning clients like to have it as a reference to review, markup, and bring for discussion in the next session. So a lot of times when I do self-esteem groups, I'll have each client get a copy of this book. We go through it page by page, activity by activity. We do them sometimes in class, sometimes as homework, and then we talk about what they learned and then they can go back and review over the week between sessions what we talked about and get those visual cues that help them remember the important skills. I hope you've enjoyed this book review and please feel free to log on. It's Self-Esteem by Matthew McKay. It does have a Google preview, so you can read a little bit more about what's in it and see for yourself and see if it resonates with you as a good tool for self-improvement.