 Welcome to 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 with Doc Snipes, practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life. We're continuing to talk about self-esteem as you've probably noticed or you will notice these are slightly shorter segments than our usual podcast segments because there's a lot of stuff that you can really do to improve your self-esteem and we don't need to get super in-depth into theory because in most cases you probably don't care about it. So we're going to have a few shorter episodes here. So we're going to start with addressing the self-esteem bully and this is sometimes called the internal critic. What characteristics does your internal critic have? And if you look carefully at this infographic, the self-esteem bully or the internal critic will trick you into thinking that you did the wrong thing or you're bad. It will bait you into getting angry about things. It will put you down, shame you, attack you, deride you, tease you for not being whatever you think you should be. There's that should again. Mock, assault, insult, trick, attack, ridicule, insult, harass, browbeat. How many times do you do this to yourself? Something happens and you take it personally. You beat yourself up for it, not once, not twice, but for the next three days you're still dwelling on what a bonehead move you made or how nobody will ever forgive you or forget whatever happened. And it can be something just like doing something embarrassing or it can be a mistake you made at work. So paying attention to what you do here. I remember one of my, I think I had been on the job for about a year as a manager. It was my first job in management and I made a pretty big mistake and I went into my boss and kind of had my tail between my legs and I walked in his office and he looked at me. He's like, what did you do? I'm like, how'd you know that? He's like, you always have this look on your face when you made a mistake. So what did you do? And I told him, and I mean, it was a pretty big mistake and he sat back, took a deep breath and he said, okay, what are you going to do to fix it? And I was a little befuddled because that's not the reaction I was expecting. I was expecting him to get angry, to shame me, to discipline me in some way for this pretty big error. And he didn't. He said, all right, you know, no clients got hurt, wasn't the choice that you should have made, but what are you going to do to fix it? How often can you do that to yourself? When you make a mistake, how often can you just act like Richard and sit back, fold your hands and go, all right, that was not ideal. What do I do now? How can I fix it? So I want you to think about the ways your internal critic bullies you. Does it tell you regularly when you get up that you're not good enough or that maybe it makes you feel like people are going to find out that you're not all that you present yourself to be. We call that the imposter phenomenon. People who have achieved something in life, you know, whatever it is, and are just constantly afraid that somebody's going to find out that they're not really that smart or not really that successful. They feel like they're an imposter in their own body. How does your bully interact with you? We wouldn't tolerate these behaviors on the playground. Why do you tolerate them in your own head? That's not how you correct any behavior anyway. If you make a mistake, you don't shame somebody. You may correct them and you may say, you know what, that was not a good choice. What do you do now? But you wouldn't sit there and just completely berate them over and over because it doesn't serve a purpose. The only purpose it serves is to make you feel less confident and less of a person. When you start engaging in self-bullying or internal critic behavior, what would you do with these behaviors were from another person? If your coworker at work started saying all those things that you're hearing in your head or your best friend or if you're a child, another child on the playground, you probably wouldn't tolerate it. You'd go tell somebody you would remove yourself from the situation. You maybe might even stand up for yourself or you might not. If your self-esteem conforms to that and you don't think you deserve any better, you may just take it. How does that affect your self-esteem from that point on? Likely, pushed it down even further. So what would you tell somebody who is experiencing these behaviors? If your best friend came to you and you're an adult and your best friend's being bullied at work by somebody who's just a nasty person to be around, always mocking them, making fun of them, trying to trip them up and pointing out their mistakes. They came to you and they're like, oh, work is just awful right now. We have this person that keeps doing this stuff to me. What would you tell them? What would be the next steps to take? Well, apply the same thing to yourself. What can you do in order to deal with that bully? We don't tolerate bullies. So this bully, otherwise known as the pathological critic, is in our head from a very early age. And this pathological critic has this arsenal of shoulds that we learned from the time we were knee-high to a grasshopper. You should wipe your feet when you come in the door. You should say please and thank you. You should be perfect at everything. You should get straight A's. You should. Okay. You get my point. Well, some of those shoulds are kind of extreme and unnecessary. So it's important to take a look at that and figure out what things are important in your life that you need to do and then change that should from can and will or can't and won't. You know, if you can make straight A's and that's something that's important to you, then you will. But these shoulds are just lingering stressors out there. Where did the critic come from? Well, it comes from those conditions of worth we talked about. When children are younger, they think in all or nothing terms. If a parent disciplines them, they generally take it pretty seriously. I remember when my daughter was little. All her dad had to do was look at her sternly and she would get these alligator tears that would just drip down her, down her cheeks. She's a teenager now and the same pretty much still happens and he didn't raise a hand to her. He was always, you know, probably the more easy going parent than I was. But she was so determined to make him proud that she wanted to know what she needed to do, what she should do to earn his love. And so that's part of these conditions of worth. Love is given by a parent for who the child is, not what they do. So these conditions of worth were learned over time when a child did something that they were not supposed to, they got punished. Again, remember when a child did something they were supposed to do, there was often no reward. Oftentimes it was just taken for granted. So what's more memorable? All the times you screwed up. So those are going to stick in your head is the time that I got in trouble, the time that I got grounded, the time that I, whatever. So we want to pay attention to those conditions of worth. And one way to start fixing that is when you make a mistake, remind yourself that, you know, you're an awesome person. You're lovable. Everybody makes mistakes. But also to separate whatever it was that went wrong from yourself and focus on the fact that that was a behavior. It doesn't represent you as a human being. We listen to this critic because it can provide some security. People with high self-esteem who don't need reinforcement, who don't need others to tell them they're okay, they're able to say, you know what, I messed up, let me figure out what to do next. People with low self-esteem, when they make a mistake, they feel frantic. So they drop back to childhood, if you will, when they were growing up and that parental figure that they've internalized in their own head. Now if they didn't have parents that were around or who are loosely engaged, they may have developed their own internal parent that told them what they should do, their own internal Jiminy Cricket, if you will. And so when things start going a little bit wonky, that's the person that they hear in their mind saying, you should have done better. You should have studied harder. You should have cleaned your room. Listening to the critic is a form of security until you can provide your own reward. Listening to the critic is the way of figuring out what you need to do in order to feel loved until you can look in the mirror and realize you deserve to be loved for who you are. So the first step is catching your critic. When you hear the shoulds in your head or when you hear the bullying and the taunting and the name calling, catch your critic and tell him to be quiet. You don't have to be nice. You don't have to be rude, but you don't have to be nice. You can be like, no, that's not what I'm going to listen to right now. In the process, you may want to try to unmask his or her voice. It may be a parental figure or it may be a coach or somebody that was important to you that you wanted to get their approval when you were growing up. So figure out who that is and then tell them to be quiet. Sometimes it's hard to do that, especially if it's a parental figure or someone who is important because we were always told not to talk back. So it's harder to deal with. Envision this critic. Once you kind of figure out who it is and make peace with it, envision this critic as a heckler in a gallery. And you are a comedian and you're standing up on stage and there's somebody in the gallery just heckling the heck out of you. What would you tell them? They're being bullied, bullies, so what do you tell them? You tell them that's not appropriate. Go away. Security, have them removed. That's what you need to do. Have your own internal brain security, have them removed. So developing self-esteem means silencing this inner bully or critic because the inner bully can be really mean. And a lot of times the inner critic was developed when people were young. So their thoughts are very all or nothing. So if you don't succeed completely, then you're a complete failure. If you don't do this perfectly, then it wasn't worth doing. The inner critic doesn't focus on giving you credit for the parts that you did right. The inner critic doesn't bolster you and give you the atta-girls or atta-boys when you do something right. The only time he or she speaks up is when you do something that you perceive is wrong. You need to be compassionate with yourself, recognizing again, everybody makes mistakes. I think I need to write a book like that because we have the book Everybody Poops and that's a real popular book. So I could write a book Everybody Makes Mistakes. I don't know if it would be as popular. But anyhow, recognize everybody has strengths and weaknesses. That's part of what makes the world go round. If everybody had the same strengths, then what would happen to the weaknesses? And nobody's going to be perfect at everything. So everybody has strengths and weaknesses and we balance each other out. That's why we have people who are good at math and people who are good at English. Generally, people are not good at both of them. They're better at one. They may be okay at the other, but generally one is prominent. That doesn't mean you're stupid. That just means your strength lies in whichever skill, whichever brain side that you've chosen to work on. Eliminate conditions of worth. Stop using the word I am. Identify all the reasons that you are worthy of love regardless of what you do or what you have. And then start addressing cognitive distortions and global negative attributions, which is a real long garbage way of saying, take those I am negative statements out of your vocabulary. I'm stupid. No, you may not be good at something. You know, none of us is good at everything. But instead of using that global term in a negative way, figure out specifically what it is that your weaknesses, you know, that's okay to have weaknesses. Being aware of them is the first step. And then you decide whether it's worth your effort to work on improving it. I've told you guys before that, you know, math is not my strong suit. I'm real good at statistics calculus. Once they started adding letters, I went downhill. That's a little bit of an overstatement, but math is not my strong suit. Can I do it? Can I do basic math? Can I do statistics and geometry? Sure. It's just advanced algebra and calculus, but that's not worth my attention right now. That's not going to make a difference in my life. So the fact that that's a weakness is what it is. Figuring this out. And this is where we start talking about core values and we're going to move into that in the next segment. We'll help you identify what things do you think you should be that you need to work on? Which things are really important to you and will help move you towards your goal of living a rich and meaningful life? If you like this podcast, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast app or join our Facebook group at docsnipes.com slash Facebook. Welcome to this week's book review. Each week I review a book that I believe would be helpful to the general public and our 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 to fray 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. 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.