Feeling Bad About Yourself is Your Choice
Posted on November 03, 2012 by Lynn Crocker, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
How do you stop being pulled around by other’s opinions of you and what you do?
Eleanor Roosevelt made the statement: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” but what exactly does this mean?
According to Dr. Maxwell Maltz in his book Psycho-cybernetics:
When we feel hurt or offended, the feeling is entirely a matter of our own response. In fact, the feeling is our response…
It is our own responses that we have to be concerned about, not other people’s opinions. We can (choose to) tighten up, become angry, anxious, or resentful and feel hurt, or we can (choose to) have no response, remain relaxed and feel no hurt…. You alone are responsible for your responses and reactions…
He goes on to quote the Greek philosopher Diogenes “no man is hurt but by himself,” and St. Bernard “nothing can work me damage except myself. The harm that I sustain I carry with me, and am never a real sufferer but by my own fault.”
I talk a lot about this concept with my clients. But like most concepts, it ethereal and nebulous until real world examples are applied.
To bring it into focus, I have my clients think about something positive that they “know” to be true about themselves. For example, a first grade teacher said she knew she was a good teacher. She felt without a doubt that her young students benefited from her soft, loving manner and her never ceasing enthusiasm for learning new and creative strategies for engaging them. I asked her how she would feel if someone were to say to her “you are not a good teacher.” Her response would be to smile inside and brush the comment off. The comment did not resonate with her because there was nothing inside of her psyche that supported the negative comment.
To give contrast, I then ask my clients to think about something negative that they “know” to be true about themselves. One woman replied that, although she held a director position at her company and often received praise for her performance, deep down she “knew” she was incompetent. An off-handed remark from a co-worker that questioned her knowledge easily sends her into a tailspin of fear, anxiety and concern that she will lose her job.
Both people were the target of someone’s negative opinion but the first grade teacher was unaffected because her self-image in relation to her teaching abilities was solid where as the director allowed the opinion to shake her because it resonated with a belief that she already held about herself.
How do you stop being pulled around by other’s opinions of you and what you do? The first step is to pay attention to your reactions to what others say about you. If you find yourself saying “she made me feel bad” or “he made me feel guilty”, take responsibility for the emotion and examine what belief about yourself flared up as a result of their comment and then take steps to heal this part of your self-image.
