emotions
The Need for Approval | Ego | Evolution
Many people have read this piece and encouraged me to post it publicly. So, by popular demand…
It is an email I posted to a client near the end of their completion of the Personal Evolution Program, and in it I address a need for approval, ego development, the purpose and motivation for personal evolution…and the distinction between self-worth and value, and more…
Your self-worth is a settled matter if you will accept it as such.
Enjoy.
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Emotional Freedom Techniques [Part 2]
Be sure to read Part 1 here first.
Practical Steps to Emotional Freedom
Your practice, if you want to develop choice, facility, and ultimately, personal freedom and mastery over your own subjective experience, is the following:
Make a decision right now to take 100% responsibility for your subjective experience. Every bit of it. Your interpretations, your feelings, your emotions, your beliefs—accept that 100% of your subjective experience is generated by…you.
Emotional Freedom Techniques [Part 1]
“We do not respond to reality. We respond to our internal representation of reality.”—NLP Presupposition
“Mind precedes everything. All that you are is a result of what you have thought.”—Buddhist Principle
People of great wisdom and insight in both the East and West agree. Our emotional experience has little or nothing to do with external reality. Oh sure—there are plenty of people, events, situations, and injustices that are easy targets for blame. Bad things happen. And while, often people’s lives are the sum total of their choices, often bad things happen to good people through no action or fault of their own. And less dramatically, unpleasant and undeserved things may happen. Only a fool would dispute that.
The Benefit of a Spiritual Practice [Part 2 of 2]
Be sure to read Part 1 of this article here.
Taking Responsibility
The more you take responsibility—for your emotions, your actions, your life the more you build self-esteem. It is not the person who upset you, it is that you became triggered—or that you lost facility. It is not that the cost of living is too high; it is that you are not generating enough income. It is not that someone treats you poorly; it is that you are ineffective at drawing appropriate boundaries. The locus of responsibility—and therefore power—is within you. Nothing is external. To blame someone is to give them tremendous power over you. When you forgo blame in favor of responsibility, you give up comfort, but you reap tremendous rewards—gaining power and building self-esteem.
Self Hypnosis: The Voices in Your Head [Part 1 of 2]
When most people hear the word “hypnosis” they get a little unsettled. They usually get unsettled as a result of some fantasy about what hypnosis is or is not. Some associate it to stage hypnosis and the Vegas show world. Others are afraid of what someone might do to them when they are unconscious. Still others are afraid of clucking like a chicken when the phone rings. Others my simply roll their eyes thinking that hypnosis is more mumbo-jumbo for the woo-woo set who wear patchouli oil and live in Northern California or in Boulder, Colorado.
The Need for Experimentation and Detachment | Organizing Principles
“There is no such thing as failure–only feedback for course correction.”
It is rumored that a missile is of course over 90% of the time. That the purpose of its guidance systems are to constantly course correct, course correct, course correct. Most of the time, with an effective guidance system, we know that even given that necessity for course correction, the missile hits its intended target with a reasonably high level of accuracy.
The Importance of Self Esteem
As I mentioned in an earlier episode of Evolutionary Sales, it is impossible to over-estimate the importance of Self-Esteem, or as I prefer to say: “esteem for the self”.
Why would I assert it is impossible to over-estimate the importance of Self-Esteem?
Its viability is your immune system for life–and the antidote to most of your day-to-day emotional and interpersonal struggles and challenges. Whether you take things too personally, fail to rebound from rejection quickly enough, have nagging self-doubts, seek validation, or question your ability to create the life you want…it could be considered a self-esteem issue. In fact, whether it is true or not, it would be useful to consider all upset as sourced in self-esteem or insufficient ego development.
Self-esteem is one of the most important, yet most overused and misunderstood concepts in popular psychology today.
What Self-Esteem Is and Is Not
Nathaniel Branden, PhD
Copyright © 1997, Nathaniel Branden, All Rights Reserved
This article is adapted from “The Art of Living Consciously” (Simon & Schuster, 1997).Four decades ago, when I began lecturing on self-esteem, the challenge was to persuade people that the subject was worthy of study. Almost no one was talking or writing about self-esteem in those days. Today, almost everyone seems to be talking about self-esteem, and the danger is that the idea may become trivialized. And yet, of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
Having written on this theme in a series of books, I want, in this short article, to address the issue of what self-esteem is, what it depends on, and what are some of the most prevalent misconceptions about it.
Self-esteem is an experience. It is a particular way of experiencing the self. It is a good deal more than a mere feeling—this must be stressed. It involves emotional, evaluative, and cognitive components. It also entails certain action dispositions: to move toward life rather than away from it; to move toward consciousness rather than away from it; to treat facts with respect rather than denial; to operate self-responsibly rather than the opposite.
Imus in the Morning is Pimp Chic
Imus of Imus in the Morning, one of the original morning shock jocks, has been fired by CBS. He was released from his contractual obligations for an abhorrent offense: referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos”.
Unlike other times in the recent past, CBS did the right thing. We should not tolerate this kind of derogatory language. And the market adjusted—sponsors pulled their advertising, money was being lost, and so CBS made the appropriate political as well as financial and business choice. They fired this tone deaf man.
Just another reason to love the free market.
They did so after an initial 2-week suspension by MSNBC for the simulcast. CBS did so after the black community came up in arms and grilled him, quite appropriately, for his words.
Having said that, it was interesting to watch the professional racists come out against subtle racism. From Al Sharpton to Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton [again].
I guess it’s okay to be a racist as long as you are black.
Losing the Enlightenment: Victor Davis Hanson
From the Opinion Journal:
Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium.
But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.
No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization–never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty–we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.
Evolutionary Sales: Episode 1 and 2: Your Foundation for Your Success
As I have written recently, there has been a shift in the marketplace. In the 20th Century marketplace sales people talked about “closing deals” at best. At worst they talked about “shooting their prospects down like they were ducks in a shooting gallery”. This is not exactly a metaphor we should be living into as we evolve as a culture–and not a metaphor the leading edge of the marketplace will any longer support in the profit centers of the global marketplace, or the Functioning Core, as Dr. Thomas Barnett would say.
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