Podcasts: Ground Rules for High Self Esteem Parts 1 and 2. It is my honor to share these empowering FREE podcasts with you to make the most positive difference in your life. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Know Yourself
Accepting Yourself No Matter What Free Audio Podcast – Listen Now
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Accepting Yourself No Matter What Free Audio Podcast. You can listen now or pick up from where you left off at any time. Enjoy!! Continue reading
How to Passionately Soar in Life
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How to Passionately Soar in Life. Read, Enjoy and Love every minute of it! Continue reading
How to Set Healthy Boundaries in Hurtful Relationships
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Now we are going to establish your inner truth and backbone-so you will actually feel a solid sense of self based on your truth. Read More… Continue reading
From A to Z You Are
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The More Self Love You Have
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Video: How to Be Treated Like a Queen
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In this video learn what it takes to be treated like a Queen! Continue reading
HIGH SELF ESTEEM – Book Excerpt
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How can I be as confident as so many other people?
First, please stop comparing yourself to other people, because when we do that we are not valuing everyone’s inherent spiritual Divinity, as we are all equal. Second, when we compare ourselves to others, somehow we usually end up on the “lower” side of the spectrum.
If other people are radiating supreme confidence, they are usually following their own truth, and really don’t care about what other people think, how other people view them, or what other people say about them! They are living life according to what is true for them on the inside, and that is displayed in supreme confidence on the outside.
So live that way! Be the REAL you! Say and do what is true for you. Bring out your highest and best self at every opportunity. Follow what you really love in life, and live from your heart. There is nothing that can overcome a pure heart. When you are true to yourself, and you are true to others, sharing, expressing, and living your truth – you will feel a great deal of inner confidence, and then you can share “how” YOU are so confident with others!
I Tried to Belong Because I Wanted to Fit In
I tried to belong because I wanted to fit in, and perhaps you tried to fit in, too.
Fit into what?
Social acceptance. Peer acceptance. Parental acceptance.
We were trying in myriad ways to gain acceptance from the outside because we did not fully know who we were from the inside.
We may have tried to get good grades in school, or to look a certain way. But no matter what we tried, that sense of belonging was based on something outside of us rather than on who we were within.
You and I had talents and gifts that might have been stifled or honored. But no matter how much we were applauded or scolded, our search for inner knowing was stunted during these years—because we could not identify with soul wisdom on the outside. And I am sure you will agree that we could rarely talk about it to those in our lives at that time.
How were we supposed to know ourselves during our preteen years? By our surroundings and how we felt in our environment. During those years of inner innocence, we only knew if we felt safe and honored, or unsafe and dishonored.
Our achievements may have been wonderful or paltry—but we were never taught to honor our own authentic power. We were taught to give it away. And we were taught to measure our worth by the grades we received, the way we looked, the ribbons we won, or whether we obeyed our parents. Our worth was all conditional.
So we were conditioned to tiptoe around outer conditions to get a greater sense of who we were, and our golden moments were when we received outer approval or validation.
Our most treacherous moments occurred when we forsook our own identity or truth to gain acceptance from the outside. These betrayals remained within our cellular memories for quite a number of years.
We learned adaptation. But we never learned self-honor. We learned to listen to everyone other than ourselves.
We learned to obey what others said as opposed to what was true for us. We watched TV and saw values portrayed that were the opposite of our reality. We longed for what was on TV, where the children were honored. Were you honored? At times I was, and at times I wasn’t. Like me, you learned to adapt to a constant sea of conditioned responses in order to feel safe, secure, accepted, and honored.
You may have been honored for certain behaviors that to this day you call your strengths. You may have been dishonored for other behaviors, and you may still be grappling with how to grow beyond whatever part of yourself you have disowned.
It is vital for you to remember that we incarnated into this life to be all we came here to be. You do have a purpose, and yet during your preteen years you might never have been honored for your true inner gifts. You may have learned to stifle your greatest talents and attributes in order to keep the adults in your life feeling secure with the limited wisdom they may have had about you. Many adults might have felt threatened by your special traits. Perhaps they didn’t know how to relate to you. Years ago, many people believed that children were at their best when they were quiet. It was said that children should be seen but not heard. As a result, few of us were taught to speak out and rock the boat! Few of us were taught to prepare for a life in which self-sufficiency, creativity, spiritual gifts, independence, and self-expression would be honored.
We were told to believe in the Cinderella theory, and to validate our worth from the outside in—and that alone has taken decades of pain to overcome. You may not have overcome it yet—but you are about to.
Were you praised for being the real you when you were a preteen? I would venture to say you were praised for listening, or obeying, and perhaps for a talent or two that your family liked to see.
If you belong to the vast majority of women who were raised to believe in everything other than the core of who they are, you most likely find it quite difficult to learn how to know yourself when you were mostly praised for obeying others.
This is the hallmark of forgetfulness among women. You forgot who you were while you were busy looking for ways to gain acceptance from those around you. Your wise soul could not relate to those people and circumstances, and perhaps you had few if any people you could share your truest feelings with—so they, too, became lost.
How can you know yourself when you can’t talk about your innermost feelings with the people around you?
How can you know yourself when you are held to a standard of acceptance based solely on your observed actions or performance? Did anyone ever ask you to honor the wisdom of your soul?
I doubt that they did—because they had also forgotten the wisdom of their own souls as they played out the roles taught to them based on the morals and beliefs of the society in which they were raised.
Many of us were not raised in a society that appreciated lightworkers. They are people (and you may be one of them) with spiritual gifts who openly share and express those gifts in order to help others awaken and evolve in our world. Many times their spiritual gifts are not openly received, and they are negatively labeled as “New Age fruitcakes.” You may be a highly evolved soul stifled in a spiritual closet. You may have wisdom within you that is so vast. And at the same time you may have next to nobody with whom you can relate or share, nobody you can even learn from.
This book is in your hands because you want to reclaim your radiance. You want glowing confidence.
Everything you want is everything you’ve already got on the inside. I take you on this journey through your life so you can see why you may not feel so radiant or whole or confident.
It is because the confidence you had when you were born was largely squelched during your younger years, and in your preteen years your inner radiance was based on whether you received approval from others.
How radiant do you expect to feel when you seek approval from others? The more approval you need, the more deeply you have buried your true self.
The more invalidated you feel, the more status you seek in society. The more you lack trust, the more you try to control the outcome of events in your life. By “trust,” I mean going with the flow, knowing that your highest good is always taken care of with divine guidance from the angelic realm and God, or whatever you believe is the highest source of pure love and wisdom in the universe, the source that is always present to assist you unconditionally in every moment of your life.
© Copyright 2006 by Barbara Rose, PhD All Rights Reserved. Chapter excerpt reprinted with permission from the book Know Yourself: A Woman’s Guide to Wholeness, Radiance & Supreme Confidence. (Rose Group ,January 2006) ISBN: 0974145734
Self Love & Your Relationships
By Barbara Rose, PhD
1. How do I love myself?
2. How can I feel like I don’t need approval and validation from anyone else anymore?
3. Why is it so hard for me to love myself?
4. What can I do to really feel happy inside?
5. Why is it so hard for me to take a compliment?
6. How can I know if someone loves me for who I am?
THE ANSWERS
1. How do I love myself?
Love of Self is simply a view of Self. If you view yourself with a great deal of compassion, and suspend all judgment, then replace that judgment with understanding, and compassion, you will come closer and closer to love your authentic self.
So many people have taken on the views of others during their earlier years, and have not learned how to replace those views with the pure truth.
The way to do this is to immediately stop insulting yourself, cutting yourself down, and degrading yourself.
This is paramount! Instead of saying: “I stink at this” say: “I am doing my best, and that is all that is needed.”
You have to bring all of the small insulting lies that you tell yourself up to your conscious awareness.
Once you NOTICE what you are actually telling yourself, and if it is degrading, simply notice it without any judgment whatsoever, and then replace it with something more compassionate and understanding.
Speak to yourself the way you would to someone that you have great respect for.
Love for Self, and love for any other person comes from our views and perceptions. It is all within the mind. Our mind is governed by our thoughts. Our thoughts create our feelings. Our feelings urge us into action, and the cycle continues.
So in order to truly love yourself, you must change how you view yourself, and that can only be with complete compassion, care, respect, and honestly taking a conscious effort to change the verbal abuse you dish out to yourself when you are not even aware of it most of the time.
People that love themselves do NOT degrade themselves. I wouldn’t dare degrade YOU, so please immediately stop degrading yourself, and come to embrace your unique qualities. You chose those qualities and attributes for your unique contribution in this world.
Honor what makes you “different” because that is your unique Light that you are on this Earth to shine!
Treat yourself the way you wish someone else would treat you, and always give yourself a heartfelt hug for the sacred person that you are.
2. How can I feel like I don’t need approval and validation from anyone else anymore?
If you are going to base your sense of self worth on the changing views and perceptions of others, then it is like building a house on shifting sand.
Every person has the right to their own views and perceptions, and no one has the right to judge you.
It is solely your view of self that matters, because only you can live your truth!
You know what feels true for you inside and what does not. Another person cannot ever live your truth, or tell you what is true for you.
Once you start to honor what feels true for you in your heart, and simply go for it without even speaking about it to anyone else, you will come to feel a great measure of inner confidence that grows each time you honor what feels right to you in your heart – not your head, or your fears, but in your heart.
It takes practice, like anything else, and once you get used to honoring and following your own inner truth, you will no longer feel the need to receive validation and approval from anyone, ever.
3. Why is it so hard for me to love myself?
It is hard because no one ever taught you how to honor yourself, your preferences, your talents, abilities, strengths, inner gifts, and areas of self expression that are uniquely yours.
So if you were never taught how to do something, why are you being so hard on yourself?
Now, all you really need to do – which is actually quite simple, is to tell yourself every good quality you have on the inside in front of the mirror, each day, based on your observable actions.
Begin a dialogue to become friends with the person you see every day.
So if you fed your pet, that is being caring. If you called a friend that is going through a hard time – that is being compassionate. If you went to work so you can pay your bills – that is being responsible.
So you are to walk up to that face in the mirror, and as hard as it will be for your ego to do this dialogue, what will happen is that you are slowly, day by day, going to become your own best friend. You are going to feel more self-appreciation. You are going to feel more care for yourself. This mirror process truly works! I have taught it to countless people over the last decade, and I also had to go through it myself for over two years, every day, to chip away at the lies I was told growing up, and replace it with authentic truth, based on my observable actions, so my big ego would actually believe me.
Trust that there will be fierce resistance to this from your ego in the beginning. I actually cursed at myself my first time in front of the mirror over a decade ago. I wouldn’t dare curse at myself now!
I can attest that every single person I teach this to, and share this with, now loves themselves genuinely. The ego is melting away, along with the self-degrading lies.
If you really want to love yourself, the old beliefs must be transformed. It is like cleaning out an inner closet with an old belief system, and replacing it with authentic truth.
No one can give this to you but you.
No one can love you and make you feel lovable.
You have to know and believe you are lovable.
This is just one technique that cost nothing, and brings about astounding change every single time.
You have to also realize that it is your responsibility to learn how to appreciate yourself, no matter what circumstances are facing you, and never seek to validate yourself from the outside in, because you can only be validated from the inside out. This will get you there a LOT faster than anything I have ever come across.
4. What can I do to really feel happy inside?
First, do the mirror technique that I outlined above twice a day, for two years.
Then, imagine that you have a clean slate before you – called your life – and that there was a guarantee that if you followed your truth, you could NOT FAIL.
What do you really want to do with your days and nights? If you had twelve million dollars in the bank, and you already owned every THING that you have ever wanted to own, what would you love to do so much that you would do it for free?
What are the natural talents and abilities that you have? What are you naturally good at? What makes you feel so alive?
These are the questions that you have to ask yourself, so that you can get to the core of who you are on the inside, and then you will be able to live it, and love every minute of it on the outside.
The only things that make me feel happy are when I am with my children, when I am giving my private consultations and intensives, writing (this for you : )) working (in absolute JOY) on inspire! magazine, going out in nature, doing my hobbies, really enjoying the night sky, or a sunset – they are simple pleasures. Being with friends and laughing – that’s something we could all use more of! Bringing through information from Divine Source in my writings – I love every minute of it! I love to travel (sometimes) and there is so much in life that I love. So I create time to do it all during my days and nights.
I had to CREATE my life, no one gave it to me.
You have to create the life of your dreams, based solely on what you love, and on how you can serve from your heart so that you are really making a difference.
For me, personally, there is no greater joy than when I am making a difference – that’s why I love the work (joy) that I do so much!
Many times I am volunteering and do NOT get paid for my work – like right now. And I still love it just as much as if I was paid ten thousand dollars for the few hours it takes to put this together.
You came into this life for a purpose. The key is to find out what that purpose is, so you CAN move in that direction, and live your life in-joy!
It is then that you will be doing everything that will make you happy, because you will be living from the inside out, rather than looking for an answer from the outside in.
5. Why is it so hard for me to take a compliment?
Probably because you are so used to taking insults. I was there too! If someone complimented me I would say: “Oh, that’s not true.” Because what I really wanted was more validation. I then learned a simple technique that actually changed that. I learned to simply say Thank You.
For the first dozen or so compliments, it was really hard for me to do that. Then, I began to feel more comfortable accepting a compliment.
NOW, I learned NOT to take a compliment seriously at ALL – because it is based solely and completely on the views of another person, and what is in their mind – which has nothing to do with me!
Additionally, I don’t take an insult personally either – how freeing!
I can be completely open to constructive critique, such as when I’m working on a project, however, I no longer take it into the core of my being like I used to.
Just say “Thank You” when someone compliments you, and should anyone ever insult you, just know that it is coming from their own perceptions, and never take it seriously.
Moreover, people do like to express their views. So if someone does share their views with you, just know that they are entitled to them, and maintain your own view of self with a lot of loving compassion, and zero self-judgment – that is the key!
6. How can I know if someone loves me for who I am?
By your keen instincts, the subtle things you pick up on, and really being honest with yourself. Perhaps someone adores you and you may not feel worthy of that. So you may doubt that anyone can really love you for you.
When you really love and value yourself, in a genuine way – without all of the ego, you will come to trust your feelings and perceptions. You will instinctually “know” if someone is for real or not. The trick here is are you being real with yourself, or are you playing games with yourself, and not following your own truth?
We tend to doubt others when we doubt ourselves. We also pick up on the authentic feelings other people have for us when we are being authentic with ourselves.
Trust your feelings, and get your head out of the way. Move more into your heart center and dare to expose how you really feel – even if it just to yourself. You will find that when you are completely honest with yourself, and the feelings in your heart, you can then learn to trust what you are picking up from other people. You will trust yourself, and you will be able to follow what feels true for you. You will also know if someone really does or does not love you – you will know – once you come to know and honor what you feel inside fully.
© Copyright 2012 by Barbara Rose, PhD. All Rights Reserved.
