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Posts Tagged ‘self-esteem’

V – Visualize how you want to be.  Years ago I thought about selling Avon, but the idea terrified me.  Ring doorbells and talk to people I had never met before!!!   Encouraged by family and friends, I decided to give it a try.  The first few times I visited my territory, I drove around the neighborhood for awhile and then went home and told my husband that no one was home.  I couldn’t admit that I was afraid to ring that first bell.

My best friend Trudy was an Avon Lady, so I visualized myself as her.  I cast myself in the role of a successful, outgoing Avon Lady.  And that was the internal message I played over and over in my head when I started ringing doorbells.  Now I wish I could tell you that I was wildly successful and made lots of money selling Avon, but that wasn’t the case.  But what I learned about myself was priceless.  I could talk to people I’d never met.  I wasn’t completely comfortable doing it, but the people I met never knew.

Now I feel quite comfortable connecting with all sorts of people.  I begin with a smile and then a brief comment on whatever is going on in the moment.  Sometimes we continue the conversation and sometimes it’s just a brief, but pleasurable encounter, leaving both of us feeling good!

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Using the word brave, we’ll start with the letter B.  Brand yourself internally.  We all have those little voices in our heads and some are louder than others.  Companies pay thousands of dollars for ad agencies to develop a brand so that the business is readily recognizable.  “You deserve a break today . . .”  

 We brand ourselves, often unconsciously, by our internal dialog.  There is a body of evidence that proposes that language influences how we think.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are what we think about all day long.”  Replace any negative talk inside your head with positive talk.  Recall the words I used to describe a psychological fall: mistake, failure, fiasco, catastrophe.   How you label the “fall” will influence whether you try again. 

If you replace the word failure with lesson, for example, you are more likely not to give up.  That’s what Thomas Edison did and 10,000 lessons later, he had a light bulb.  

 Use the word catastrophe as the descriptive and that’s when you crawl in a hole and never come out.

 The word failure gets a bit tricky, because there is also a difference between calling something you did a failure and calling yourself a failure.  Pay attention to how you speak about yourself to yourself.  Calling yourself a failure can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

 Developing a positive self-image and a brave heart starts with what’s inside your head!

Next up – R

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George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is now Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society (cnms.berkeley.edu).

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