Building You Back Up: Self-Esteem Strategies that Work

One of the most important virtues in the world is also one of the most misunderstood: humility. When most people hear that word, they think of self-deprecation, talking about how bad, or at least unremarkable or undeserving you are. Or they think of someone who is just extremely mild-mannered. It’s easy to see why this idea of humility is unappealing, because it is dull, and probably rooted in nearly as much falsehood as pride. But this is not the true meaning of humility. Really, I think humility comes down to just two things.

1. Believe the truth about yourself.
2. Don’t focus on yourself.

Simple, right? No self-deprecation required, no false modesty. You’re allowed to believe good things about yourself when they’re true, you’re just not boasting about them because your attention is not centered on yourself. Of course, simple doesn’t mean easy—and I certainly wouldn’t call humility easy. Life has all kinds of difficulties and distractions that attempt to pull us out of this mindset. But having talked last time about what real love (one might even say real goodness) looks like, today I want to talk about how to keep your faith in it, and in the truth of yourself.

Keep the Faith: Embracing Truth for Lasting Confidence

You may note my use of the word “faith.” While yes, it is usually used in a spiritual context, you can have faith (and lose faith) in any belief or fact. For example, you may know perfectly well that airplanes are an extremely safe way to travel, and still feel a little sense of fear or worry on takeoff, or when you hit turbulence. If someone allows that fear to grow and get away from them, you could say that they’re losing their faith in air travel. They believe the truth, but they have a conflicting fear-based belief which has become stronger.

I want to take the time to go over this because we’ve all heard the phrase “faith in yourself” so much that we’ve stopped thinking about it. To some of us, it may even take on a kind of mystical significance. But once again, all that we are really talking about is believing the truth.

My friend David Mills has an excellent teaching on fear that we can apply here. He says that whenever we’re afraid of something, we’re afraid of being either temporarily screwed or permanently screwed… and both are really nonsensical. It’s nonsensical to worry about being temporarily troubled because trouble is a chance to learn, because of ancient manuscripts that describe how to count suffering as joy, because it is part of the process of molding us into a better person, and because it will pass. We know now, as a biological fact, that fear and worry do not help us to cope with difficult circumstances, in fact they do the opposite. We know that the right internal state can create perseverance and even joy in seemingly impossible circumstances—some of the most joyful and loving people I’ve ever met were in a children’s cancer ward. This fear of setbacks is really the biggest setback of all.

So what about something that could permanently screw you up? Well that could mean a few different things. If you’re worried about having your life ruined somehow, then first, remember that it is your internal state that makes the real difference in your life, and this can always get better. New loving relationships can always form, new passions can always be found. In times of tragedy this can seem untrue or even unfair, but it is the truth.

Building a Daily Confidence Habit

I don’t talk often about this sort of thing, for a couple of reasons. First, because this sort of advice is widely available elsewhere, and I don’t feel much need to add my voice to everyone else’s. Secondly, because my own methods are overall more effective. Still, there’s nothing wrong with supplementing prayer and energy work with some of these daily rituals, and I’m told that engaging with them helps the algorithm find me, so let’s talk about them!

Gratitude journaling is a good way to formalize the process of positive self-talk. Everyone’s been told that positive thinking is a good, healthy thing, but it’s rarely as simple as just choosing to change your thoughts. Why? Because most of our thinking is driven by subconscious beliefs. Change your beliefs (which is exactly what the healing codes are best at) and you change everything.

The practice of journaling with the specific aim of recording positive thoughts and beliefs has a more personal reason for appealing to me as well. My most recent method, Belief Mapping, is actually one of more older ones. It never worked as well as I thought it should, until recently, when I realized that when my clients wrote down what they were working on, it worked nearly every time (I still don’t know of a legitimate failure, after hundreds of clients).

So it’s fair to say that I’ve grown to respect the subconscious power of recording your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. I don’t think the medium matters much, whether you’re using paper and pencil, a computer, or an iPad. But the simple physical action involved seems to solidify these thoughts in the unconscious mind—which is a very powerful thing indeed.

However, I would add one proviso: be honest. Some twenty years ago or so, affirmations were the hot new thing in psychology. I had a friend who had a fairly serious stomach problem, and he would always repeat to himself, “My stomach problem is healing itself. My stomach problem is on its way to healing.” This wasn’t based on any evidence or even real belief, it was an attempt to actualize those affirmations through positive thinking. I never held much with them, because they weren’t based in truth.

Since then, affirmations have lost a lot of their popularity, and new research has come out to indicate that these sorts of “false” affirmations may actually do more harm than good. This isn’t surprising to me, if the individual is repeating something they don’t believe—because that, by definition, is a lie, which causes physiological stress. That’s the whole reason lie detectors do what they do. They’re not measuring truth and falsehood at all, they just read stress. So by all means, use those journals. Record and emphasize positive thoughts and beliefs, work through some of the less positive ones if you feel up to it. But don’t kid yourself.

Rewriting Negative Self-Talk

Fighting the unconscious mind is nearly impossible on a long-term basis. The unconscious is a million times more powerful than the conscious, and the memories and beliefs hosted there define most of our daily life experience. Sure, you can consciously think positive thoughts for a while, or clear your head entirely with meditation, but eventually you have to stop doing those things. You have to start thinking about your family, about your career, or at least about what’s for dinner. You stop holding back the unconscious, and it starts sending you the same old stuff.

This is where I have to bring in the advice from ancient manuscripts, since it has yet to be surpassed, and even the science which has begun to explain it is still very young. The ancient king Solomon the Wise had a couple of things to say on this subject, you may have heard the proverb: “guard your heart above all else, for from it flow all the issues of life.” I’ve asked a number of biblical scholars what Solomon meant by “the issues of life,” according to the original text, and they’ve all told me the same thing. It means everything. Literally every problem a person could conceivably have in life.

Now, I believe that the heart referred to in these ancient manuscripts is the same thing that modern science calls the unconscious mind. I can’t prove that, but it fits all of the data I have on the subject. The heart is the unconscious mind, which is a million times more powerful than the conscious mind, and contains the memories of every experience that has ever happened to us, as well as some generational memories (we now know that cellular memories are the source of illness and disease, thanks to research by Dr. Eric Nestler). No wonder that everything flows from it!

Rewriting the way you think and talk to yourself, what these ancient manuscripts might call “taking every thought captive,” is certainly no easy feat. It is extraordinarily difficult, but the most powerful and reliable way I’ve ever found is to simply turn every negative thought into a prayer. Don’t reword them, don’t embellish or worry about adding a lot of “thee’s and thou’s.”

Even if you don’t believe in god, think of it as talking to your unconscious mind. This seems to be an incredibly powerful way of unifying your mind on things that you know to be true—and that, in itself, will solve a lot of problems.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd