Dec
7
Counterintuitive Counsel to Boost Your Self-Esteem
December 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Posted by: Kathleen Daniel
This excerpt from Debbie Ford’s newsletter, The Light and Dark, paradoxically suggests diving directly into your shadow – nemesis and harbinger of midlife – to raise your self-esteem. An elegant tool to pierce the heart of the awakening at midlife.
“So how do we raise our self-esteem? There is only one way … I am here to tell you that it is the very thing that you despise and don’t want to be that can help you become the person you always wanted to be.
It was my weakness and suffering from addiction that brought me to my knees and opened me to greater realities. Arrogance is what made me believe I knew more than most people, and it was ignorance that made me get down on my knees every night for years and beg God for spiritual wisdom and new ways to integrate my emotional pain.
My fear of being called lazy gives me my drive. It is my vanity that dresses me in the morning and gets me to work out even when I’m tired. My fear of being a negligent mother makes sure that I go to all the flag football games (even when I’m busy) and drive my son to school (even when I’m tired and he could take the bus).
It is my greed and love for fine things that drive me to work when others are out partying, and it is my denial of the evil and angry judgments of others that allows me to stand in front of group after group and tout my message — to heal the split between the two forces that exist within each of us. And it is my depressive nature that birthed the Pollyanna in me that relentlessly tries to transform the untransformable and never gives up hope on the hopeless.
My feelings of inadequacy have me wake up in the morning and ask what I can do to make my world a better place. My need to matter, to be all used up when I die, was birthed out of the fear that I, Deborah Sue Ford, would die unnoticed, that I would be nothing more than a middle-class Jewish girl from Hollywood, Florida.”
You can read the entire excerpt from Chapter 4 from her book, Why Good People Do Bad Things: How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy on her website.
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