This Article Continues From C: Courage & Confidence (Part 2)

CLICK FOR C: COURAGE & CONFIDENCE PART 2 >>

#2: Self-Respect

If you don’t feel validated in what you do, you will seek validation from others and external situations.

For instance, if you don’t feel valued in your job or that what you do matters to anyone, you will seek to feel valued and respected through your boss and work colleagues, even your clients and customers.

Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours will therefore reflect this need to be of value and to matter, which will be needy and self-serving. You will be motivated to do things only for the reward of being noticed and praised. The value in doing what you do won’t be in the good you can do for your team or your customers, rather its value will only be in the good that it can bring to you.

But if that reward isn’t forthcoming, if you don’t get the attention and respect you feel you deserve from your boss, colleagues, or clients, then you will feel undervalued and resentful.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Do you feel that what you do isn’t good enough?
• Does the value in what you do need to be recognised?
• Are you what you do? A human doing or a human being?
• Do you respect who you are and what you do?

7 Tips for Self-RESPECT

#1: RESPOND with kindness, and don’t react with negative judgement of yourself or of others.

#2: EMBRACE your mistakes and allow yourself to fail—your greatest lessons for success will come from your failures.

#3: SERVE and treat others as you would have them serve and treat you.

#4: PRAISE yourself for your efforts and celebrate your victories.

#5: ENGAGE help when you need it and don’t try to do everything on your own.

#6: CRY if you have to and accept your vulnerability—you’re only human.

#7: TRY and keep trying to reach your worth goal—never give up.

#3: Self-Worth

If you don’t feel validated in why you do what you do, you will seek validation from others and external situations. For instance, if you don’t feel that your life or work has any purpose or meaning, you will seek to find meaning and purpose in things other than yourself.

Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours will therefore reflect this attitude, which will be needy and self-serving. Either your craving for meaning and purpose will cause you to hunger for it, or cynicism will get the better of you and you’ll just give up and say life has no meaning, so why should you bother anyway?

If you hunger for purpose and meaning in external things, you will hunt with false hope, little realising that you will never capture what you are hunting because nothing can give you purpose and meaning other than yourself, and that can only be achieved with any permanence through self-love because love is the ultimate purpose and meaning of life.

Only you can love yourself. Only you can love what you do. Only you can love others as yourself. Only you can love Life. No one else can love for you. Nothing else can give you meaning.

5 Tips for Self-WORTH

#1: WELCOME the good and the bad along your path to your worthy goal—they are lessons you need to learn along the way.

#2: OFFER to help whenever you see a need—there’s a reason you are where you are at any given moment.

#3: REMEMBER that who you are and what you do matters, even if it’s difficult to see.

#4: TREASURE each moment as the gift of life that it is.

#5: HONOUR your purpose by remaining true to the path of your worthy goal.

#4: Self-Approval

If you don’t feel validated in how you do what you do, you will seek validation from others and external situations. For instance, if you don’t feel that you’re clever enough or that what you do is ever good enough in the opinion of others or even in your own opinion, you will seek to find approval and self-worth through doing rather than being.

Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours will therefore reflect this attitude, which will be needy and self-serving. You will be motivated to be cleverer and better than others. You will become extremely competitive and you will desire to win at all costs because your sense of identity and self-worth will be dependent on your need to be first and your superiority over others. When you win and you’re the top dog, you feel great, but when you don’t win it feels as though a bottomless pit has opened in the ground and you have fallen into it.

Feelings of not being clever enough or not being good enough will also drive you to the unending search for perfectionism. The logic works this way: “If I’m perfect, who can reject me?” Not yourself and not anyone else, or so you assume.

But perfectionism is a false ideal because, first of all, there’s no such thing, so you’ll always be chasing a phantom and worshiping an illusion; and second, perfectionism gets in the way of being effective. It’s also exhausting trying to become something that you cannot ever achieve and reach an end goal that keeps on moving further out of reach.

Perfectionism is therefore a barrier to your effectiveness and succees. It gets in the way of your success because there will always be something more you can do to be perfect and thus it becomes a distraction from getting on with what you should really be doing. If you’re not careful, perfectionism can become an unintentional cause of procrastination.

I too have fallen many times into the trap of perfectionism, and every time I do so it is invariably because of my lack of feeling good enough or my fear of not being accepted. In my early years of writing at the turn of the Millenium, I could spend ages deciding on the use of a comma. Should I put it in? Should I take it out? Then I’d make a decision to put the comma in, only to suffer a gnawing doubt of whether or not it was the right decision. Then I’d delete the comma, satisfied that the sentence read much better, only to agonise over whether I should have left it in or not. I in fact edited the opening page of my medical thriller, Ananda, 17 times. Probably more, actually, 17 was when I’d had enough and stopped counting how many times I edited the first page.

Silly, really, when I look back on it, but that’s how perfectionism can get in the way of being effective. Don’t let it stop you.

Tic-Toc Method

• Take in Calm, Turn Other Cheek
• Increases your positive Problem Solving Orientation
• Take in Calm:
  • 17,280 breaths per day = 17,280 opportunities to ‘take in calm’ (at approximately 12 breaths per minute)
  • overrides the primitive ‘reactive’ centre of the brain; plus it activates the Vagus Nerve (parasympathetic = calm emotions); plus it centres you in this moment of now (i.e. attentiveness Vs inattentiveness)
• Turn the other cheek
  • builds responsiveness, not reactiveness (maturity Vs immaturity)
  • respond with positive emotions (e.g. kindness, understanding, empathy, non-judgement), not react with negative emotions (e.g. anger, hate, jealousy, pride, fear)

On the other hand, if you have a solid sense of self-worth and internal value, you will feel complete in who you are and, as such, you won’t feel needy. Instead, you will seek to give others what they are looking for and to be generous with your time, help, patience, and even money, if required.

Knowing your value and self-worth feeds into your self-belief. The more self-belief you have, the more you believe you can do it. The more you believe you can do it, the more courage and confidence you have to face down any fears and surmount any obstacle along your path to your worthy cause.

8 Tips for Self-APPROVAL

#1: ACKNOWLEDGE that you don’t know everything and can’t do it all—you’re not a robot.

#2: PRACTICE self-forgiveness every day—don’t put bricks on yourself and pile up the pressure to always be perfect.

#3: PUT one foot ahead of the other and keep climbing your mountain, because no-one else can do it for you.

#4: REACH for your worthy goal every day by doing at least 1 thing that will bring you nearer to it.

#5: OPEN your heart to self-love and close your mind to negative self-talk.

#6: VALUE who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.

#7: ACCEPT your perfect imperfections.

#8: LIVE and let live—the past is the past and all you can do is focus on this present moment, because only now are you alive.

This article is an excerpt from Dr. Scott Zarcinas’ upcoming book, The SCOPE of YOU!

Why Success in Anything You Do Depends on Your SCOPE (and Your Failure Too) 

---

Broaden Your SCOPE. Take the First Step to Create the Life You Want Today!

 

 

---

ABOUT DOCTORZED

Dr. Scott Zarcinas (aka DoctorZed) is a doctor, author, and transformologist. He helps pro-active people to be more decisive, confident, and effective by developing a growth mindset so that they can maximize their full potential and become the person they are capable of being. DoctorZed gives regular workshops, seminars, presentations, and courses to support those who want to make a positive difference through positive action and live the life they want, the way they want, how they want.