How To Find Happiness Blog

How Are You Treated By Others?

Self-acceptance begins in infancy, with the influence of your parents and siblings and other important people.

Your own level of self-acceptance is determined largely by how well you feel you are accepted by the important people in your life.

Your attitude toward yourself is determined largely by the attitudes that you think other people have toward you. When you believe that other people think highly of you, your level of self-acceptance and self-esteem goes straight up.

The best way to build a healthy personality involves understanding yourself and your feelings.

Let The Light Shine In

This is achieved through the simple exercise of self-disclosure. For you to truly understand yourself, or to stop being troubled by things that may have happened in your past, you must be able to disclose yourself to at least one person. You have to be able to get those things off your chest. You must rid yourself of those thoughts and feelings by revealing them to someone who won’t make you feel guilty or ashamed for what has happened.

Understand What Makes You Tick

The second part of personality development follows from self-disclosure, and it’s called self-awareness. Only when you can disclose what you’re truly thinking and feeling to someone else can you become aware of those thoughts and emotions If the other person simply listens to you without commenting or criticizing, you have the opportunity to become more aware of the person you are and why you do the things you do. You begin to develop perspective, or what the Buddhists call “detachment.”

Be Honest With Yourself

Now we come to the good part. After you’ve gone through self-disclosure to self-awareness, you arrive at self-acceptance. You accept yourself for the person you are, with good points and bad points, with strengths and weaknesses, and with the normal frailties of a human being. When you develop the ability to stand back and look at yourself honestly, and to candidly admit to others that you may not be perfect but you’re all you’ve got, you start to enjoy a heightened sense of self-acceptance.

Do An Inventory Of Your Accomplishments

A valuable exercise for developing higher levels of self-acceptance involves doing an inventory of yourself. In doing this inventory, your job is to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative.

Think of your unique talents and abilities. Think of your core skills, the things that you do exceptionally well that account for your success in your profession and in your personal life right now.

Think About Your Future

Think about your future possibilities and the fact that your potential is virtually unlimited. You can do what you want to do and go where you want to go. You can be the person you want to be. You can set large and small goals and make plans and move step-by-step, progressively toward their realization. There are no obstacles to what you can accomplish except the obstacles that you create in your mind.

Action Exercises

Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, sit down with your spouse, or a good friend, and tell him or her about something that is troubling you and is still causing you unhappiness.

Second, develop perspective on your problem by standing back from it and imagining that it was happening to someone else. What advice would you give to that person?

Third, think continually about the good experiences and accomplishments you have enjoyed in the past. Remind yourself regularly that you are a pretty good person and you’ve done a lot of good things in your life.

———————-
Article by Brian Tracy

Get Brian Tracy’s 21 Success Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires for FREE!
“Did you know that every 60 seconds someone else in the world becomes a Millionaire?”
Wouldn’t it be great to know their secrets? Their formulas? The little-known facts? Well now you can - and ALL for FREE! Absolutely no commitments and no strings attached.
Get it Get it here.

You can’t make everyone happy. I’m sure you’ve heard this most of your life. It seems like a surface statement - it goes in one ear and out the other - but it runs very deep. You will never be able to please everyone. No matter what you do, what decisions you make, what kind of car you drive or where you live - someone is going to be disappointed with you. Putting the opinions and judgments of others before your own will only result in your failure. Learn to trust and believe in yourself for phenomenal success.

Are you constantly trying to maintain the peace in your office or home by making sure everyone is happy? Do you find yourself walking on eggshells everywhere you go, hoping no one will “start something”? Are you afraid of ruffling feathers when you’re out with your friends, so you agree with whatever they say? If you said yes to any of these questions then you my friend are a people pleaser, or on the fast track to becoming one.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with wanting everyone to be happy. Heck no! I want everyone to be happy 24 hours a day. But I’m not willing to compromise who I am to make that happen.

Sometimes you have to ruffle a few feathers - and that’s okay. You can’t be a “lesser” you just to make someone else happy. That’s not the way it works. Express yourself. Go ahead. But do it with love and a gentle voice. You’re not challenging anyone. You’re just being your authentic self.

When you stop saying “yes” to everyone and start expressing how you really feel, be prepared. The people who have only known the “suppressed” you are going to give you funny looks, and you’ll probably hear “what’s gotten into you” quite a bit. A few so-called friends may not ever speak to you again. But isn’t it better to know who your true friends are?

There is no such thing as a superiority complex. It’s only an inferiority complex hiding as superiority.

Action Step

Do you have people in your life that you are constantly trying to please? Are these people who you look to for approval? Do they always have opinions about your life and what you’re doing wrong?

Normally, we all have at least one of these people in our lives. But why do people act negatively toward us when we try to better ourselves? It’s not usually out of spite. Most of the time these people are either insecure about themselves and their lives, or afraid that once we begin living our dreams they’ll be left behind.

So, how do you keep your mind and your focus on your goals when these people are around? Well, the first step would be decide who you really want in your life - people who are going to support you or people who are going to bring you down. You are going to change your life and you don’t need any negative distractions. If those around you can’t listen and support you in your efforts, then they have no place in your life. Period.

If for some reason you cannot remove these people from your life, then you’ll have to decide not to discuss your life with them. If they ask you questions about what’s going on in your life tell them you’d rather not discuss it with them. Eventually they will stop asking and go away. If they offer advice anyway, simply thank them for the advice and ignore them. Try this a few times and see what happens. Negativity only survives where it is allowed to feed - starve it and it will move on.

About the Author:

Mark Victor Hansen, co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Series, has for more than 25 years, uniquely focused on the vital elements of human behavior that most affect our personal and professional lives and has influenced society’s top leaders and the general public on a global scale.
To learn more about Mark and to receive 20% off Mark’s best-selling audio programs - Sell Yourself Rich, How To Think Bigger, The Aladdin Factor and How to Build Your Speaking and Writing Empire
- visit http://www.YourSuccessStore.com or call 877-929-0439.

Somebody said you have to love what you do, but that’s not necessarily true. What is true is that you have to love the opportunity. The opportunity to build life, future, health, success and fortune. Knocking on someone’s door may not be something you love to do, but you love the opportunity of what might be behind that door.

For example, a guy says, “I’m digging ditches. Should I love digging ditches?” The answer is, “No, you don’t have to love digging ditches, but if it is your first entry onto the ladder of success, you say, ‘I’m glad somebody gave me the opportunity to dig ditches and I’m going to do it so well, I won’t be here long.’”

You can be inspired by having found something even though you are making mistakes in the beginning and even though it is a little distasteful taking on a new discipline that you haven’t learned before. You don’t have to love it, you just have to learn to appreciate America, appreciate opportunity and appreciate the person who brought you the good news; that found you.

Appreciate the person who believed in you before you believed in yourself, appreciate the person who said, “Hey, if I can do it, you can do it.”

If you will embrace the disciplines associated with the new opportunity you will soon find that your self-confidence starts to grow, that you go from being a skeptic to being a believer. And soon when you go out person to person, talking to people, you will find it to be the most thrilling opportunity in the world. Every person you meet - what could it be? Unlimited! Maybe a friend for life. The next person could be an open door to retiring. The next person could be a colleague for years to come. It’s big time stuff. And sometimes in the beginning when we are just getting started we don’t always see how big it is.

——-
Article by Jim Rohn, America’s Foremost Business Philosopher. To subscribe to the Free Jim Rohn Weekly E-zine go to here.