Social anxiety and low self-esteem…
Why you should drop it?
Why should you drop the concept of it?
Because they all come down to one basic thing and that is…
This is the concept that helped me greatly in overcoming my struggle with social anxiety.
Self-esteem tends to have ideas of high or medium or low or extra low or really high.
There’s a scale same with worth or value.
The problem is when we get into this game we always try to figure out where we are on this spectrum of self-esteem.
If you use the word self-esteem and it works for you, great but I found it not useful.
It puts you in a paradigm of trying to value yourself.
But when you’re in a paradigm of self-acceptance, you either self-accept or you don’t.
And then you ask yourself is it bad to not self-accept…
Well, no. And you got 2 options, you’re self-accepting or not.
If you’re not self-accepting, then you might think it’s hard.
You can be self-accepting and not, back and forth until you get the hang of it.
I find certain points where I am not self-accepting in my life and there’s something happening that I don’t want to happen or I get to be somewhere I don’t want to be.
But then because I’ve developed this skill I can go:
I’m just in resistance to what I’m feeling and my thoughts. I’m making up this thing and I’m resisting it. I accept that that was my thought or emotions but not me. I accept that I said that but that wasn’t me intrinsically.
That was the behavior that I did and it wasn’t good. I didn’t behave well doesn’t have to do with my intrinsic value as a human being.
So when you learn to self-accept, you learn to separate you from your behavior, feelings, thoughts, etc. They are part of you but they are not you.
We think where our thoughts, behaviors, mind and that’s why we get into trouble, we get caught in a soup and we think negative about ourselves like we’re a bad person.
No, that’s not right.
If you did something bad to somebody, you just need to frame it in terms of self-acceptance like this:
I’m a person who behaved in a poor way and said nasty things to a person.
instead of..
I’m a bad person because I said nasty things to another person.
It’s more than just a thought, it’s a feeling that you start to incorporate as you start to practice this.
I did a lesson in my dissolve anxiety course, which is probably one of the most powerful lessons and it has to do with the art of self-acceptance and also compassion which is an important part.
Right now I’m talking conceptually about self-acceptance and why I think it is a better model to use in self-esteem or self-worth even confidence because when you self-accept it’s easier to take a look at your behavior that you do want to change.
Say you want to change things but you’re okay as you are right now and you can actually make the change towards those easier because you’re not judging yourself as those behaviors.
It’s easier said than done but it’s also easier done than said..
when you start to get the hang of it.
People think that their realities are their thoughts.
They don’t see that their thoughts are filtering in their reality.
They can actually let those filters go and they can put in the ones they want.
We need these filters or beliefs to navigate through the world.
So it’s about using the beliefs, embodying, living from beliefs, the story that you want to create that’s useful to you.
I don’t say which story is good and bad.
I just say, here’s the story you want to live and here’s a social anxiety story.
I don’t say that social anxiety story is bad because that way I’m being judgmental.
Most people with social anxiety story are seeking a different story and they think that the story is reality but it’s just a story.
But if you judge it as bad and you need to get rid of it and it makes it harder to shift your story.
Once you learn to self-accept, you don’t have to worry being self-confident.
I used to do affirmations and I never believed it but once I got into self-acceptance, the confidence came out.
There is a competence to social confidence if you don’t know what to do or say.
I’m saying this because there are probably some people who just want to be able to interact without being really social and I teach the whole thing.
If you want to dissolve your social anxiety I can help you out.
If you want to have social skills, I can help you as well.
Because those are the things that I love to do.
Not only overcome my struggles with social anxiety but I also wanted to be more social.
Best,
David
