Mmmm Experts?
I Read an interesting article on the BBC website recently, except the only thing useful I got out of it was the inspiration to write this article. I’m always amazed at the "We have the deifinitve answer" statements made by some scientific researchers. It’s very closed-minded and not the most useful approach to researching matters of psychology, but there you go.
So back to this article – linked here for you to agree or disagree with. It appears that research has concluded that ’self help’ can actually be bad for you because people with low self esteem feel worse after making positive affirmations to themselves.
Hey sorry folks with low self esteem.
It seems the experts have spoken.
You can’t be happy and your life won’t get better!
That is the problem with fixed viewpoints. They contain too many assumptions, which are narrow-minded and hold back our progress. The assumption in this case is that people with low self esteem are beyond helping themselves.
Think about it. First of all, those who try any self development technique with the attitude that they are broken and need fixing are not going to get results very quickly and in fact may feel worse in the beginning, but that’s got nothing to do with the ’self help’ techniques: As described here. That has everything to do with their attitude. Any process of change, growth or improvement has to get messy and painful before it gets better.
Just think at how everyone of us came into this world. It wasn’t pretty! (but it is beautiful of course).
The fact is that it takes more than trying to affirm positive statements to yourself for a few days to change your life. In fact it takes longer than most people have the stamina for because you have to maintain the discipline to change your view of life and your view of yourself. You have to force yourself to think about things in a more desirable way before those thoughts become habits and that can take a while, by which time most people have given up. Some might even be heard saying "Well that didn’t work it just made me feel worse", so the way I see that article, all it did was conclude that we are stuck with our situation and if our situation is a poor one, then bad news, there’s no point trying to do anything about it.
I do have an issue with much of the media though. I don’t read the newspapers or watch the news. It’s mostly full of what certain groups of people want you to see and is rarely the whole truth, but I’m glad I saw this article because these days I am very clear about wanting to inspire people to find improvement in their life and I try and expose to people as much information as I can that will allow them the awareness that they have a choice.
In a nutshell, I don’t listen to any so-called experts. Not for long anyway. The best teachers in my mind are the ones who openly admit they are still learning and who are not above learning from their students either because teaching is a 2-way street, not dictation. Sounds like inspiration for another article!
The icing on the cake of that BBC article for me was this statement:
"A UK psychologist said people based their feelings about themselves on real evidence from their lives".
Did you get a degree to come up with that? Of course they do, it’s how most of us are conditioned since birth, which means that people have been creating a habit of whatever their attitude is for years. Try changing the root cause of the way you feel and then see what happens in the future.
I’d like to make a suggestion to the psychologists. Take a step out of your own boundaries and text books and conduct some research starting now with people who apply techniques to change the way they think and feel about themselves, whether they have low self esteem or not, then after several years, publish the results. You might learn something.
SELF HELP is just that. There is nothing in this universe that can "Self Help" you. In case anyone’s forgotten, "yourself" is you… or rather the character you have built over years in your own story of life.
There is always the option to change the story and actually some sequels are even better than the first story too!
From Longing to Living:
Bill O'Leary
Derek Sivers
Maria Palma
