Your Self-Esteem — Building Strategies: Point A to Point B
The act of eliminating excess stress in your life builds self-esteem simply by virtue of the fact that the elimination of stress makes you feel better. Thus, all of the stress management strategies in this book have the potential to build self-esteem. And working through those strategies with the specific purpose of building self-esteem can make them work even faster. And remember, you have to finish. You have to start at point A and work all the way to point B without stopping or getting distracted.
None of these strategies take more than thirty minutes, so you don't have any excuse not to do them. Anybody can spare thirty minutes out of a busy day in the name of feeling better and becoming more efficient. Isn't feeling better about who you are and how you are spending your life worth at least thirty minutes of your day?
Take a Reflection WalkThis strategy is for people who (a) don't get enough exercise on most days and (b) tend to worry too much or mentally obsess about negative things in their lives. You know who you are! A reflection walk is a way to proactively take control of your physical and your mental state, at the same time, for one short, thirty-minute period. If you worry all day, sit at a desk all day, or feel rotten all day, then you need a daily reflection walk, and you need it badly. Even you can pretend to be an active optimist for thirty minutes. You may have to pretend at first, but eventually, subtly, the effects of your reflection walk will begin to take hold.
If you don't have a good (pleasant, safe) place to walk in your neighborhood or if the weather is rotten, have a walking backup plan, such as the track, the gym, or the mall.
Although, as you know, exercise helps relieve stress, a reflection walk can help relieve stress and make you feel better about yourself at the same time. This is what you do: First, put on comfortable walking shoes and comfortable clothes that will “work” for moderate exercise and also make you feel good about yourself. In other words, let your criteria be to dress so that if you happen to meet someone you know, you won't feel self-conscious about what you are wearing. Brush or comb your hair. Wash your face, put on some sunscreen, and, if it makes you feel more human, put on some makeup. Go to the front door and take five deep, full breaths. Then, out loud, say: “I'm ready to reflect upon all the good things in my life.”
Then, out the door you go! Walk for thirty minutes at a moderate pace — just fast enough to feel as though you are getting some exercise but not enough to wear you out or make you frustrated or your muscles sore. As you walk, continue to take deep breaths and, most importantly, begin your mental list of all the things that are good about your life. Here are some questions you might consider:
What is working?
What parts of your life make you feel great?
Who are the people in your life that make your life better?
Whom do you love?
What do you like about yourself?
What are some of your fondest memories?
Where do you love to go?
What are your favorite things to do?
What foods make you feel really good?
What is your favorite book?
What is it that you love about your home, your pets, your car, and your job?
In what areas of your life are you successful?
Don't undermine your own efforts at building up your self-esteem by telling yourself that any accomplishment isn't worth celebrating. If you, say, finally balanced the checkbook, or vacuumed, or turned off the TV last night earlier than you normally would have, that's great! Or, maybe you didn't eat that bag of cookies or spend that $50 on stuff you don't need. You can and should feel good about things like that!
You can get as general as “I love my kids” or as specific as “I set up a system for paying my bills on time that works really well.” If you are having trouble focusing or thinking of things, set a goal, such as adding one item to your mental list for every twenty-five steps or for every five breaths. If you get stuck, stop until you think of something, then move on.
The challenge of the reflection walk is to put aside for the thirty minutes all the things that aren't working, the negativity, the things you think you should be doing. After the walk is over, you can get back to work, but put all your stressful thoughts aside for now. They'll still be there when you get back, but they may not seem quite so overwhelming, once you've put them in perspective. After a reflection walk, your life will probably look a lot better, and you'll feel a lot better about yourself, too.
Clean Your Kitchen SinkIf you are housecleaning-challenged, and if the state of messiness in your house is often directly related to your level of stress, then I have the Web site for you. This Web site can transform the life of anyone who feels they are incapable of getting their housecleaning under control — which is something that can severely undermine your self-esteem but which is a condition of life for thousands of people. If you are one of them, you must go to
This Web site contains a complete system for getting your house — and, by association, your life — in order, even if you've never been able to do it before. Flylady has a few ground rules and allows no whining about them. One of the most important Flylady rules is to keep your kitchen sink empty, clean, and sparkling.
Another Flylady golden rule is that every single morning you must learn to get up, make your bed, and get dressed all the way to your shoes. Many resist at first, but once they try it, they discover the miraculous effects. It's amazing. (I'm here to tell ya'!)
A clean sink has incredible stress-relieving power. As Flylady says, “As the kitchen goes, so goes the rest of the house.” I would add, “As the kitchen goes, so goes the rest of your life!” The kitchen is the heart and soul of the house, and if one's house is symbolic of one's life (as it is in
If you aren't one of those people who has a hard time keeping things clean, this step isn't for you. But, if you are like me, you may discover that the kitchen is a clear and direct reflection of how your life is going. When it sparkles, you feel great about yourself and everything in your life is working. When it gets to that point where you won't let anybody in there unless they live in your house and insist on being fed, then chances are, your life is in disarray, too.
The kitchen is a ready-made jumping-in spot in that stress cycle I mentioned earlier in this chapter. No matter how busy you are, no matter how behind or overwhelmed, if you take just thirty minutes — or even fifteen — to go into your kitchen, put all the clean dishes in the dishwasher away, load up the dishwasher with dirty ones, fill the sink with hot soapy water, wash the rest of the dishes that are sitting around (or, if you don't have time, just set them aside on another counter for now), then drain the sink and scrub it down with cleanser, a scrubbing pad, and a spritz of glass cleaner for shine at the end, you won't believe the impact it will have on your self-esteem.
Do this every day, especially every evening, and the effect of waking up and walking into the kitchen to face a bright, shiny sink — as opposed to a sink piled high with dirty dishes, making it impossible even to fill up the teapot — will astound you. Really! This works. And if you need help from there, check out Flylady's Web site.
The best part about getting into the habit of keeping your sink clean is that the rest of the kitchen will soon follow. And once you are in the habit of keeping your kitchen clean, it only takes a few minutes a day to keep it that way.
When it comes to natural beauty — meaning forests, mountains, flower gardens, and other such scenery — some people can take it or leave it. Other people find that being in or even just looking at natural beauty has a profound effect on how they feel about their lives, the world, and themselves. If you are interested in Ayurveda and have discovered that you are a Pitta type, you are probably one of these people. But even if you don't know anything about Ayurveda, you probably know whether natural beauty has a deep effect on you.
Even if you live in the city, you can use natural beauty to help you relieve stress and feel better about yourself. Surrounding yourselves with images of natural beauty can give you little lifts all day long. Here are some ways to accomplish this:
Use a computer wallpaper and/or screensaver that shows rotating images of stunning scenery. Sign up at Webshots, at
Tonight, instead of your usual sitcoms or drama lineup, watch the Discovery channel, Animal Planet, or a nature show on public television. It's good for your brain, food for your soul, and you just might learn something!
Spend thirty minutes puttering around your own microenvironment. Even if your yard or the area around your apartment building is small, it probably contains some green stuff. Meander, examining each tree, flower, patch of grass, or planted bed. Don't think about anything else. Just see how much you can observe.
Get to know the trees on your property. Some cultures believe the trees are spirit guardians. Look at and think about the trees surrounding your home. If the spirit moves you, you might even ask for their protection. Who knows?
If you have no microenvironment on your property worth examining (although even a single flower can be worth examining), walk or drive somewhere close by, for example, a park or a nicely landscaped neighborhood. Walk around and look, look, look. Fill up your brain with natural beauty, and there won't be room for anxiety, at least not during that thirty minutes you've reserved for this purpose.
Grow an herb garden or a small flower garden, either from seeds or by transplanting purchased plants in a large planter. Put the planter on your patio, deck, front step, or back step, or in a sunny window. Check and tend it daily. It's like taking vitamins for your soul!
Go to your local library or bookstore and browse through a book that contains large color photographs of natural beauty. Maybe you'll feel transported by a photo essay on Hawaii, or maybe the Rocky Mountains are more your style. Or Europe? Africa? The Central American rain forests? Let your imagination whisk you away for thirty minutes.
Plan your next vacation around a natural wonder, such as the Grand Canyon, or take a cruise to the Caribbean, or camp in a national park or forest, or go to a beach in a neighboring town. Okay, this takes more than thirty minutes, but not if you average it out over the year.
This one's for all of you who feel like all the little things in your life are out of control. If you have so many things to do that you can't seem to finish any of them, take thirty minutes and complete just one of the short chores listed below. You'll get a feeling of accomplishment you could never get from half-finishing twenty different chores. None of these chores takes very long, but they are all things that a lot of people have a hard time getting around to. When they remain undone, they weigh on your mind and add to your stress and the sense that you aren't able to keep things under control.
Doing just one thing on this list each day can make a huge difference in how you feel about yourself. Try it for a week. You'll see.
Clean out your car. Throw out all the trash, return the recyclables, put everything back in the house that belongs in the house, and attack those floor mats with the hand vac. Then, wipe down the windows with glass cleaner.
Clean out your purse or wallet. Throw away all the junk you don't need. File the receipts. Put everything in the right place. Flatten out your money and stack it so that all the bills face the right way. Clean out all the loose change and put it in a jar somewhere. (If you do this every day, you may soon have enough change in that jar to cover college tuition!)
Spend some quality time with your pet. Pets relieve stress. And because they seem to love us unconditionally, they can make us feel pretty good about ourselves, too.
Clean out the coat closet. Take out all the things that don't belong in there and put them away properly. Hang up all the coats that have fallen or have half fallen off the hangers. Store all the scarves, hats, mittens, and earmuffs in a bin. Give away all the stuff that doesn't fit anymore or that nobody wants. Wow! Who knew you had all that space in there?
Balance your checkbook. Quit griping or dreading it. Just go do it.
Call the dentist and make that appointment. And keep the appointment!
Go to your desk and take one manageable stack from your many stacks of things that need to be filed or put away, and file or put away everything in that one pile.
Drink a really big glass of water, all the way. Finish the whole thing.
Dust all the flat surfaces in your living room. This should take only five minutes, but it makes a perceptible difference.
Make your bed. Just do it.
Take a bath or a shower, then put moisturizer on every square inch of your skin. Put on a bathrobe and relax for fifteen minutes.
Read one full chapter of that book you've been trying to get to.
Sweep the garage. Don't worry about the other stuff in there; just sweep out all the dirt you can get to.
Remember that call you've been meaning to make to work out that problem with that company? Make the call.
Groom the dog. Just do it.
You know that thing you've been meaning to tell that person but keep forgetting or putting off? Tell him.
Set aside fifteen minutes — just fifteen minutes! — to start, experience, and finish your own personal time. Go to a quiet room after instructing others you are not to be disturbed, set a timer, and do something all on your own that you really want to do, and do it for fifteen minutes solid. Read, listen to music, sew, whittle, whistle, whatever. Don't gyp yourself. Do the whole fifteen minutes, start to finish. Voilà! You're ready to continue with your day.
Was that so hard? I bet you feel better already.
Take a water day. Don't drink anything but water all day long. Just for one day. (If you are addicted to caffeine, you might need just one cup of black coffee or tea in the morning to avoid the inevitable headache.) If you drink about eight cups of water during the day, you'll feel lighter, airier, and you'll have more energy.
