Breaking Up with Self-Esteem

Breaking up with Self-Esteem?

What? You may ask. Why on earth would I break up with self-esteem? I thought that was my primary goal - to increase self-esteem, self-worth, self-love and confidence. I thought that was the key to living a fulfilling life. I thought that high self-esteem meant belief in myself and my worthiness of happiness, joy and abundance.

Yes, yes, yes. All those things are still true. The title is a little misleading, and is based on an article called Why You Should Break up with Self Esteem that we read in November. It discusses common misconceptions about what self-esteem is, such as building yourself into a better person that is more worthy of your love.

But this faulty concept of self-esteem is not the definition we use here in the blog - as most of you know by now. We use the deeper definition which is about changing your thoughts and beliefs about yourself first, the same conclusion the article comes to. We at the Blueberry Planet thought it would be helpful to share another perspective on the true meaning of self-esteem. Check out the article and watch the video below so you know what we are talking about.

Focus on What you WANT

At a basic level, the article supports a point we've touched upon in some of the articles here, namely to focus on what you DO want, rather than what you DON'T want. The typical example would be rather than saying, "I don't want to keep repeating old patterns in relationships", say, "I want to have new healthy experiences in relationships." Turning the desire into an affirmative of what you do want is much more effective at making a change - not only because the focus is on the goal (not what you don't want, which just re-emphasizes it), but it's more inspiring to work towards a happy goal than avoiding an undesired outcome.

Beyond Self-Esteem and Affirmations

But the video takes things to a whole other level, where imagination soars and the skies are the limits.  In a certain way, children do not even have a concept of self-esteem at all - nothing to improve, not even the idea of believing in themselves more (as we talk about a lot on this site).

If you could wipe the slate clean and pretend you'd never had a bad experience in a romantic relationship, how might your desire be expressed. Beyond the "I don't want a bad one" and even beyond the "I want a good one", it might look something like this: "I'm going to meet my super hero companion and we are going to have adventures in life using the power of x-ray vision and flight!" Now, that may not be literal, but metaphorically, it could be so. What freedom and fun in this new way at looking at our dreams and desires!