50 Mindful Steps to Self Esteem: A Quickstart Guide

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs register@allceus.com counselortoolbox. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's class 50 mindful steps to Self Esteem. The book was written by Janetti Morota and obviously I am just presenting information found in the book. What we're going to really look at here. We're not going to go through the book in depth step by step because obviously if this is something that sounds like it's a really good fit for you, you're going to want to read the book. But I am going to hit the highlights and talk about how self esteem is developed and how mindfulness activities can really be used to help enhance self esteem. One of the things in this book that I didn't like as much was the fact that that connection really wasn't made between why are we doing this particular activity and how does it build self esteem. So that's really going to be my goal throughout this presentation is to connect the dots for us. We'll explore how physical sensations give clues to what's important and whether you're living in harmony with your values, whether it's your head saying this is good, your gut saying, saying, and your heart and whether that's telling you that it feels like it's something you should do. So we're going to talk about head, heart and gut honesty. We'll identify and address thinking errors that may keep you stuck. We'll evaluate how emotions and the heart contribute to the development of self esteem and we'll examine how the environment impacts your self esteem. So with the nature of self esteem, what is it? How you feel about yourself is in contrast to who you think you should be is really what we talk about when we're talking about self esteem. So it's sort of a loosey goosey concept if you will. It's not something you're going to find in the dsm. It's just a concept or a construct that we are trying to help people understand more about themselves. The more rejecting you are of yourself, the more distress you experience. So if somebody is constantly telling themselves they're not good enough or they're stupid or they're fat or they're ugly or they're lazy, well yeah, they're not going to feel too good about themselves. Imagine how you would feel if somebody was constantly telling you that. So whether the rejection is coming from within your own head or from someone Else it's still creating a negative impact on the self esteem. And the more rejecting a person is of themselves, they're telling themselves they're not good enough. Then they seek other people to tell them they are okay and say, no, honey, you're fine. So it's important that people have their own self esteem and their own ability to tell themselves, good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me. In order to develop healthy relationships, you need to feel good about yourself. Self esteem is basically your relationship with yourself. It's you telling yourself you're okay. It's you being your own best friend. So before you can have a healthy relationship that's based on mutual respect and not just forming relationships to find somebody to validate you, you have to have good self esteem in order to develop healthy relationships. You also need to get in touch with yourself and your true values. When you're forming relationships with someone, you don't have to agree on everything. You may only agree on one or two things, but if those one or two things are very salient in your life, then you may end up being fast friends. So understanding what's important to you because you know, like attracts like. We're not like magnets. We like to be around people who share similar values and similar interests. And we also need to choose actions that are in harmony with our true self. So if we're doing things that really don't fit our personality, you know, maybe if I think back when I was in college, for a little while I was in a sorority, and that just isn't who I am. I'm not somebody who goes out to parties four nights a week. I am not somebody who is exceedingly social. The time that that's just not my temperament. That's not who I am. So choosing actions that are in harmony with myself ended up meaning leaving the sorority. Not because it was a bad thing, it just wasn't for me. But if I should have stayed in that, or if I would have stayed in that situation, then I would have been kind of going against my own internal tendencies and I would have always been sort of fighting myself. Self esteem means feeling okay about who you are, the way you are without having to fight yourself. So where does mindfulness fit in here? Mindfulness teaches people to live in the moment so they're not stuck in guilt or resentment of the past. You know, things have happened in the past, and a lot of my clients will when they present for treatment, Whether it's for depression or anxiety or anger or Addiction. I can't remember a client and I'm sure it may have happened at some point or another, but I can't remember a client who's ever gotten to the point of presenting for treatment who had just a rock in self esteem. Generally, there were some self esteem issues going on there. Whether they had developed over time or whether the person really had never had a strong self esteem, it didn't really matter. When they were in my office, their self esteem was pretty low. So helping them focus on the fact that you felt that way back then, that's how you felt. Not going to take that away from you. Let's talk about how you're feeling right now, not being paralyzed by fear of the future. People who have low self esteem often have a lot of anxiety because they fear rejection, they fear failure, they fear isolation. So anything that changes may cause them to have a lot of high anxiety. So mindfulness helps them learn to put one foot in front of the other, focus on how they're feeling at the moment, and realize that they can tolerate a little bit of ambiguity, they can tolerate forward movement. The cornerstone of mindfulness is acceptance. So when we're teaching people to be mindful, we're teaching them to accept how they feel non judgmentally, letting it be, not saying I shouldn't feel this way and being patient with themselves and with the situation. So when we think about self esteem, again, if we're experiencing a situation, we experience it non judgmentally. It's just. It is. You went to work, you got your evaluation, it wasn't what you had hoped it was. It is. It doesn't mean you're a bad employee. It doesn't mean that the world is going to come to an end. It just. It is letting the feelings of frustration or guilt or resentment or anger or disappointment be. That's just where you are at that point and not judging yourself harshly because self esteem is something that's always evolving. We aren't perfect. Oh my gosh, none of us is perfect. So even if you think of yourself as a relatively intelligent person, occasionally you're going to do some things that are really kind of silly. Are you going to let that negatively impact your self esteem or are you just going to accept that? You know what, sometimes I goof. Hopefully we can get to that point with our clients where they can accept lack of perfection. They can just be non judgmental about it and see it as it is and maybe find some positives in it eventually. Mindfulness teaches that when you trust yourself and act with awareness and Purpose, you become more self reliant. When some of my clients are in early recovery, they've spent so much time minimizing, denying, blaming, justifying, rationalizing that when they start getting honest and doing the next right thing, it's really scary. And they know what they're supposed to do. But their addicted mind says, nah, you really don't want to do that or that's going to be hard or you're going to fail. But they trust themselves and they do the next right thing, the acting with awareness and purpose, because they want to start living that recovery lifestyle. And lo and behold, they realized that they were able to do it. So they increased their sense of self reliance and you know, sometimes that'll happen. And whatever they did, they acted with awareness and purpose and it fell flat. Well, they can realize from that that they can also tolerate failure. They don't need somebody else to pick them up. They can exist even if it's imperfect. So let's switch gears a little bit to mindlessness and talk about how that impacts self esteem. When we ignore or invalidate how we feel, we're telling ourselves that our feelings are not important. Think about how that would make you feel if your significant other or your best friend came up to you and said, you know what, I don't really care how you feel and went on about their business. It would impact your self esteem a little bit. It would hurt. It would say, really, you don't care about me enough to pay attention to how I feel. Now, you know, as a therapist, I'm going to say if your best friend came up and said that to you, that probably means there's something going on with him or her. But when you're saying that to yourself, you got to say, all right, if I'm constantly ignoring and invalidating how I feel, then I'm telling myself I'm wrong or I'm not justified. So moving from that, how can I start paying attention and validating how I feel? One of the things that we talk about in mindfulness is just accepting that you feel the way you feel. It's not good or not bad, but once you acknowledge it, then you can do something about it. Mindlessness also encourages us to fail to integrate feelings, thoughts, sensations and urges. How many times, and I think we're all guilty of it, have you had a feeling and you didn't even really notice the feeling? You just went to a drop back behavior to sort of numb it? I'm guilty of stress eating and occasionally I will, you know, be wandering around in the kitchen and just randomly eating. And my husband will be like, what's wrong? You're stress eating. You need to go out into the garden or do something because you're going to be miserable later. And he knows. I mean, after 20 years, he knows. But it's important to be mindful of how you're feeling. So when we talk about mindful eating, for example, we talk about paying attention to why you're eating before you eat, say, okay, am I hungry or am I stressed? But mindlessness causes us to just basically stuff our feelings or ignore them. When we're running on autopilot and not making time for things that are important, which is getting us closer to where we want to be, how does that impact our self esteem? After a day or two, it's not, probably a huge, big deal. But at the end of a week or a month when you look back and go, well, I really wanted to get all this other stuff accomplished that was important to me, but I never found time for it. I just kind of got up, went to work, came home, took a shower, went to bed, repeat. So when we're running on autopilot, we're forgetting the things that are important that we are assigning meaning to. Another impact of mindlessness on self esteem is blindly adopting mainstream messages of who we are and what we should be, which may not be in harmony of who we really want to be. You know, if we think back into the, to the 70s, I think it was, you know, when I was little and they wanted to have everything gender neutral because they didn't want to communicate messages to children about what they should like or what they should play with. Today there is so much mainstream media between Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook and Google and television. And, you know, I could go on and on. There are. We are bombarded by messages telling us what we should wear, what we should look like, what our thoughts should be, what our opinions should be, and if we follow those blindly without checking in and going, is this something that's important to me and, or is this how I really feel about it? We can get caught up and then look back later and not feel so good about some of our choices, we can also adopt mainstream messages that are not achievable or realistic. One of the things that always flabbergasts me is the models that are used in some of the fitness magazines that are stick thin. I mean, the camera adds some weight and they look stick thin in there. I'm like, there is no way she is running 25 miles a day because she's just so thin, she doesn't have the musculature to sort of support that. But if that message is coming from the advertiser, coming from the media, saying, you know, you need to look like this if you are going to be considered fit, you need to have this body type that may not be achievable or realistic for the majority of people. So what does that do to their self esteem if they keep trying to achieve that goal and not meeting it? Mindfulness will encourage us to look at how we feel and validate ourselves telling us it's okay to feel this way. Integrate feelings, thoughts, sensations and urges so we don't act just randomly. We're actually paying attention to what is motivating or supporting our feelings, thoughts, sensations and urges. And we're adopting messages and values that are consistent with who we want to be. Breathing in the body Breathing is one of the first techniques in mindfulness that we can teach to just about anybody. And it can be challenging with certain groups, but depending on how you present it, it can be a relatively easy activity to do. By developing mindfulness and self awareness, you can quiet your thoughts. Our constant noise in our head, I've got to do this, I've got to do that. Oh I shouldn't forget this. I need to remember to call that person. It often prohibits us from addressing the underlying issues of any emotional turmoil. There's just constantly chatter. So life becomes focused on just treading water. You're not dealing with any of the underlying issues. You're just trying not to drown in the day to day activities. So forward goals are exchanged for just surviving. Then when you look back over, like I said, when you look back over two months, three months, a year, and you had had all these goals that you wanted to accomplish and you accomplished none of them, what happens to the self esteem? By making contact with the present moment, you can find your strength. Learn to grow and choose how you wish to respond. So what does breathing have to do with all this? Well, the first thing you do when you're born is breathe and then cry. But it's one of our most primal basic instincts. When we breathe slowly, our heart rate slows down. When we breathe rapidly, our heart rate speeds up. When we breathe slowly, not only are we slowing down our our heart rate, but we're also sending out the relaxation response to the body which helps quiet the chatter. One of the activities is just taking a deep full breath. Abdominal breathing signals the brain to slow down and relax. She calls it the rest and digest. By simply paying attention to your breath, you can often cause it to slow down. You know, if I'm running or right after I finish running, I intentionally pay attention to slowing my breath down. When you go on a diet and you start paying attention and completing a food diary and you're paying attention to how much you're eating, for most people, they automatically cut down on how much they're eating. When we start paying attention, things kind of slow down. Another activity she has in there is called feeling the loving touch, which is the breath. Life begins and ends with breath. Breathing helps relax the body and move the qi around. And it wasn't really discussed a lot in the book as far as moving chi, but remembering that our energy comes from getting this oxygen throughout our body, to the organs, to the muscles, to everything else as we breathe. When we breathe deeply, it gets more oxygen in there. It helps us relax and helps the oxygen gets to where it needs to be. In order to encourage people to stay in touch with their breathing, A lot of Americans tend to breathe poorly. We breathe shallowly and through our chest because we're stressed. We're clenching our teeth, we're tightening our back muscles. We're just like little stress balls. So if you put visual and auditory breathing reminders around, it will help you stop and take a breath and get that relaxation response periodically throughout the day. I have a activity monitor, and it goes off periodically, reminding me that I haven't moved often enough. But I also use that activity reminder to remind me to take a deep breath or three before I get up and start moving around. And then I usually take another couple when I'm sitting back down again. That's an auditory reminder for me because I tend to habituate to visual reminders. I'll see it for the first two or three days, and then I'll just totally not even notice it's there anymore. In and out. Inhale and take in positive affirmations. Exhale and let go of the stress and negativity. Now, this sounds pretty easy to do when you're working with adolescents or you're working with people with cognitive disabilities. You may need to break it down a little bit less abstractly. Have them list a bunch of different positive affirmations. One of my favorite is Hakuna Matata. So we'll put that up on the board and we'll start listing different positive affirmations. And it's amazing how many of them actually come from Disney movies. But I digress. As people figure out a positive affirmation that they want to hold on to when they start to get stressed. You want to just remind them to breathe in and tell themselves that. And when they breathe out, feel the stress kind of leaving their body, because stress is a lot of heat and energy. Taking another step further, imagine inhaling a cooling, calming blue air and exhaling the stresses, which could be red, black, or gray. If somebody is more visual in nature, obviously the second one that talks about the blue versus the red can give them something to really visualize when they're doing this activity. Read the inscription. Pay attention to what your body is trying to tell you. Last year, actually it's been a little more than a year now, I was having a lot of heart problems and I would start feeling a tightness in my chest and it just kind of wouldn't go away. And I ended up naming it Lenny from Of Mice and Men. And Lenny would just sit on my chest and I couldn't get rid of him. So what was my body trying to tell me at that point in time? Was it a physiological heart issue? Was it stress? Was it panic? What was going on that I needed to read on the inscription to figure it out? Because it was a symptom. When you pay attention to what your body's telling you, you're going to be living more in harmony with your values. You're going to be getting closer to where you want to go and. Or you may be able to tell yourself, you know, I feel really stressed about this right now. Positive affirmation, I can get through this, or this is what I need to do to cope with it. It's important to practice noticing points of tension, tightness or heaviness and feel them relax or loosen as you exhale. So these are all still breathing exercises, but we want to encourage people to become more in tune with their bodies. As Americans especially, we tend to somaticize a lot of our stress and anger and anxiety and dysphoria. So if we pay attention to what our body is telling us, we can identify when we are starting to have emotional turmoil and address it from there. If we're having emotional turmoil, then we want to go back to the self esteem and say, you know, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me. And what is it that is this burr under my saddle right now? Because as you feel strong, as you feel capable, as you feel more resilient and you're able to handle life's stresses as they come along thinking in the mind, One activity that I kind of like, is the fly on the wall or an impartial witness? If you were sitting in a situation that was, you know, maybe you were in a meeting and it wasn't going so well and you took a break from the meeting. And generally what we're thinking at that point is what we are thinking, what we are feeling. Oftentimes when we're in emotionally charged situation or state, it's hard for us to take multiple perspectives and take a time out and go, okay, what might be going on? So this activity can kind of help sometimes because you can say, what would that fly on the wall tell me was happening? If that fly had to describe what they're seeing, what would they see? Stop sorting things into good and bad. Go through the day just to kind of get a clue about how often we do it. Because, I mean, everybody does it. Some people do it more or less. Instead of sorting things into good and bad, they just are, you know, it was raining today. Is that good or is that bad? Well, why do you need to put that into a pile? I didn't go to the gym today. Is that good or is that bad? You know, you can argue both sides of the coin, but why argue about was? That's what happened too many times. People spend so much time sorting and they focus or pay more attention to the bad stuff. A lot of times they'll artificially elevate the number of bad things. So we want to have people just stop it. Instead of looking at things as bad or good, they just are. Encourage them to see the whole elephant. Back to Lenny. Again, we want them to look at the issue, what's going on at that point in time. But what are the strengths? Because every situation has good and bad. So what are the problems and what are the strengths? If the person is not feeling very good about themselves because they lost their job, you know, they may feel like they failed. They may feel like a failure. And we want to say, are you a failure at everything? Because that's kind of a global statement. So you got fired from your job. Good or bad, it's what it is. So what are the strengths that you have that can help you overcome this, and what are the positives of this situation? You know, maybe they didn't like that job. Maybe they can find another job. Encouraging people to not take one situation or one event and have it take it in and have it reflect who they are as a whole person. If they're walking down the street and they trip and they wipe out and fall on their face and gosh knows I've done that. You know, I am not the most graceful person in the world, but does that mean I am a complete klutz? No. It just was not one of my better days. I didn't take it as a stable, global internal attribution. Spin the wheel of paradox. What is the opposite? You know, if you're feeling like something is going against you, then encourage yourself to look for all the positives in it. So maybe you hate your job because obviously if you loved your job, you wouldn't be trying to have an intervention. But if you hated your job, it's like, okay, I really hate my job. I don't want to go to work today. Let's spin the wheel of paradox and say, what are the positives I can get out of this? Why are we looking for positives and what does that have to do with self esteem? Because as we find successes, as we find peace, we will feel more confident in our own abilities to handle distress. You're driving to work and traffic. Oh, my gosh, traffic is backed up. You're going to be 45 minutes late. Well, yeah, that may kind of stink. What are the positives? Well, you weren't the one that was in the accident that caused the traffic jam. Maybe you can start making phone calls or checking your email if you're at a complete standstill. Finding both sides is basically where thinking in the mind comes. And in one of our prior classes, we talked about walking the middle ground and finding where both things can happen. Yes, we can be in a traffic jam and it can really suck, but we can also make use of that time doing other things. And it may just be doing breathing exercises, but okay, so cool. You have time to do some of your breathing exercises and encouraging the no blame game. Yeah, not the blame game, but the no blame game. Not blaming yourself for everything, not blaming other people for everything, because generally everybody has a little part in it. So instead of using the energy to blame anybody, figure out how to fix it. Figure out what the positives are, figure out what the issues are, figure out how you got to this point and figure out how to make it not happen again. When people experience successes, when they're able to fix things that go wrong, when they're able to see things as not catastrophic, they will start seeing themselves. Stronger people, emotions in the heart. You know, I told you we were going to talk about head, heart and gut honesty. Now we're moving on to the heart. And our heart's kind of small. It's about the size of our Fist. But it's bigger on the inside, encouraging people to recognize all the emotions contained within their heart. There's love, there's empathy, there's compassion, there's curiosity. There are a lot of emotions that are contained within the heart. And no matter how much you love somebody, there's always room to love somebody else. It's not like there's a finite amount of love you have to give. And encourage people to cultivate warm heartedness, not just towards others, but again, we're talking about self esteem here toward themselves. What would they tell themselves or tell other people? And whatever they would tell other people, they need to turn around and tell themselves. Plant your garden. And I like this one around my house. When we first moved in, I ripped out the majority of the shrubbery because my feeling, whether it's right or wrong, it just is. If I'm going to put that much effort into taking care of something, it darn well better produce something for me. So I replaced everything with edibles. When you plant your garden, you've got to choose. You only have so much time to cultivate a good garden. You can't just plant 150 things and 10 to six of them. So when you plant it, choose what you're going to care about. There are a ton of things you would love to do, but what is going to be your focus? When we focus on too many things, a lot of things tend to wither and die. So encourage your clients to figure out which plants they're going to cultivate. And sometimes, you know, you can take this metaphor out and talk about companion planting and all kinds of stuff if gardening's your thing. But sometimes it's helpful to actually do sort of a visual representation of the garden so they can see what they want to care about. But then they can also focus on, are they giving it water? Are they making sure it's getting sunlight? Are they taking care of it? Tend and befriend themselves. They need to tend to their own needs. They need to become aware of what's important to them. And then they need to be their own best friend. You know, some days you wake up and you're like, you. You know, I would really. Well, I do. I would really love to just sit around in my jammies all morning and drink hot chocolate and watch cartoons because that's where I am today. And that's okay. I'm like, all right, well, let's do it. So myself and my dog and cats and whoever else wants to does, but being kind to yourself and not saying well, you shouldn't, you know, you're almost 50 years old. You shouldn't be watching cartoons. Well, the heck with that. I will be my own best friend. People don't need someone else to take them out to dinner. People don't need someone else to constantly provide rewards. We need to learn how to provide rewards for ourselves. Now, is it cool to have somebody else to take us out every once in a while? Sure. But it's important that people can provide their own rewards. Encourage them to count their blessings or do a gratitude list, however they want to phrase it. What is going right in your life and what part did you have in that? Because guess what? You probably had a big part in that. Life doesn't just happen. And especially if everything is going relatively well, that means there was probably some hard work and dedication and it wasn't just luck. So let's look at what's going really good and how you've cultivated that and delight for others. Sometimes we can get the greatest amount of joy in being happy for someone else. Instead of being jealous or envious and thinking, well, I should have that. We can be happy for them. They have it. Wonderful, awesome. Does it make us any less worthy or any less of a person because we don't have that? No. Looking at other people's successes in terms of great for them is a lot better on our self esteem than looking at their successes and going, well, I should have been able to do that. And being in the world. Claim your emotional baggage. Please don't let it stay on the conveyor belt. How many times have we been guilty? Or have we had clients come in who've had the same baggage that just keeps coming back? Maybe it's the same basic dysfunctional relationship that comes over and over and over again. A part of that as clinicians is for us to say, okay, you know, clearly there's something that's not getting resolved here, so we need to do something a little bit different. But as clients or people who have baggage on the conveyor belt, it's also up to that person to go, I need to figure out how to get this baggage off and don't give it to somebody else. When you take it off, don't say, okay, this is your problem now. Don't blame other people for your situation. It's important to claim it and go, this is my stuff. I'm sorry, I'm having a really bad day today. I'm not going to blame you for making me feel X, Y and Z. It gives people a sense of personal Power to go. Yeah, it's my stuff. But you know what happens when we say that? Yeah, that's my stuff we can say, and I am going to let it go. If we give it to somebody else, then we've got to wait to figure out what they're going to do with it. So when we claim it, we take power over it and we can choose what to do with it. Listen. Just listen. Listen to hear and understand. But that means listen to yourself as well as others. You know, we talk a lot in counseling about how we spend too much time talking and not enough time listening. When the other person's talking, we're already formulating our response. Well, that's true for ourselves, too. So we need to stop and be quiet and tell ourselves to just hush and listen to what is it we need and what is it we want. That also means silencing, going back to the very beginning, silencing all that chatter. The you've got to get up and make dinner, you've got to do laundry, you've got to do this. You've got to make sure this gets hush, all that so you can listen to yourself. It's kind of like the difference between trying to have a conversation in a noisy restaurant versus on a park bench. We need to be in the world on the park bench. Speak with compassion to yourself and others. Try to take the compassionate viewpoint of what's going on with that person right now. That might be contributing to them feeling angry, feeling hostile, feeling down, being just grumpy. Went to get chicken feed at the feed store the other day, and the young man who was at the desk is usually just all kinds of bubbly and all about customer service. And he was so flat that day. And, you know, I didn't take it personally because we all have bad days, but I felt that it was important to go the extra mile to make sure that I smiled and spoke with compassion because he was clearly having a bad day. But we need to do that with ourselves when we're having a bad day. Say, you know what? I'm just going to do what I can do today and be okay with that. I love this next activity. Write your job description. What is your job description for being you? What are your goals and what are your duties? You know, at work every year we write our job goals and whatever else in our performance plan. I don't remember what I used to call it when I was supervising people. And then at the end of the year, you had a performance evaluation based on the goals that you set forth and the duties you were expected to accomplish. So why don't you sit down and write those out and figure out what's important to you to get a good job evaluation on being you. This is the time when, as you start writing it down, you start realizing, you know, maybe I'm putting too many goals here, maybe I'm putting too many duties here. I wouldn't do this if it were my actual job, because I know there's no way I can accomplish it. Once you start writing it down and seeing it visually, you're like, yeah, maybe I'm being a little too demanding. So writing your job description is an excellent activity. And adolescents tend to do this pretty well too. They haven't had as much experience with performance appraisals and things like that, but they can get an idea about how to write a job description, especially if you give them a template. So ultimately, the goal is to realize that self esteem begins in childhood. And we want to start teaching children to be mindful. We want to teach them to stay in contact with how they're feeling, learned how to calm their breath from the very early age when they start feeling all hyped up, when they start feeling tense, help them figure out how to diffuse that. We want to help them figure out what their values are and what's important to them. We want to help them be aware of themselves so they can identify their strengths and develop their me identity. So, you know, who are you as an individual? In our society, we tend to want to be part of a group. We want to be interdependent, and that's great, but interdependent does not mean having the same identity as everybody else. We're not the Borg. Interdependent means taking our own individual identities and strengths and combining them to make sort of a greater good. Part of self esteem development includes values identification. And this can start early. We can talk about honesty, we can talk about compassion. We can talk about trustworthiness. Kids get that they know some of the basic values and they can start learning why those are important and making decisions about some of the other ones, about what's important in their life. What do they see as an important value? We can help them start separating their wants versus their needs. You know, a need is something that's going to keep their body, mind, and spirit going. A want is something that, you know, they may really want in their heart, you know, like a new bike for Christmas. But is it something that they need? And we can also start helping them address those cognitive distortions. The all or none, thinking we can start helping them address the sorting into the good or bad piles and learn how to accept that some things just are. And we can encourage them to be aware of sensations, feelings and thoughts. Why? Because it helps choose behaviors which are in unison with your values. Not all of us notice sensations first, not all of us notice feelings first, and not all of us notice thoughts first. That depends on you. I may notice that I'm being a negative Nelly as my first clue that I might be under stress. On the other hand, other people may feel a knot in their stomach and go, oh, I think something's going on, or I've got food poisoning. But I digress. Probably something's going on. And still other people may hone in on those feelings and they know they're angry. They don't know what they're angry about right now, but they know there is something that is ticking them off. Whatever it is that they're most in tune to, helping them integrate those will help them figure out how they're feeling, thinking and choose behaviors that can help them feel happy. Being aware of these sensations can help support people through the difficult moments. Knowing that this tightness in your stomach before you go out and do a speech in front of 100 people, this is your anxiety, Strong self esteem and a sense of self awareness. Acknowledging that anxiety and saying, all right, it is what it is, can help people learn that they can move through the difficult moments. They can experience distress and succeed. Being aware of all these things also silences the critics. Because a lot of times the critics are the ones that are bringing on some of these thoughts and sensations. They're heckling you, silencing the critics. You can say, no, that's not how I feel about that, or that's really not how I think. If the critic is saying, you should feel this way and it helps you clarify who you are and what you want. Because ultimately self esteem is feeling good about you. Not what your mother thinks about you, not what the woman down the street thinks about you, not what your boss thinks about you, but how you feel about you. Because once you have that, then you are going to start attracting other people who have a strong sense of self and can say, you know what, we can have differences, but we can be friends. We can have different experiences, but we can share those to make something that's a stronger something. So kind of to tie it all up in a bow. Mindfulness is really just a tool to help people get in touch with what's important to them and to silence the critics and the negativity that often dashes a lot of self esteem. So people realize and become more aware when they're being unjustly negative and critical of themselves and holding them to a standard that they wouldn't hold their child or their best friend or for that matter, anybody else to. We want people to feel good about themselves. Until they do, they're going to experience dysphoria at some point or another. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceus.com counselortoolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by allce.com providing 24.7 multimedia continuing education and pre certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code counselortoolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month.