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By Brian Tracy
Self-acceptance begins in infancy, with
the influence of your parents and siblings and other important
people.
Your own level of self-acceptance is determined
largely by how well you feel you are accepted by the important
people in your life.
Your attitude toward yourself is determined
largely by the attitudes that you think other people have
toward you. When you believe that other people think highly
of you, your level of self-acceptance and self-esteem goes
straight up.
The best way to build a healthy personality
involves understanding yourself and your feelings.
Letting the
Light Shine In
This is achieved through the simple exercise
of self-disclosure. For you to truly understand yourself,
or to stop being troubled by things that may have happened
in your past, you must be able to disclose yourself to at
least one person. You have to be able to get those things
off your chest.
You must rid yourself of those thoughts
and feelings by revealing them to someone who won't make you
feel guilty or ashamed for what has happened.
Become Aware
of Your Feelings
The second part of personality development
follows from self-disclosure, and it's called self-awareness.
Only when you can disclose what you're truly thinking and
feeling to someone else can you become aware of those thoughts
and emotions.
If the other person simply listens to
you without commenting or criticizing, you have the opportunity
to become more aware of the person you are and why you do
the things you do. You begin to develop perspective, or what
the Buddhists call "detachment."
Accept the
Person You Are
Now we come to the good part. After you've
gone through self-disclosure to self-awareness, you arrive
at self-acceptance. You accept yourself for the person you
are, with good points and bad points, with strengths and weaknesses,
and with the normal frailties of a human being.
When you develop the ability to stand
back and look at yourself honestly, and to candidly admit
to others that you may not be perfect but you're all you've
got, you start to enjoy a heightened sense of self-acceptance.
Do an Inventory
of Your Accomplishments
A valuable exercise for developing higher
levels of self-acceptance involves doing an inventory of yourself.
In doing this inventory, your job is to accentuate the positive
and minimize the negative.
Think of your unique talents and abilities.
Think of your core skills, the things
that you do exceptionally well that account for your success
in your profession and in your personal life right now.
Think About
Your Future
Think about your future possibilities
and the fact that your potential is virtually unlimited. You
can do what you want to do and go where you want to go. You
can be the person you want to be. You can set large and small
goals and make plans and move step-by-step, progressively
toward their realization. There are no obstacles to what you
can accomplish except the obstacles that you create in your
mind.
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