Six pillar of self esteem – Learn the 3 Levels of Self Acceptance as a Valuable Human Being
Self Acceptance is one of the fundamentals of the six pillars of self esteem. Without self acceptance, self esteem is impossible. With self acceptance you can be a fulfilled and happy human being capable of personal growth and development. There are three levels of self acceptance. Understanding them will help you to find the areas you need to work on to raise your self acceptance and ultimately your self esteem.
Self esteem and self acceptance are very closely related. You may even confuse these two terms. However, there is a difference. Self esteem is a state of mind, a set of feelings, beliefs and emotions. Self acceptance is something you do, the more you accept yourself the higher your feelings of self esteem.
The first level of self acceptance – you are alive!
The first level of self acceptance is to be on your own side, to affirm yourself as a human being, to be committed to your own growth, your own value as a human being. At it’s simplest and most primitive level this is your will to survive. The first level of self acceptance is fundamental to your existence as a human being.
People who have been deeply traumatized may have trouble achieving even this basic level of self acceptance – often with tragic consequences such as a spiral of self destruction. Such people can only move on and choose life if they can achieve some degree of self acceptance at this fundamental level.
The second level – be honest with yourself warts and all
The next level of self acceptance is to accept everything about you as being an integral part of you be it positive or negative. This means everything you think, feel, do, all your mental states, all your experiences.
To achieve full self acceptance you cannot deny any part of your experience, even if you are ashamed of it. When you fully achieve this level, you do not deny that you have done something that you believe to be bad, however that does not mean that you have to excuse any behaviour that you consider to be unacceptable. Your attitude should be one of striving to understand why you did what you did. If you manage to understand the cause of whatever it is you are not proud of, you will find that you will gradually stop doing it.
Similarly, many people deny that they have done something good – they don’t feel that they are worthy. Maybe you are one of these people – you spend your life beating yourself up for your mistakes while ignoring all the good thing you have done. You need to work on your self acceptance!
Level 3 – be a friend to yourself
In the second level, you learnt to accept both the good and bad about you and at least enquire about what lay at the root of the problem. In this level, you go further, you stop beating yourself up and instead you become a friend to yourself. Like any good, compassionate friend, you care about yourself and you are able to enquire about the causes of negative experiences with compassion rather than subjecting yourself to the judge and jury of your own mind…
Such a compassionate approach to your own shortcomings will meant that you can also be compassionate towards other people.
Self acceptance at it’s highest level means that you are able to separate the essence of you, your inner being from the actions, thoughts, beliefs and feelings that you experience on a day to day level. This is a powerful state of being that enables you make choices about how you respond in any circumstance. You can choose to respond in ways that help you and those around you to be the best you and they can be!
Self acceptance is one of the fundamentals of the six pillars of self esteem. Self acceptance means that you affirm your own existence as a valuable human being, that you accept yourself “warts and all” and that you exercise compassion towards yourself and your shortcoming. When you achieve true self acceptance you become an outstanding human being.
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