Skills that Build, Enhance or Maintain Self-Respect Part 2

1
Skills that Build, Enhance or Maintain
Self-RespectPart 2

• Week Eight

2
Topics

• Forgiveness
• Assertion Skills
• Affirmations
• Brandens Pillars that Support Self-Respect

3
Forgiveness

• The downside of withholding forgiveness
• Perpetuates the illusion of power over
  vulnerability
• Has a punitive or wounding intent
• Can become blaming or shaming

4
What Forgiveness is Not

• Forgiveness is not condoning unkindness.
• Forgiveness is not forgetting that something
  painful happened.
• Forgiveness is not excusing poor behavior.
• Forgiveness does not have to be an otherworldly
  or religious experience.
• Forgiveness is not denying or minimizing your
  hurt.
• Forgiveness does not mean reconciling with the
  offender.
• Forgiveness does not mean you give up having
  feelings.
• Forgiveness does not exclude or preclude justice.
• From Dr. Fred Luskin's Forgive for Good A Proven
  Prescription for Health and Happiness

5
What is Forgiveness?

• Forgiveness is the peace you learn to feel when
  you let go of unresolved grievances.
• Forgiveness is for you and not the offender.
• Forgiveness is taking back your power.
• Forgiveness is taking responsibility for how you
  feel.
• Forgiveness is about your healing and not about
  the people who hurt you.
• Forgiveness is a trainable skill just like
  learning to throw a baseball.
• Forgiveness helps you get control over your
  feelings.
• Forgiveness can improve your mental and physical
  health.
• Forgiveness is becoming a hero instead of a
  victim.
• Forgiveness is a choice.
• Everyone can learn to forgive.

6
The Stanford Forgiveness Project

• Nine Methods for Practicing Forgiveness
• Know exactly how you feel about what happened and
  be able to articulate what about the situation is
  not OK. Then, tell a trusted couple of people
  about your experience.
• Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have
  to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and
  not for anyone else.
• Forgiveness does not necessarily mean
  reconciliation with the person that hurt you, or
  condoning of their action. What you seek is
  finding peace.
• Forgiveness can be defined as the "peace and
  understanding that come from blaming that which
  has hurt you less, taking the life experience
  less personally, and changing your grievance
  story."
• Get the right perspective on what is happening.
  Recognize that your primary distress is coming
  from the hurt feelings, thoughts and physical
  upset you are suffering now, not what offended
  you or hurt you two minutesor ten yearsago.
  Forgiveness helps to heal those hurt feelings.

7
The Stanford Forgiveness Project

• Nine Methods for Practicing Forgiveness
• At the moment you feel upset, practice a simple
  stress management technique to soothe your body's
  flight or fight response.
• Give up expecting things from other people, or
  your life, that they do not choose to give you.
  Recognize the "unenforceable rules" you have for
  your health or how you or other people must
  behave. Remind yourself that you can hope for
  health, love, peace and prosperity and work hard
  to get them.
• Put your energy into looking for another way to
  get your positive goals met than through the
  experience that has hurt you. Instead of
  mentally replaying your hurt, seek out new ways
  to get what you want.
• Remember that a life well-lived is your best
  revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded
  feelings, and thereby giving the person who
  caused you pain power over you, learn to look for
  the love, beauty and kindness around you.
  Forgiveness is about personal power.
• Amend your grievance story to remind you of the
  heroic choice to forgive.
• Frederic Luskin, Ph.D. http//www.learningtoforgi
  ve.com/steps.htm

8
Bill of Assertive Rights

• You have the right to
• judge your own behavior, thoughts, and
  emotions, and to take the responsibility for the
  initiation and consequences upon yourself.
• offer no reasons or excuses for justifying your
  behavior.
• judge if you are responsible for finding
  solutions to other people's problems.
• change your mind.
• make mistakes-and be responsible for them.
• say, I don't know.
• be independent of the goodwill of others before
  coping with them.
• be illogical in making decisions.
• say, I don't Understand.
• say, I don't care.
• YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO SAY NO, WITHOUT FEELING
  GUILTY
• Taken from When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, by
  Manuel Smith

9
Assertion Skills

• 4 skills for positive assertion
• Broken Record
• Workable Compromise
• Free Information
• Self-Disclosure
• 3 skills for asserting for your self-respect
• Fogging
• Negative Inquiry
• Negative Assertion
• From When I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Manuel
  Smith

10
Assertiveness Exercise

• The dreaded door-to-door salesperson
• Passive dialogue
• Assertive dialogue

11
Affirmations

• All humans make meaning of their interactions
  with the conscious world through an internal
  dialogue
• Part of that process involves adding meaning to
  neutral events, in the form of attributions
• Applying attributions accurately requires two
  elements
• Realistic self-evaluation
• A rich vocabulary for describing emotions and
  subjective appraisals
• Most training in attributions, self-evaluation
  and emotional vocabulary are provided through our
  family as such, the skills and vocabulary may be
  inadequate or dysfunctional
• Affirmations provide an alternative or expanded
  vocabulary for self-description

12
Branden Chapter 3The Face of Self-Esteem

• Rationality
• Working with concrete facts
• Non-contradiction
• Realism
• What is, is and what is not, is not
• Those low in self-esteem tend to underestimate or
  overestimate their abilities
• Intuitiveness
• complex, super-rapid integrations that occur
  beneath conscious awareness
• scanning data for supporting or conflicting
  evidence
• a mind that has learned to trust itself
  (efficacy) is more likely to rely on this process

13
Branden Chapter 3The Face of Self-Esteem

• Independence
• taking full responsibility for ones own
  existence
• Willingness to admit (and correct) mistakes
• correcting an error is esteemed above pretending
  not to have made one
• those with low self-esteem experience a simple
  admission of error as humiliation and even
  self-damnation
• Benevolence and cooperativeness
• If I am secure in my right to exist, confident
  that I belong to myself, unthreatened by
  certainty and self-confidence in others, then
  cooperation with them to achieve shared goals
  tends to develop spontaneously
• my relationship to others tends to mirror and
  reflect my relationship to myself.

14
Branden Chapter 5The Focus on Action

• What must an individual do to generate and
  sustain self-esteem?
• Families in which reality is often denied and
  consciousness often punished place devastating
  obstacles to self-esteem
• Every value pertaining to life requires action to
  be achieved, sustained or enjoyed
• The six pillars of self-esteem are all operations
  of consciousness

15
Branden Chapter 5The Focus on Action

• Practice implies a discipline of acting in a
  certain way over and over again, consistently
• Self esteem is a consequence, a product of
  internally generated practices