Get Rid of What Doesn't Serve You!

Get Rid of What Doesn't Serve You!

The other day I decided to finally grant my daughters a playdate. As an introvert who enjoys being with herself only second to being alone with my daughters, playdates are often avoided. I play the games, I get in the pool, I build Lego structures, etc. with them instead. But summers are long and they need to socialize. I love that they make me socialize with people I normally wouldn’t. These days I spend at least two weekends out of each month at children birthday parties. Lucky me. No really, I feel blessed. 100% grateful.

My latest attempt to break our trend of isolation was to invite over my oldest daughters’ sweet little friend from school. The even better part was that the mother was actually someone I would like to know regardless of the children. We hit it off gabbing about everything from the recent Supreme court ruling on same sex marriages (which I had no idea happened until 7 days later, no television) to looking up the characteristics of high self-esteem on blogosphere Island of the Internet.

Which quickly led us to a discussion on how to refrain from behavior that doesn’t serve us. She purported that she really needs to grow in some areas but had no idea of how to do it. I asked her what specific behavior she had trouble letting go of. She replied with what she referred to as behavior stemming from her tendency to believe her “self-esteem is shot!” Her words.

My immediate response was, first of all, your self-esteem has a future, and it isn’t limited to who you are today. So while you may think there is some new person you become that is so perfect that you will then in turn love yourself more wholly, you may be mistaken. We are organic beings. Meaning us, like everything else naturally occurring in nature has to first be fertilized before it can grow. I couldn’t understand why she thought high self-esteem was just going to fall into her lap without any consistent provocation on her end. Self-esteem is a very deep arrangement between who you are and what you think of who you are and cannot be approached superficially.

I ask well, what do you tell yourself concerning your self-esteem in the course of any given 24 hour period? What do you say about yourself when you wake up in the morning and look into the mirror? What are you reading? What are you watching? The idea that dysfunctional behavior could be broken down, analyzed and done away with is to her, like it is to many, a foreign concept. So the idea that she was in charge of what she thought of herself was nothing new, the problem was actually believing the negative self-talk, she simply didn’t know how to begin down a path to change it.

Think about your brain as having a clean hard drive. As time goes by we store some stuff and get rid of other stuff. The longer we hang in places where low self-esteem is cloaked with things like hair extensions, cosmetic surgery, expensive clothing and pounds of cosmetics, the more we begin to believe that high self-esteem can be attained outside of ourselves. She went on about wanting a different body shape, different hair and generally wanting to do away with a host of other characteristics that made her uniquely her.

I explained to her that those images we see in various media outlets are merely suggestions and it is up to us to decide if something works for us or not. Ads are suggestions that the average woman takes much too seriously. The crux of her issue is fear. Fear of not being chosen by a great guy one day, fear that she’ll never measure up to what she believes is beauty in her head and fear that her daughter might turn out the same way. We have to stop moving forward with behavior that’s rooted in fear. Pay attention to what emptions are being triggered inside of us when we scroll down the timeline on Instagram or Facebook? Is it envy, jealousy, inadequacy? If the answer is yes, why are you putting yourself through this? How do you feel when you flip through magazines and see designer items that you know you can’t afford but still lust after them in a way that you feel these things will make you a happier or better person? Stop letting so many insincere suggestions in.

My hard drive is not a dumping ground. To keep your system running smoothly, you have to keep it clean. You have to refrain from the habitual thought process that has landed you where you are today. Cleanse yourself of the various forms data surrounding you that suggest that you’re not good enough, that you don’t have enough and that there’s not enough of the good to go around. It’s a lie that keeps you at the mercy of people, places and things that don’t serve your greater good, but instead serves a much larger agenda that is not remotely considerate of your self-esteem. It prohibits you from establishing a clear path from the place that observes what you think about consistently to the place where you observe what you experience consistently in life.

This is how we found ourselves looking up characteristics of high self-esteem. If you want to know how to do or be anything all you have to do is put forth the effort and the seeds you plant, once nurtured, will grow.

So maybe you will change what types of people, places and things you follow on social media, maybe you won’t decide to let your ex back into your life because you know he is not the kind of man you would want to see your daughter marry in the future or maybe you create daily affirmations that counter your negative thoughts, after all the power of suggestion can work in favor of your esteem too.

I explain to her that achieving something outside of the norm, like a high self-worth, is not a passive undertaking. It’s our responsibility to our daughters and ourselves to actively seek out ways to cleanse our behavior of all of those habits that create life results that are the opposite of what we truly desire and need to flourish.

Get rid of it. Whatever ‘IT’ is.

~Jam

www.JameelahRaoof.com