Life's Simple "People Complicate It"

Your self image is key to becoming your own best friend.

I can state without any doubt that it is the strength of your self-image that makes all the difference in your life. It is my hope that the application of the information and principles about how we create our world will enable you to create all the beauty, love, freedom, joy and abundance that IS your birth right. It is your self-image that either holds you back or allows you to grow and expand.

You cannot see or touch your self-image; however it is the most real part of you. It is the image you hold of yourself that governs everything you do, both positively and negatively, and it’s in control of your feelings and emotions every day of your life.

Your self-image is the built up picture you hold of yourself, and it has been building for as long as you’ve been alive; whether you pay attention to it or not, it’s controlling your life for better or worse. If you see yourself as nothing more than this body, made up of tissue, skin, organs, bones and blood, you become trapped in the false five scenes physical image and may never become aware of your true nature.

You are a creator, and you create your life experience, all of it. I believe the most important quality for an enjoyable and satisfying life is having an empowered self-image, which means feeling at ease with you, feeling good about yourself ... liking yourself.

You can tend to doubt yourself and your ability to do what you want because of the lack of understanding about your self-image. The self-image when the doubt is gone, gives you the courage to have a go. It lets you understand you have the same rights as everyone else to be happy and follow whatever makes you happy. There is an addendum here—as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone or go against another person. So, what if you have read other self-awareness books in the past? If the self-image is defective, nothing will work out the way you hope.

A defective self-image will damage the quality of your life in spite of all the willpower and motivation you have towards any area of your life. If your life is not going in the direction you would like it to, despite your best efforts, the origin of your problem is more than likely a neglected self-image. No one would neglect their self-image on purpose. What you can tend to do is get caught up in the daily running of your life and never stop to think about how you actually feel about yourself. Instead you may look to others for approval, and love.

Here is where the problem starts, because if the others don’t approve of you, and you don’t have this understanding of what truly motivates you to do what you do, your self-image takes another blow. Eventually, if this happens often enough, you may find ways of just coping in the world, instead of ways to really start feeling better about yourself.

What makes your self-image? It is the composition of what you perceive to be the successes, failures and experiences that have made up your life; and the perception you hold of these successes, failures and experiences in your mind. It is this perception you hold of yourself that determines how you feel, how you react, and what actions you become involved in. The majority of people have the wrong perception of them and believe they have no control over what happens to them.

They follow the dogma of a society that wants you to believe you have no choice. What needs to change is the way we view ourselves internally, what the voices and the pictures we are forming in our head are saying, and to correct the self-image where it starts. Self-confidence or self-esteem is the product of a good self-image. Self-image, put simply, is the idea or picture we carry in our minds of what we think we are really like. Have you ever carried a picture of someone you like in your wallet or purse? Our self-image is like that; except it’s the picture of ourselves we carry in our minds.

Unfortunately, the self-image picture in our mind isn’t always as accurate as a photograph. Sometimes, just like some of the photo’s I take, it’s out of focus, blurred or just plain wrong. By allowing outside influences to blur our image of ourselves we allow the picture to fade and become a shadow of its former self. Have you ever watched children? I have 3 grandchildren and I loved watching them, in their younger years, because they have the best self-image, they believe they are all there is, they never see themselves as less than or undeserving, they believe they can do anything.

The unfortunate thing that happens is we tend not to recognise it and we make children conform to what we want from them and this leads to the biggest problem we have with our self-image in adulthood. The self-image and what we choose to focus on will determine what happens in our lives. We are focusing mechanisms that have this incredible ability to focus on whatever we choose at any moment of the day or night. We can focus on all the past failures or we can choose to focus on the successes, and remember our self-image rules our lifestyle, controls our feelings, our actions and reactions to any and every situation, relationship, and circumstance we find ourselves in.

The conclusion is focusing on stress, bad habits, misfortunes and failures will literally produce more of the same, over and over again. An empowering self-image gives you the freedom to make mistakes and cope with what we tend to see as failure (I’ll talk a bit more about that in a moment). Just in case you are thinking this is a recent discovery, let me assure you it’s not. Seneca, the Roman statesman, author and philosopher who was born about 4 BC, said, “Lack of self-image is not the result of difficulty; the difficulty comes from lack of self-image.”

How we see ourselves influences the way we respond to the experiences

we encounter day to day.

In Munay Lyn Collett