With successes, which can be frequent if we are a champion sports star, but for most of us such achievements stand out in our lives as unique and especially rewarding memories – provided we do allow the memory of them to come to mind at all.
There is a weird affliction surrounding success from which many of us suffer. What are its symptoms?
Memory loss when it comes to remembering the success, when one would have thought we never would have forgotten it..
A second and classic feature is how we can try to pass off our achievement as an accident, as a fluke and therefore does not rank as special at all. Worse, we can compound this reticence on the odd occasion we are actually reminded by someone about our previous success, by denying it happened, or by seeking to change the subject, lest our embarrassment at the reminder of our being successful gets the better of us – not the other person, who seems to want to talk about it..
Yet, to feed our sense of effectiveness, to enhance and grow our self-esteem, we should be doing the very opposite and reminding ourselves of every success we have had and even every near-success.
We are a very impressionable species, far too easily conditioned in our thinking. Underplay or understate the significance of the successes we have had in our life and effectively we are undermining our own image of ourselves..
We should remind ourselves daily to feed our impressionable minds with positive reminders of how well we did; how we prepared for the success; how exactly we did it. This not only sponsors our sense of self-worth once more, but it puts us in a much more effective frame of mind to succeed again tomorrow, next week and next month.
Vital is it, if we are an employer that we benefit from the positive efforts of our staff. Yet it is just as important for them, that we remind each and any one of them of their successes in their work or in their life generally – and keep reminding them.
We are not the only ones we can help here, because partners, children, grandchildren, employees can be reminded of their successes and on an ongoing basis through time.
We should do it with our partners too.
So – in handling success, does this give us a clue on how most of us handle failure? I wish!!
Don’t we forget, play down and change the subject on our life’s failures, just like we do with success? Wouldn’t that be consistent behaviour?
NO! NO! Most of us don’t do that at all. We remember our failures. We burnish their memory onto the very fabric of our minds. We recall the sense of failure we felt at the time, the anguish, the embarrassment, the loss of self-respect.
And we do it repeatedly, often for years after, when we are still alive to tell the tale and had other lesser dramas which tested us but somehow we got through.
So what we do here then? Do we try to blot the whole episode and all its aftermath out of our minds?
It’s “No!” to a lot of that that too! What we need to do is to forget the failure itself and pledge to ourselves that we will give it no time in our thoughts in our lives ahead. But it is fundamental at the same time that we should focus on how we got over the failure; how we recovered and re-established ourselves.
Better still we should go a stage further and remind ourselves that while success cannot be guaranteed, getting though and past failure can. This is true particularly if we adopt a mentality which makes us search for ways out of a dilemma, rather than wallow in it..
There it is then. Too many of us forget our successes when we should remind ourselves of them constantly – and remind others of their successes. Equally, too many of us waste time and emotional energy reminding ourselves of our failures, when we should blot those memories out by recalling how we recovered from the disappointment and re-established ourselves.
Good luck and don’t hesitate to keep doing this to restore your sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
Sir Gerry Neale believes our view of ourselves in the light of our successes or our trials and tribulations lies at the heart of our sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Make small changes in our thinking and we can transform our level of achievement and happiness. Visit his blogs for more helpful information at http://psychologysimplified.blogspot.com and http://cognitivementors.com.
