What can we do?

Kris Rosenberg

Apr 2002; Jan 2006 (Edited Notes from her files.)

Shakti Gawain Creative visualization: "Imagination is the ability to create an idea, a mental picture, or a feeling sense of something. In creative visualization you use your imagination to create a clear image, idea, or feeling of something you want to manifest. Then you continue to focus on the idea, feeling, or picture regularly, giving it positive energy, until it becomes objective reality--in other words, until you actually achieve what you have been imagining. The truth will set your free but first it will make you miserable. Connect with your unconscious."

H M Warner founder of Warner Brothers, as sound came to the movies in the late 1920's "Who wants to hear an actor talk?" False knowledge always seems so true at the time. God, you're one of those optimists.

Charles Schulz (of Charlie Brown fame) enrolled in art correspondence school receiving his lowest grade in drawing children.

Multiples of people have different physical responses in the different personalities is shown by encephalogramography, allergies, by-polar responses their creativity. And in their colossal mistakes. For example:

• Edison: "The radio craze will die out in time." (in time for what?)
• Chaplin: "The cinema is little more than a fad...what audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage."
• Darryl Zanuck: "TV won't be able to hold on to any mraket...after the first six monthes. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

Activate your potential by practicing confidence-raising experience/ relaxation and meditation activities.

Do You Want a Paint-by-Number Life or Are You Working on an Original? Kris Rosenberg

Try the following:

• Recall your background: Discover what needs to change in outlook, what you yourself can change.
• Measure self-esteem: How do I get those fun-house mirrors? (I cannot, I am not, I never will be are negatives that I can change with practice.)
• Break the Mirrors: Just as lack of confidence causes you to become less and less confident.
• Do what you do well and do a lot of it.
• Learn new skills.
• You have to be selective to be effective. Skip trying to being good at everything.
• Distinguish between legitimate challenge and foolish frustration.
• Shatter those fun-house mirrors. Do only the things you are good at; become the best you can be in those things.

Once you start rolling in the right direction, confidence snowballs.

How do we recognize a clear mirror? Just as you select positive, invigorating experiences, surround yourself with people who lift you up. Develop a new support system or add to what you have already.

• Be open to others.
• Give up the idea that you have to fix everything, provide solutions to all problems, prevent all disasters. There is such a thing as helping too much.
• It is never a kindness to help a baby chick out of its egg.
• We weaken others when we take the reins from their hands.
• Make new tapes for your life; reinvent yourself, keeping what works best, getting used to trying alternatives for what doesn't do as well.
• Never finish a bad start; look for a new approach or avenue.
• When you're walking a tightrope, don't look down.
• Distinguish between a lesson well learned and a conditioned fear response; practicing the former negates the latter in due course.
• Distinguish between forgiving and letting yourself be walked on.
• If someone is pulling you under, swim away. Victims can be very powerful when they become assertive, refuse to be a doormat.
• Relax when drowning. If you are the drowning one, don't sink your rescuer.
• Don't let anyone else define you or select your values. Be whom you are.
• Interrupt a downward spiral--sooner rather than later.
• If what you're doing isn't working, don't keep doing more of the same.
• Break your goals into small, manageable (workable) pieces, each of which requires moderate risk. Rome was built one brick at a time, and a life time really is a long time.
• We can't see around corners; knowing our next step is enough.
• Some problems cannot be solved they have to be lived through.
• Don't stay in "the park." Explore, with adventure comes wisdom.
• "Are we there yet?" Living in present time... life is a journey not a goal.
• Light other people's candles, thereby illuminating your own path.
• If you want to make a change, start with yourself.
• Remember people don't love you so much for what you are as for how they feel about themselves when they are with you.
• Once you do your best, just laugh at the rest.
• Don't defer all joy until you solve all your problems (and everyone else's!).

Being still and listening just waiting and being open in a meditative state with visualization is more likely to open my soul so that the healing light of the universe can pour into me. Be still and open to Power, Energy, Wisdom and Peace.

Let your ideas sink into your unconscious for processing.

When I was a high-school freshman... I dropped out of college in my first year;

When I was thirty-seven... I re-enrolled, learned to drive... Then and now..

• Do what you do well and do a lot of it.
• Avoid what you can't do.

This will take some trial and error if you haven't discovered your talents yet.

Once I was a full-time houseperson/homemother. I had fun with my little children, but I was a flop at cooking, cleaning, decorating, sewing--all the tasks that important people in my life said were the measure of a woman's worth. I would do my very best washing a window, but when the sun shone through it, there were more streaks to be seen than when I started. Once I baked a birthday cake and had to prop it up against a bowl when the party children came. I wasted cloth in my terrible attempts to make little dresses. They laughed at Lucy, but no one found what I was doing very funny.

I had a tape in my head with my father's words: "You won't ever be a good cook and housekeeper so be sure to learn to do something else"

I am very poorly coordinated. I don't play sports and I cannot wrap a gift presentably. I don't know how to style my hair with a blow-dryer. My handwriting is a joke. Once I wrote notes to friends to come for lunch on Thursday and three people showed up on Tuesday. Because I spill, my friends jokingly ask the server in a restaurant to bring me extra napkins. I trip over door sills. Once, when I was leading a college chapel service, I backed up and knocked the fire extinguisher off the wall.

As I have moved in my profession, people frequently say, "You are so gifted, you can do anything." Not so. There are many, many more things I cannot do than I can do. I am very awkward, poorly coordinated. I have often teased that I wear clothes to match the food I'll be eatingred for Italian.

Entering a classroom, I drop and scatter papers and misplace things. And that's just for starters so you'll know I can accept my flaws with humor, laugh at my failures...usually. Other people can laugh at them, too, and that's fun, not a downer. I do have to eat and walk through doors, but mostly I don't do the things I'm not good at.

But I am walking (sometimes stumbling!), breathing (sometimes panting!) testimony to the fact that no matter how paralyzed by fear you may be, no matter how low your self-esteem, you can raise your level of confidence -- a process not a terminal handicap.

You can't control everything (Shirley MacLaine not withstanding); however, you can effectively shape the substance of your life past, present, and future.

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Put a number from 1 to 10 on your level of self-esteem. Examine what you see yourself as being compared to what you want to be.

People with low self-esteem are poorly able to cope with the inevitable troubles and pressures of life (which take too much energy when there is little to spare). Ask each to name a negative....then a positive.

My feeling about just telling yourself you are great. For example:

• There is little relationship between how we vs. others perceive ourselves.
• There is little to do with reality everything to do with our perception.
• We form our self-perception mainly from feed back fun-house mirrors, from siblings and school mates, parents and teachers, neighbors, friends, two blue crayons...
• Learn to distinguish between a lesson well learned and a conditioned fear response. If you eat a couple of bad meals, look for the lessons.
• We see ourselves from the inside; others see us from the outside.
• With gray glasses, lenses, filters--expectations we go out and self-fulfill and in the process we set ourselves up for rejection. If we go out with negative expectations that perceive unfriendliness, we create unfriendliness (self-defeating, s-d, perception / behavior. For two examples--a speech, a new job. We set ourselves up for failure and rejection.
• Go out smiling and you find smiley people.
• When Julia Child submitted her first cookbook, the rejection letter said, "It is a big, expensive book of elaborate information and might well prove formidable to the average housewife."
• The Diary of Anne Frank came back with "The girl doesn't have a special perception or feeling which would lift the book above the curiosity level"
• Rudyard Kipling received this succinct note: "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language."
• NY Times reviews July 15, 1951 JD Salinger The Catcher in the Rye: This Salinger, he's a short story guy. This book though, it's too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should've cut out a lot about these jerks and all at that crumby school.
• Oct 22, 1861 Catch-22, Joseph Heller "...it gasps for want of craft and sensibility...It fails because half its incidents are farcical and fantastic."
• April 7, 1963 The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan "Sweeping generalities, in which this book necessarily abounds...it is superficial to blame the 'culture' and its handmaidens, the women's magazines..." What is to stop a woman who is interested in national and international affairs from reading magazines that deal with those subjects?
• Neil Diamond: "The trick (to achieving success) is not to listen to anyone who might (put you down). Because if I listened to these people all along, I would never have tried to become a composer. I was told no, you can't make a living, you can't make a life as a songwriter. I was told your songs are not commercial. ...Eat your heart out, Kathy."
• Nobodies often get discouraging advice from somebodies.
• A college junior once wrote a class paper describing his idea of a nationwide package delivery service with a hub where all the parcels would be sent before entering the distribution network. He received a grade of C; his professor didn't believe that Frederick Smith's imaginary enterprise could exist in the real world. But the young man transferred his vision to realitymulti-million dollar reality and called it Federal Express.
• The director of a modeling agency to Norma Jean Bakeraka Marilyn Monroe 1944: "You'd better learn secretarial work or else get married."
• Gary Cooper, 1938: "Gone With the Wind" is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling flat on his face and not Gary Cooper."
• Jim Denny, manager of Grand Ole Opry, firing Elvis Presley after one performance, 1954: "You ain't goin' nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin' a truck."
• Kathy Bates: "From the very beginning, I got the same thing from people all the time. 'Oh, I don't know if you're pretty enough to be an actress,' and 'You're not pretty enough for daytime TV, that's for sure,' and 'You need to lose weight,' and 'You are not going to make it and you should think about doing something else,'NY Times 1998
• Imminent professor who wrote a prize-winning book on Thomas Jefferson: The charge of a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings is distinctly out of character, being virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson's moral standards.
• Matt Damon tells of taking a girl he was "hopelessly in love" with to a prom at which she "hooked up with another guy," leaving him "heartbroken, crying myself to sleep."
• I never felt like I was anything, that I had any influence, that anyone really loved me...Princess Diana
• Robin Williams' father, when Robin failed all his courses except drama: It's fine to have a dream, but you'd better learn a skill, like welding, just in case.
• And, last, Sidney Poitier, when he first read for a part in a play in New York heard these words: "Why don't you just get a job as a dishwasher?"

Review the list. Then...

As you try new things, remember that feeling confident doesn't mean you will never stumble. A demoralizing job, for example, can stun you for a time. You may fall down, but probably you will not fall all the way back to the bottom where you started.

Take care not to stay in emotionally battering situations. (What batterers and battering workplaces do to our thinking: No one else would hire/have you. This is for your own good. If you leave, we will hurt you even more (give you a bad reference etc)

Learn to distinguish between forgiving and letting yourself be walked on. Forgiveness is a process of releasing resentment, unburdening debris. When you allow yourself to be abused, you forget that you are one of the people to care about.

Part of my peace is interconnecting with all being a spiritual connection, integration, integrity; effective compassion, no animal consumption, taking in adrenaline from terror and pain (not to mention steroids, antibiotics, pesticides and diseases) disturbs our bodies and minds. I've had disease as result and it started growing in me long before my abstinence not sacrifice found a richness. We don't realize the associations because consequences are not immediate.

Joseacute; Silva has said: "The more you meditate, the deeper you go within yourself, the firmer the grasp you will have of a kind of inner peace so that nothing in life will be able to shatter it... (this will) put forces to work for you in the direction of creating the event you want."

Do meditative, here-and-now, exercise.

When we don't like many of their basic characteristics, values, and behaviors, but put up with them thinking that if only we are loving enough, he'll change...we have feelings like an abused child that if we are not loved we are doing something wrong which we must try to correct. Some people who were never able to change their parent or parents into loving people find some emotionally unavailable person and try to do it again. Hungry people make poor shoppers.

You then act as though love doesn't count unless it is extracted from a basically unloving person. When your self-esteem is low, you feel that you do not deserve to be happy. You may not be attracted to people who are kind and stablethe unstable is challenging.

You are then more concerned about whether the person likes you than whether you like him. You are drawn to people who can't love. The relationship gets to be more like an addiction than anything else. The addicted one has a willingness to suffer. We work so hard to make the other person feel better that he has no reason to work at it. The person who always tries to fix things is held responsible for everything. In looking for a person like the lost parent, we want a second chance to make that person pay attention to us. The culture says frogs turn into princes, that you can make a person change if you love him enough. The more pain from childhood, the more we try. It rarely works.

The only solution for a person who has such a compelling need to be loved by the wrong person is to begin to love herself. Instead of what you can't have, begin to look at what you really want and need. This is the hardest thing any person ever has to do. It means stopping the only thing that has ever given temporary relief from pain (whoever or whatever you are addicted to) and starting to do something initially painful which, in the long run, will bring what you want. (The pain from letting go will not last as long as the pain from holding on.)

This will cause a lot of anxiety at first. Do as much for yourself as you have done for him all along. Start doing what you need instead of knocking yourself out to please someone who can't be pleased. The less you need someone else, the better person you will attract. Become selfish enough to give up being a martyr.

Kris Rosenberg (pre-publication notes.)

See also Even A Child Can Do It and Locus of Control