Self-Esteem: Opportunities in the Pain

Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

Today we’re going to talk about self-esteem. To one degree or another, at one time or another, each of us deal with feelings of low self-esteem. We questions ourselves. We have doubts about ourselves. And so, I want to give you some thoughts that will help you build and maintain a strong self-esteem.

Let’s start with this thought. It reads this way:

“Oddly enough, we might want to consider the fact that the things that have run rough-shod over our self-esteem are the very raw materials from which great futures are constructed. The more the damage, the more the material and therefore the greater the opportunities. The future cannot help but be shaped, built and ultimately fed by the past. The worst the past, the greater the feeding.”

We have this tendency to focus on the negative. On what went wrong. What didn’t work. What backfired. What came back to bite us. We have this really interesting tendency to become consumed with all the bad stuff. The bad stuff is what comes to define us, it defines our situation, and it defines every outcome of whatever it was that went wrong.

And because the bad becomes so predominant, the bad becomes ‘all bad.’ By that I mean we can’t find the ‘good’ in the ‘bad,’ even though some element of good is always there. The lessons that we can learn. The perspectives that we would have never had had we not tried and fallen short. The opportunity to learn things like patience, and endurance, and flexibility, and how to manage disappointment, and how deeply the human heart can feel when things go bad. The opportunities in the carnage are massive, and often those kinds of opportunities can’t be found any place else.

But our pain convinces that the opportunities aren’t there, or if they are, it’s basically impossible to ferret them out. We just need to focus on getting rid of the pain (because it’s painful) versus spending valuable time trying to find the good in something that seem entirely bad.

Now, think about this.

Bad things have happened to all of us. Nobody’s excluded. Nobody’s exempt. There are no exceptions. And at some point, bad things going to happen again. You can count on it. And it’s not just ‘bad’ stuff that happens to us. Sometimes it’s ‘devastating’ stuff. Stuff that knocks us down in ways that we never really get back up again. We’re all walking wounded. The real issue is the depth or degree our woundedness and what we’re going to do with it.

Think about this:

“We’re going to get knocked down because of a thousand unjust things that should never have happened. But are we determined enough to get back up so that a handful of good things might happen?”

Regardless of what has slammed itself into your life, there is something good within it. And there is enough good within you to ferret it out. These situations that you’ve experienced and the wounds that you’re carrying around because of those situations contain within them some of the greatest assets that you have available to you. And you have enough within you to mine those assets out of the carnage.

As someone once said, “It’s not what happens to us…it’s what we do with what happens to us.”

What happens to you is opportunity, even though that opportunity is often wrapped in pain, and sometimes a lot of pain. But if we dig the opportunity out of the pain (which we have the capability of doing) in time the pain will be offset by the opportunities that lay within it. Therefore, rather than these difficulties and struggles destroying our self-esteems, they are the very assets that can build them. The very things that have crushed your confidence, hold within them the things that can build your confidence.

As we’ve said:

“Oddly enough, we might want to consider the fact that the things that have run rough-shod over our self-esteem are the very raw materials from which great futures are constructed. The more the damage, the more the material and therefore the greater the opportunities. The future cannot help but be shaped, built and ultimately fed by the past. The worst the past, the greater the feeding.”

I would suggest that you take some time and think about that.

“The Self That I Long to Believe In” is a timely, thoughtful, and straight-forward look at both building and strengthening your self-esteem. You will find “The Self That I Long to Believe In” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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