This is How: part 2

part 1: heaa

from: How to be Confident

"To allow yourself to be "yourself" when you are with others, you don't need to have years of therapy-polished love for yourself - merely tolerance.

When you're on a date or in a meeting or wherever it is you need to be seen as confident or wish you had "confidence," this is the tool to pull from the box and use: be where you are when you're there, doing whatever it is you're doing.

Engage with someone and focus on them, not on your own self, not wondering how focused you are or how much time has passed."

from: How to Shatter Shame

"Some people find it difficult - or impossible - to focus on what they're doing instead of the people watching. Some people struggle and cannot seem to let go of other people's opinions of them, whether real or imagined. That means they're not able to be themselves. Which means other people won't see them as confident.

This is a self-esteem issue.

The phrase "self-esteem issue" is a cardboard stage prop of a phrase. What does it even mean?

I guess I have a hard time believing that anything hyphenated could possibly be the deepest truth of the matter.

A lack of "self-esteem" really suggests a feeling of shame over being one's self.

Shame is the landfill emotion. It's not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else."

from: How to Get Over Your Addiction to the Past

"For many years, I believed that one's past had to be fully understood in order to move through and beyond it. I see now that I was wrong about this. I know now that scrutinizing one's past and trying to gain understanding and "make peace" with it is a kind of addiction that keeps one focused on the past and not on the present.

The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

The unfairness of your current status is unimportant. What matters is, can you do what you need to do? If not, what can you do to achieve what you want to achieve?

Denial of the painful events in one's past is the same as obsessing over one's past. To actively refuse to discuss or think about, if need be, what happened is to imbue it with power.

Recycling the past into a new business, a not-for-profit to help others, a workshop, a painting, a book, a song - these are ways to explore the past in the context of the present. These are things people who are actively alive do."

more to come as I read on.

Winter break je t'aime.