Landon Saunders:
One thing that we will say over and over and over, and that is that as a human being, you do not have to be effective to have value. You don't have to be a winner by someone else's definition, and you don't have to be successful.
Announcer:
Hello everyone and welcome into another episode of Heartbeat, The Podcast, featuring the teaching and insight of Landon Saunders. Today we begin a series featuring content lifted from Landon's popular community workshop entitled, Feeling Good About Yourself. And on today's episode, he helps us wrestle with this question of our own self-esteem, how we feel about ourselves. Enjoy today's podcast with Landon Saunders.
Landon Saunders:
Self-worth, value, self-esteem begins deep within your life. I cannot allow anyone else to control that fact, and you can't either. That somehow your worth and your esteem, they're not tied to all of these external things.
Now, let's do a little check, self-esteem check, and I'm going to ask some questions and then you can tell where you are on the self-esteem spectrum. Research tells us that in the first grade, 80 to 85% of first-graders feel good about themselves, have a good strong sense of self-worth. But by grade five, that number has dropped to 20%. Only 20% of fifth-graders feel good about themselves, and that number drops, by the 12th grade, to 5%. Okay, here's the test for tonight, and you answer these questions quietly.
To tell whether you have good feelings of self-worth, are you a critical person? How critical are you? Do you criticize yourself? If you're a critic, would you stop that? Human beings don't have to behave that way. Now, if an individual is a very critical individual, if they're critically inclined, then it's assigned that there is low self-esteem. Second, can you make mistakes? Are you an individual who can make mistakes and still feel good about yourself? Thirdly, this is a good one. Can you accept your physical image? Now, when you look in the mirror, can you accept what you see? Can you accept what looks back at you? I love the expression of the kid who says, he says, "I'm not tall, but I'm slow." Feels pretty good about himself to come up with that. Number four, can you say no? Can you say no? Do you have a hard time saying no? Do you say yes? Anything anybody asks you to do, do you say yes? Not a good sign.
You say, "What if we're flunking this?" Do you like your name? Do you like your name? I'm fortunate. I love my name, Landon Brady Saunders. But do you know what my name almost was? My great-grandmother, when I was born, Landon is one of her son's name, my grandfather's name, and his middle name was Perminus, and my great-grandmother wanted to name me Landon Purminus Saunders. Now, if she had succeeded, I promise you I wouldn't be here tonight, and if mother never did anything else in this world to be a success, that makes her a success to me. Now, I have a psychiatrist friend, this is true, whose name is Dr. Looney. I'm not done yet. He went into partnership with another therapist whose name was Dr. Nut. Looney and Nut.
Names are so important. I believe this. I believe that one of the most powerful gifts given to human beings was the privilege and responsibility of naming things. You get to name things. Now, you have to be careful with that because we are all doing it all the time. Now, a lot of our names, we call a label. "Stupid!" There are children who have one name on the birth certificate, but who grow up with another name. The one on the birth certificate doesn't do them in. The other one might. You've named everyone you work with. You've named your boss. Yes, I have. But you've never told him. You've never told him. You've never told her what her name is. Naming, so powerful.
Six. Do you like birthdays? I like birthdays. Do you know what my best birthday was? It was my 40th. It was my most joyous birthday that I ever had. I was on an airplane flight across the US and a flight attendant came back and she said, "Landon," or "Sir, why are you so... You just look so happy? You look like you're having a good time." I said, "Today's my birthday. I'm 40." She said, "You need a drink." Do you like birthdays? They're a real index. Now you have to think about that. People who like birthdays, as a rule, have higher self-esteem than those who don't. Some people want to hide on their birthday.
Announcer:
We'll get back to Landon's teaching in less than 30 seconds, but we wanted to remind you that you can access a complete transcript of today's episode simply by visiting the show page. Heartbeat, The Podcast is brought to you by Friends of Heartbeat. If you have any issues or we can be of assistance in any way, let us know. And now, let's get back to Landon.
Landon Saunders:
Are you argumentative? Do you like to just argue? It doesn't make any difference what anybody says. Now, it's all right, if you're argumentative, if you always do it with a twinkle in your eye. And then go ahead and argue, then we'll know you're just kidding.
Number eight. This is a rough one. Are you intolerant of other people? Are you an intolerant kind of person? One of the reasons that I'd love to do Feeling Good About Yourself and as many places as we can is our society is increasingly eaten up with intolerance, there's racial intolerance, there's ethnic intolerance, there's gender intolerance, there's religious intolerance, that some sociologists feel that our society may be on the verge of one of the biggest outbreaks of intolerance and racism that we've faced yet. It's a deep sign of some real loss in sight, some real slippage in terms of how we feel about ourselves and sense of value.
Number nine, do you find it easy to forgive people? People who have good self-esteem find it easy to forgive others. Beware of those grudges. They're too heavy for a human being to carry. You will fall under its weight. Whatever that resentment is, whatever that grudge is, whether against a family member or against any other human being, for your own sake, please lay it down. It's too heavy for you to carry. Give you back trouble, but worse, give you head trouble.
What about jealousy? Are you a jealous individual? What about materialism? People with low self-esteem have to prove their worth by what they own have, have to prove it with an automobile, you prove it with furniture, prove it with the size of house you're in, that somehow we've got this wonderful quality, this powerful dynamic that we call a human being who is taking second place to things that you can burn and destroy, things that rust, and that's unacceptable. What about titles and awards and credentials? How critical, how important are they to you? And what about your ability to lose? Are you able to lose gracefully?
Now, how'd you do? How do we feel about this thing that we call the self? Now, let's go another step deeper. How do people usually determine worth? Worth is usually determined on a basis of two criteria. One of them is looks, the external, and the other is performance. Now, let's examine those. When looks is the measure for how one feels about themselves or the estimate that one puts on him or herself, when we get up in the morning, what's one of the first things we do? We go look in the mirror. It's the worst time in the world to look in the mirror. If you don't like what you see, it puts you in the hole and you spend the whole rest of the day trying to dig your way out. And sometimes it's pretty difficult. You look into that mirror and sometimes there's a nose there that you have to look around to see yourself. It's difficult to feel good about oneself unless you've come to terms with a nose, if your nose happens to be prominent.
But before we leave that point, I know exactly what to do with a big nose. Love it. And the bigger it is, the more love you have to give it. Now, when I look in the mirror, we men, you know what we men worry most about? Oh, hair. Oh, yes. You know how to hurt a guy. Hair loss. Hair and height. Those are the two things that we worry most about. Now, in my own case, I looked in the mirror... Well, I really first noticed mine in the sink, and you make all these jokes and you try to enjoy it and all of that, but the truth is it's not a very pleasant thing at all. But I will say this, when we men begin to lose our hair, do you notice how creative we get? A man can get more mileage out of two or three hairs.
Now we're talking about this thing that's called appearance, but this is what I know. Whatever that external appearance is, if it's weight, if it's acne, if it's no hair, if it's a nose, if it's ears, if it's skin, whatever it is, oh my, what a loss to this world if you allow it to just put you in the basement. We're all losers if you do that. You can laugh, you can cry, you can feel, you can touch, you can give friendship, you can create, you can bring delight. You can bring all the things that are in such short supply in this land. Why, why let it all drain out, simply because we can't quite come to terms with this thing that we call self-image?
Announcer:
We hope you've enjoyed today's episode on self-image, from the Feeling Good About Yourself workshop. Be sure to join us next time as our series on Feeling Good About Yourself continues. And if you enjoyed today's program, we encourage you to share it, like it, rate it, and review it wherever you get your podcast information. It really will help others find the same kind of content. And until next time, thanks for joining us on Heartbeat, The Podcast.
