Despite being a successful model, Amy suffered from horrible body dysmorphia and hated looking at herself in the mirror. When asked to remember the last time she was paid a compliment and believed it, she replied, “I don’t remember”, despite receiving a compliment nearly every day. Strange, right? Unfortunately, Amy's perceptions has overtaken her reality. Our self-belief acts as a filter that creates the reality we have set ourselves to believe to be true. It will edit out all incoming information to make our reality fit with who we think we are, and in turn create our self-image. Amy immediately dismissed anything nice that was said to her because it did not fit with her self-belief.
A little bit of a history lesson...
In the 1960s, the famous plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz found that after many of his operations, the self-esteem and confidence levels of his patients rose dramatically. For a few people, however, the operations did not seem to make any difference. After a great deal of exploration, Dr. Maltz concluded that those patients who did not experience a change in their levels of well-being were ‘scarred on the inside’. They saw themselves as unworthy, bad, or hopeless, and the fact that their appearance had changed on the outside made no difference to the image of themselves they held on the inside. They had what he called “an impoverished self-image“.
Your self-image is how you see yourself in your imagination. It’s the blueprint that determines everything about you, from how motivated, intelligent, and confident you are willing to let yourself be, to what kind of person you become. The reason our self-image has such powerful influence on our behavior is that it is self-reinforcing. For example, we have all met people who have an aura of attractiveness regardless of their physical appearance. Because they think of themselves as attractive, they carry themselves well, dress to bring out their most attractive features, and seem comfortable speaking to anyone. This self-confidence is the key. The belief that they are attractive makes them appear attractive to others, whose positive response in turn reinforces their self-image as attractive.
“A man is but the product of his thoughts - what he thinks, he becomes.“ - Mahatma Gandhi
Why do so many diets fail and people who have seemingly lost weight gain it back again? One reason is that those people are focused on changing the external consequences of their thinking, not the real cause - their self-image. As long as they continue thinking of themselves as "fat" or "unworthy", their brain will always find ways to prove this inner statement to be true, no matter how much they exercise or how many changes in diet they might make.
Our self-image is not set in stone. The way we choose to talk to ourselves - the kind of thoughts and feelings we have in our inner conversations - has immense power to change our reality. By getting into the habit of focusing our attention on what we want and attaching a sincere, heartfelt feeling to it, we will be able to start changing our thought patterns. As we start to create change in our thought patters and then our self-image and behavior, our lives will slowly start to undergo change and transform as well.
With Love,
Luna
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