The Feel Good Factor!

The Feel Good Factor

Welcome to the new blog, the focus of this blog is to explore how to get the Feel Good Factor! The question of how we can help ourselves get The Feel Good Factor is something that could be particularly useful to focus on at the moment because of all the stress that people are currently facing in their everyday lives.

As we all know there are lots of self-help books out there, some good, some bad; I think as helpful as these books can be, the reality is that there is no one answer to this question and each individual has to work out for themselves what makes a difference for them, particularly in times of stress. Having said that, I am going to recommend a book on how to build self-esteem which has certainly been a big influence when writing this blog.

What do I mean by the Feel Good Factor?

My understanding of feeling good is that we have self-confidence in ourselves, we care for ourselves, we love ourselves, that we respect ourselves and that we appreciate, accept and have a deep understanding of ourselves. In order to do this, we have to have a value and belief in ourselves; this doesn't only mean when things are going well but also at times when we are struggling or when we feel vulnerable or maybe having to manage some kind of crisis. For a moment let's look at what helps our mental wellbeing; there are three key themes to mental wellbeing: Resilience, Emotional Intelligence, Healthy Communication.

You will find some tips on some of these key themes in my previous blogs. In this blog though I would like to start looking at emotional well-being which plays a big part in looking after our mental well-being; we can start by exploring the idea of self-confidence and self-esteem. People who tend to have a good sense of emotional well-being tend to be self-confident; they manage their stress well, they are resilient, they have a good understanding of their emotions and know how to manage them, they are good at motivating themselves, they are able to relate and empathise with others and have good interpersonal relationships.

I think in order to know and manage our emotions we need to have a strong concept of self, with good self-confidence. I thought it might be worthwhile to consider what helps us to build our self-confidence and probably the first step is building one's self-esteem. First of all let's look at what is meant be self-confidence.

What is Self-Confidence?

Being self-confident means believing in yourself; having a strong sense of self-worth and a value and commitment to your beliefs and values. This can be relatively easy when things are going according to plan and we have every reason to feel good about ourselves. However if for some reason things go against what we plan and we find ourselves dealing with some sort of crisis, our confidence can take a bit of a battering. At times like this, we may start to criticise ourselves and this will only make things worse. This harsh critical voice is what we refer to as the "inner critic", I think we may all be aware of the voice of the "inner critic" that can go into overdrive telling you, "well I knew this was going to happen it was only a matter of time", " you should have known better", "this is all my fault", and I could possibly think of lots more and I am sure you could too! It seems a little weird but it is often the case that when we are at are most vulnerable we can give ourselves the hardest time and needless to say this is not going to help!

What we need is to be aware of our emotions, learn to understand and manage them. This is why I want to look at the area of self-confidence; it is about getting to know ourselves, accepting the good and the bad and learning to take responsibility for ourselves.

Building your self-esteem

Nathaniel Branden (1994) wrote a great book on developing self-esteem, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. He identifies and explores the Six Pillars that he feels are important in order to develop and build on for one's self-esteem and in turn developing good self-confidence. I believe that these pillars provide a very good structure for working on self-esteem issues and I believe they would be very useful to focus on:

• The practice of living consciously: Learning to live in a conscious manner, being very aware of the decisions and actions we take on a day to day basis.
• The practice of self-acceptance: Learning to accept the good and the bad, the ups and down of life. It is about facing reality learning to understand and manage our thoughts, feelings and desires.
• The Practice of self-responsibility: Learning to take responsibility for your mental and physical wellbeing, taking responsibility for the attainment of one's own goals.
• The practice of self-assertiveness: Learning to be assertive and have a good understanding of what this means, a respect for ourselves and others, while acknowledging your own beliefs and values, honouring your needs and wants and being able to respect these
• The practice of living purposefully: Learning to make our own goals and commitments and being responsibility for our choices, living purposefully and productively while cultivating the capacity for one's own self-discipline.
• The practice of Personal Integrity: Knowing what you believe and why, learning to integrate your convictions and ideas, when we go against what we truly believe it can cause conflict at an internal level and we can be very dismissive our ourselves which works against our self-esteem.

Self-esteem is shaped by internal and external factors; internal factors are our beliefs that we have developed about ourselves and external factors are the environment that we experience. We need to be aware of old messages that we have picked up along the way, patterns of behaviours that may be destructive and good awareness of self-care and lifestyle balance. Look back on the other blogs on life-style balance and building resilience, they might help. Also if you feel you need some extra support it might be time to contact a professional to get some help.

Click Here to see James Brown sing I Got You (I Feel Good)!

Next blog we will address the topic of Living Well