Personal Growth Planet Blog

The word “unconditional” is thrown around quite a bit. It is often assumed that parents love their children unconditionally. Lovers are expected to love one another unconditionally. To boost self esteem, a person is encouraged to accept him or herself unconditionally.

I don’t know about you, but truly accepting or even loving unconditionally is not as easy as it sounds.

If any of us are completely honest with ourselves, we’d probably discover that there’s not a whole lot of unconditional loving or accepting going on.

The weight of my responsibilities, interests, hopes, dreams, worries, fears and more can really pile up. I tend to feel it in my shoulders, my back, on my head.

Pushing me down. Holding me back from the light, free and joyous life I really want to live.

We all have “to do” lists. We all have places we “have” to be, tasks we “have” to accomplish and roles we “have” to fill.

We all also have a seemingly interminable stream of thoughts that crowd our minds, often filled with worrisome or hopeful projections for the future as well as worrisome and wistful memories of the past.

I think of myself as a pretty positive kind of person.  I make it a point to focus on what, to me, is going “right” in a situation.

If the cake I bake falls, I remind myself that it still tastes good. If I have to spend an afternoon with someone who usually annoys me, I try to find something about the visit that I can genuinely appreciate.

(Okay, I’ll admit it. This is an intention and not always the way it plays out.)

During my high school and undergraduate years, I remember looking forward to being a full-fledged adult. Part of the allure of getting older was the promise of no longer caring about what others think of me.

Now that I am most certainly a “full-fledged” adult, I am a bit disappointed to see that this desire for acceptance and approval has not magically evaporated. It’s still there even if it takes different forms and is mellower (at times).

I’ve heard plenty of people claim that a benefit of growing older is that you don’t care what anyone else thinks about you anymore. Unfortunately, I have not found that to be true in my experience.

Swirls of color on a canvas. Voices and dance on stage. Handmade crafts of paper, cloth or found objects.

All of this will come together tomorrow in a Columbus, Ohio art show called KidzArtz that I have had the privilege of helping to organize with some Mother Artists at Work friends.

The creativity and imaginative spark that have gone into each craft, visual art piece and performance are amazing…all the more so because every artist is under the age of 18.

There is nothing quite so precious in both a child and an adult than the ability to imagine.

Pretty much every one of us has some (or many) old wounds that we carry around. Long ago, or more recently, we were “wronged” or hurt in some way and we just can’t seem to get over it.

Forgiveness is one very effective and powerful way to heal those wounds…or so we’ve probably been told.

The trouble with forgiveness is it is such a loaded concept!

There’s a definite connotation that posits forgiveness as the “right” or compassionate thing to do for another person. Religious teachings might have helped cement this self-less understanding of forgiving in your mind; they have for me.

By Amy Phillips-Gary

Yesterday, I offered advice for stopping the stories that fuel low self esteem. As I pointed out, we all tell ourselves stories and there might be quite a bit of “truth” to those tales. But if the stories are contributing to a sense of inadequacy, it’s not necessary to keep repeating them over and over again– or ever again.

There are other stories we can tell ourselves that are also accurate; and these different stories can allow each of us to bolster self worth.