Learning to Say No

I don't think I could say no to an old lady, except that one tine I called one a "S*** hag" but she deserve it.

 

Confidence at its core is stability of your own self image. This stability comes from a feeling you have about yourself.
We form self image from two components, our own perception of our self worth and feedback we get from others about our self worth.
Issues with personal self worth typically come from childhood, where child questions if he/she is loved, person ends up in a state of feeling not worthy of anything and they carry this low self image with them.
Being deprived of confidence, these damaged people begin to use feedback from others as a way to prove they are worth something.
This is incredibly apparent, they have no personal compass, constant fear of failure, they often feel clingy and constantly suspect people around them do not like them.
Complement makes them feel good and rejection devastates them, so mood swings are a part of life.
This type of individual gives away control of their mood to his/her environment, and becomes a victim, at the whim of others. Easily manipulated and dependent emotionally.
It is common for these individuals to treat others better than they treat themselves and to make huge sacrifices just to avoid conflict, that leads to emotional pain.

So at the core, the issue is that these people rely on others to see if they are good.

Now how does one fix this?
Good news is that broken part of you, is your own view of yourself, so, any work you do has to be done one on one with - you.
You basically need to build up a solid, reliable, self-image and it will then begin to provide you with confidence you need to not give too much thought to what others think.
To do this you have to set goals and achieve them, without getting others involved. You have to reward your success and punish your failure - all on your own - no help allowed.
Simple exercise - be 100% honest with yourself. Ask yourself difficult questions - why do I not exercise? Do I respect myself? What am I afraid of?
Your personality is broken, and you are probably not spending the time on yourself because you are too busy trying to look good to others, you devalue your own happiness and health in many cases.
You now will have to go in to your mind and try to figure out what you feel about your life, honestly. What you want, where you are wrong.
Its a long process and I suggest reading books.
Typical example of self esteem building is to start doing workouts - why do people find it hard to keep doing it? Because there no ongoing social value - they can say "I am working out" few times and get positive feedback from others, but soon noone cares and activity no longer provides external benefit and self esteem is so low that personal health is not even close to the top of the list, "I am worthless who cares if I get sick, get fat or die. I will just work 16 hours a day and only come home to sleep, because my team will appreciate me". Having self esteem means you care about your health and working out is rewarding because you feel it is important.

To summarize - you have to stop doing things that make you look good in eyes of others and start doing things that make you feel good about yourself. Do not involve others in this process, this is about making you become proud of yourself, and when you get there you will be happy to discover that you do not care much about what others think.

Best of luck

 

I loved this post!!!!

 

thingh is my manager said to me you are not done with tags or to keep working and stuff like that and I was genuinely working from the moment i clocked in so i fired back with calm anger and reiterate calm anger I have been working since i clocked in (her name) you can check the cameras if you want to ill get the work done .

 

I have this problem myself. Recently bought a vehicle and allowed myself to get pushed around by the dealers. I need to get tougher in these situations. Best of luck!

 

When you are dependent on others for self esteem, your behavior will change depending on who you are with.
In circle of close friends and family, you have much higher self esteem because you have learned that they have good opinion of you. So lean on this feeling and enjoy confidence.
You also think this is how self respect is and how it is earned with others.
So interactions with new people, you see yourself as worthless again and your goal becomes to build something to lean on to be confident.
You begin to act in a way that pushes people to show you they like you, or they like what you do. Then you gain some self esteem.
The problem is that all of this is an illusion, even reasonable conflict in your family may feel like rejection and boss telling you you are late is devastating.
You adapt a stance that if people are good to you then you will be good to them, but if they mistreat you - then you resent them.

There is a book that talks about loving yourself(in sense of feeling not sexuality), author literally spends the entire book explaining to you the concept of loving and accepting yourself.
I wrote all this because I struggled with same issues you describe, and when I listened to that book, there were moments when warm tears streamed down my face, when the realization hit me - I did not love myself, and that realization was eye opening and crushing at the same time. How it is that I neglected myself as a person and placed the needs of all others before my own?
As eye opening as these realizations are, they expose the problem but do not offer a solution, they orient you in the right direction.
What do I actually like? Do I do things that I do not enjoy? Why? What do I want to do? What makes me happy?
This is a long path you get on to explore yourself, and I said in my initial post - get books on the topic, they will help you stay on track, this is a long term project.
During this path you will find what you did wrong, and fixing those wrongs is the core task. Letting your ego flourish a bit.

You explore what you want, and they staying true to those wants, working to get those goals done.
Not arbitrary things, that you just force yourself to do, no, things that make you personally exited.

 

bro this is one of most helpful comments I have read....i want to save this post! Thanks for making this post!

 

I didn’t realize I had so much in common with you. And yes you are exactly right in everything.

What is the name of the book you referenced ? Please post or send me a dm.

 

I am very interested to hear the resource Ronila mentions— I had all the same symptoms and started looking into multiple explanations. Including codependency, attention seeking disorder. Pmo just filled the lack of self esteem; but perfectionism is huge for me too.

Hang in there man. We can obviously overcome.

 

Book is called - Love yourself Like your life depends on it.
But keep in mind that in life, one door leads different people to different places. Focus on the message.

Perfectionism in extreme forms stems from fear of failure, when I was preparing for presentations in college, I would spend hours and hours writing and developing my ideas, every sentence was revised, over and over, all of it flowed, seamlessly and engaged and made sense.
Nothing was overlooked, my intonation, my posture, positioning and gestures - all comes together in to a logical cohesive expression.
My presentations were stellar, they were leagues ahead of anything that happens in college, both students and professors were stunned and delighted. They sat there with their eyes wide open, happy to take a break from aimless, mumbling talks of other students.
They came to me after class and said - that was amazing, I was delighted as well.
Technically this is a story of success, I apparently worked hard and I did something people admired - great job, pat on the back. But reality is that I did this because of fear, I was afraid not only to make a mistake, I was also afraid of judgement that would come if I did not do well, what would people think? I was also not able to understand this at the time. And so I went on, spending hours and days on 5 minute presentation that accounted for 10% of the final grade.

This also also proves another important point - if you want to be good at something you have to spend allot of time on it, if you want it to be better than anything around - you have to spend more time working on it than anyone around did.
It is better to work hard on something important because you want to achieve something, not wasting your time on useless stuff because you are afraid of what other will think.

 

I do the “eternal revising “ thing a lot. It is an all consuming problem too.
But fear is what I have been attacking en masse since I started acting out sexually and quitting my marriage, then quitting pmo, to now I’m attacking my acting out....

Fear kills freedom, love, decision making.

 

hey man, loved this. From where do you have that insight?

Edit: Nevermind, I see you have posted it already, thank you

 

Books do not give you insight. It would be amazing if they did! =)
Then, we could just give teenagers bunch of quality books about life, and boom! We would have socially responsible adults, that have deeply human values helping each other thrive.
Unfortunately that is not the case, books present opportunities for us to gain insight, a great gift perhaps, but far from insight itself.

Insight is something you gain as a result of comprehension; simplification of complex ideas, to their most significant parts.
I am fascinated by human psyche, mine as much as anyone elses and so I share what I believe to be solid ideas.

 

A book that helped me was "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F##K" by Mark Manson.

This book is a lot more than it's title suggests. It's about being confident, not letting people influence your decisions, and standing up and saying "NO" or even "YES" when you have to. Too often we worry about what people think during our day to day actions. We have to make good solid decisions in life and not waffle around because someone intimidates us.

I don't think I'm saying it all very well. But I do highly recommend the book. You can get it in Kindle Version.

 

I do not particularly like the approach this book takes, it assumes people care about what others think because they are too caring and they need to grow up.
Problem is not that people care too much about others, the problem is that they depend on opinions of others too much, which forces them to give these opinions, interactions and relationships disproportional value, often resulting in stress and eventually abuse.

Suggesting you should not give a f##k in these circumstances is in many ways similar to taking someone with fear of highs to the edge of a skyscraper roof and saying - just do not give f##k about the fear you have. Just does not work.
And there are treatments that work for the condition, they involve gradual learning and changing the emotional response to heights and not focused on the fear that response brings, because fear in this case is the result not the cause.

 

The only advice is practice makes perfect. Just keep at it and you’ll get there.

The only thing I would say though is if your job is in the hospitality industry then it’s a matter of customer service and professional etiquette to do or act in a certain way. For instance, at work I can’t tell my boss to “go eat a bag of dicks” or to “fuck off” but rather I say “ok, thanks” or “ok, great”. Once I’m out of the office and off the clock my position changes and he knows that; we’re not friends. The point is at work you’re not being paid to express every emotion, you’re being paid to reflect your company and their values. If your values don’t align with your company then maybe you should seek to find a place that will. I know that’s easier said than done.