I had a very interesting coaching client this morning. He is a 29 years old young man, let's call him Brian. He is professional, friendly, and mostly upbeat, yet suffers from isolation. What caused him to talk to me is the fact that during the last six months he was on several first-dates, and even though some of them had potential, and he wanted to meet the girl again, he was rejected.
Diving in to details, we dissected several interactions he had and realized that the core issue lies with him, over the years, developing a bad habit of how he responded to verbal and written communications.
To compensate for his lack of self-esteem, when interacting with others via conversation or messaging, before hearing the other person out and fully understanding their point of view, Brian would jump, and prematurely offer his point of view, which was based on his partial understanding of what was said. The insecure need to provide immediate response, before taking his time to fully digest what is being said, caused him to impulsively rush to conclusion and often offer a completely unrelated response, causing the other person to immediately form a negative impression of him.
My point to everyone is that we need to be very conscious of negative habits we picked up along the way and have the confidence not to be robots and accept them as our default setting for life. Just like habits are created – they can be changed and recreated. G_d gave us will power to create a bright future for ourselves and not to self-destruct. Let’s use this magic power wisely. Our happiness and health depend on it!
And guess what? Thinking of ourselves as individuals with a low self-esteem is also a habit. It can be easily reversed by practicing self-love.
