THE ROAD™ Road Rage: Self-Esteem One Way or Another

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THE ROAD™
Road Rage: Self-Esteem One Way or Another

We all operate by trying to enhance our self-esteem. We all want to feel good about ourselves - proud, content and self-confident. We do not want to feel bad - ashamed, guilty and inferior. We will do whatever we believe necessary to produce the former feelings and avoid doing what results in the latter.

There are two basic ways we go about this: by setting goals and achieving them; and, by enjoying personal relationships and the pleasure of simply being alive.

On the highway, however, we may invest goals with more importance than they deserve. We may not even be aware that we are doing this. When we do, we set ourselves up, needlessly, for a self-esteem battle. For example, something as simple as driving time to a destination may become a goal linked to self-esteem if we invest it with too much importance. When we invest too much in meeting such goals, we will become angry with whatever and whoever has thwarted us.

Because we have such a personal self-esteem investment in achieving the goal, we will experience any event or driver that delays us as acting against us, personally, because we have made it into a personal issue. If we do this we will frequently become enraged. There must be another way to achieve self-esteem!

Another way to achieve self-esteem is to experience in our bodies the warmth that comes from liking and loving and being liked and loved in return. We cannot have it both ways. Our efforts in gaining self-esteem by reaching our destination on time costs us the self-esteem we could have obtained if we were more engaged with our passengers.

Not only can we reduce our anger, but we can increase our self-esteem and our happiness. It all hinges on whether we get our self-esteem from setting goals and achieving them or from out relationships.

How we get our self-esteem depends on what we believe is important. The good news is that we have the ability of choose our beliefs. All we have to do is to identify the beliefs we are currently using and then understand alternative beliefs that would give us self-esteem in more life-enhancing ways and flip us to the new beliefs. It’s almost as easy as it sounds.

Acknowledgement: The content of this training is based on Road Rage to Road Wise by John Larson, MD (Tom Doherty, 1999 paperback)