Why Your Best Is Good Enough , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Kevin Leman Dr.

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124 pages

English

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Writing in his well-known, upbeat style, Dr. Kevin Leman helps those who struggle with self-doubt to value their talents and gifts and accept their shortcomings. He points out why the lifestyle we develop as a child determines our degree of success or failure and explains how, regardless of the past, each person can develop a healthy lifestyle today.

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Assertiveness

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 mars 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441212566
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 1988, 2007 by Kevin Leman
Published by Revell a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2010
Ebook corrections 10.23.2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1256-6
Previously published in 1988 under the title Measuring Up and in 1997 under the title When Your Best Is Not Good Enough
To my son, Kevin Anderson Leman II
Your humor, sensitivity, and concern for others make us proud to be your mom and dad. Mom and I love you very much.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Part 1 Starting Out on the Wrong Foot
1. Why Can’t I Measure Up?
2. What’s This Thing Called Life-Style ?
3. How the Pattern Begins: The Early Years
Part 2 Discovering Who You Really Are
4. The Critical Parent and You
5. The Problem with Guilt
6. Is It Time to Lower Your High-Jump Bar of Life?
7. Help and Healing for Your Broken Heart
Part 3 No Losers in the Game of Life
8. A Few People Who Didn’t Measure Up
9. It’s Great Being You!
Notes
About the Author
Other Books by Kevin Leman
Back Cover
Introduction
After writing The Birth Order Book in 1985, I got an avalanche of responses to one specific part of that bestselling book. I talked about a syndrome that I observed in people over and over again: perfectionism .
Perhaps you know these people. They start a lot of projects and don’t finish them. Their motto is, “If I can put it off for a day (or a year) or two, all the better.” If you look on their desks at their places of work, you’ll see signs of the defeated perfectionist—they live in piles. If you ask these people to find something on their cluttered desks, they’ll find it with ease. If you want to send them into a tizzy, move their piles. There is order within the disorder.
But these personality types have a unique way of defeating themselves. Let’s look at a student who fits the profile. This young person needs to study for a final exam. He tells himself throughout the day that he is going to study all night. Evening arrives, and he sits down to bury himself in his books, only to find himself studying for just a few minutes before seeing that shirt or that jacket that needs to be hung up across the room. What’s the probability of him returning to his studies? Zero? Nada? Zilch? Bingo! You should have been a psychologist. This syndrome is produced in people who are brought up with at least one critical-eyed parent. That parent can spot a flaw at forty paces. And these personalities protect themselves from criticism by simply not completing tasks and not performing up to their abilities.
So, because of the overwhelming response, I wrote the book Why Your Best Is Good Enough . It’s intended to help those afflicted with this syndrome to remove the high-jump bar of life that seems to stymie them at every turn.
My hope is that it will help you.

1 Why Can’t I Measure Up?
You’re bound to know the feeling.
Maybe it only comes around at family reunions, when you see your younger brother, Fred, again. There he is—tan, handsome, athletic—and a tremendous success in the world of business.
Most of the time you’re pretty self-confident. You’re doing okay in the world, and your friends seem to like and respect you.
But then, there he is—and all of a sudden you feel like you’re six years old again, with torn pants and a dirty face. You suddenly realize that whatever you’ve done with your life, it hasn’t been enough. No matter how much you know, it isn’t as much as he knows.
No, sir. You couldn’t measure up to this magnificent brother when you were a kid—and you’re still standing in his shadow. You feel so . . . so . . . inadequate. At any minute he’s bound to come up and tell you that you have spinach stuck between your teeth, or that your fly’s open. Maybe you’d better stay over here, in the corner.
If it isn’t your brother who brings out these feelings in you, perhaps it’s somebody like her . . . Mary Johnson, who still looks terrific after all these years.
You had to practically starve yourself for six weeks to get down to a size 12 for your high school reunion. And then she shows up wearing a stunning size 5! And just look at that figure!
If situations such as these are the only times you feel like something of a failure, then you can consider yourself very lucky. You’ve developed a pretty healthy self-image.
Many people—no matter what they may say or how they may conduct themselves—really don’t feel very good about themselves. They feel inadequate, like failures and rejects much of the time. And they’re not. They’re ordinary, productive citizens, who have just never been able to feel they measure up. They try so hard, but always seem to come up short. Even when they succeed, they feel as if they just got lucky, or that they’ve failed.
They don’t measure up to their parents’ expectations, their teachers’ expectations, or even their own expectations. They always feel as if they’ve let somebody down, and in many instances they have become so defeated and weary that they live out their lives in a way that reinforces their opinion of themselves. These people are defeated perfectionists. Defeated because they can never clear what I call “the high-jump bar of life.”
If they ever do manage to get over it, they quickly raise it up a notch or two so they can never get over it a second time.
In my more than thirty years of private psychological practice I’ve talked to thousands of these people, and I’ve come to see consistent patterns of thought and actions—patterns that reinforce the “I just can’t measure up” syndrome.
I don’t care who you are, or what has happened in your life up to this point. You are not a failure, and you do not have to live your life as one.
This book is being written to help everyone who has ever struggled with feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy, no matter how strong and consistent or weak and sporadic those feelings may be. I want to help you break the cycle of failure and rejection. I want to teach parents how to instill a positive self-image in their children. And I want to help you understand how you got caught in this vicious cycle in the first place. The defeated perfectionist can be set free from discouragement and failure, and I’ll show you how.
Now, I’ve already told you that I’m a psychologist, and that I’ve counseled thousands of people over the past thirty years. But don’t think for a moment that I’m going to approach the subject with the cold and detached eye of a clinician. I’m not going to be writing from some lofty ivory tower and use only words you might find in Reader’s Digest under “It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power.”
I haven’t always been a psychologist, and I wasn’t born with a doctorate degree. When I write about the feeling of not being able to measure up, believe me, I know what I’m talking about.
For instance, when you hear the word undistinguished you might as well think of my high school career. I graduated a “gimme putt” from the bottom of my class. I was in a reading group in elementary school where one kid ate paste and two others continually smiled for no apparent reasons. I was a college dropout who worked for a while as a janitor in a hospital. The head nurse there took my future wife, Sande, aside and told her not to go out with me because it was clear I was never going to amount to anything, and that she was wasting her time with the likes of me. (I’ll tell you more about this later.)
And I’ll have to admit, at the time that looked like some pretty good advice. (But I’m awfully glad Sande didn’t take it!)
Take It from One Who Knows
What’s my point? Only that I know what I’m talking about not only on the professional level, but on the personal level as well. When you’re starting out on a vacation trip, it’s one thing to look at all the colorful brochures and believe what they say. It’s another thing to take the advice of someone who knows where you should stay because he’s been there himself. Well . . . I’ve been there!
I’ll talk more about that later on, but before we go further I want to assure you of something else: People who see themselves as not being able to measure up are often some of the most intelligent, attractive, and productive people around. If you’re one of those who are troubled with thoughts of inadequacy you’re in some pretty good company.
I remember Joanne, for instance, who was warm, intelligent, and absolutely beautiful, with soft golden hair, Carolina blue eyes, and a perfect smile. It was hard to find the slightest flaw on that face, and the rest of her was not bad either!
She was the sort of woman who couldn’t walk into a crowded room without causing several male heads to turn in her direction. Her looks, coupled with her sparkling personality, made her a most-eligible and sought-after young woman.
But she never saw any of that, and her charming personality was only a front. Beneath the surface she was miserable, sad, and lonely; she considered herself to be a terrible failure.
She wanted desperately to find a man to love her—or at least she thought she did. But even though she had many “relationships,” they always ended in disaster.
The truth was that Joanne, like many others I have counseled, was caught up in the self-perpetuating cycle of not being able to measure up.
She unconsciously sabotaged every one of those relationships because she had grown so used to living in a world of broken dreams.
It could be that this is what has happened in your life. You have come, for whatever reason, to see yourself as