Forums IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ Paraliminals, Paraliminal Resets, Paraliminal Walkabouts, Natural Brilliance, Sonic Access GETTING RESULTS

Raymond

For me, accepting that humans are mistake makers, and putting that in the right frame, that is, not stepping all over others, but apologising easily and quickly if necessary, means I can interact more freely, expecting to be forgiven as much as to forgive, allowing grace to others, and thereby freedom to myself.

You are already cognizant of such freedom by your posting, try to bring this understanding to your interactions with seemingly out-of-reach attractive ladies.

Read through these insightful messages by Michael Hall, developer of Neuro Semantics:

How to Strengthen Your Ego-Strength
How do we go about strengthening our ego?
What patterns and processes allow us to do this?
What frames, beliefs, values, expectations, etc. support this?
The following are offered as beginning guidelines—processes which we have incorporated in our basic Meta-States training, Accessing Personal Genius. If you have experienced that training, then you know these processes and can keep refreshing the meta-stating patterns until you not only strengthen your ego-strength, but actually super-charge it. This will empower you to face life on life’s terms and to develop a sense of self-efficacy in the face of changing times. It will enrich your powers of optimism, resilience, and creativity.

1st Acceptance
First and foremost, we strengthen our ego-strength by meta-stating ourselves with acceptance. Access the state of acceptance and apply that feeling to your “self.” Think of something small and simple that you simply accept. You could get yourself worked up about it, even furious and frustrated, but you have learned to just go along and accept it. It could be something like the rain, the traffic, changing the baby’s diaper, taking out the garbage, etc. Think small and simple.
What is that like when you are accepting something? Feel that and reflexively turn that feeling back onto yourself—your sense of self, life, the cards that life has dealt you, when and where you were born, your aptitudes and lack of aptitudes, etc. As you do this, you’ll experience a quiet and tender feeling, one that may not necessarily feel very positive. It’s just a feeling of welcoming something into your life but not with any particular thrill or liking. To do that is to experience appreciation. Yet acceptance also is not resignation or condoning. Acceptance is just welcoming something into your world without any negative fanfare.
In this, acceptance can be a truly magical state. In it, we simply acknowledge the world for what it is regardless of our likes or dislikes. We simply acknowledge the constraints that exist and that we have to deal with.

2nd Adjusting Expectancies
Second, look at your self-expectancies and expectancies of others, the world, work, etc. and adjust them so that you have a fairly accurate map about what is, how things work, and what you can legitimately expect. What have you mapped about yourself, people, relationships, fairness, life, etc.? Every unrealistic expectation sets us up for a cognitive and semantic jar and for a possible disappointment. If it is unrealistic, then we are trying to navigate and work in a world that is ultimately an illusion of the mind. A more effective approach is to set out to create a good and useful map that will enable us to go and experience what we desire.
This explains how learning and developing greater understandings about things increases ego-strength. Knowing what is, how things work, the rules and principles of people, relationships, careers, etc. gives us the ability to adjust our thinking-and-emoting to such and this increases our ego-strength. It takes the surprise and shock out of being caught up short. It raises our level of frustration tolerance.

3rd Stepping into Our Power Zone
Weak and strong ego-strength is related to our sense of personal power or the lack thereof. We increase ego-strength when we accept our personal powers or responses of thinking, emoting, speaking, and behaving, meta-state them with a frame of ownership and then by welcoming and practicing the use of our powers, step more and more into our power zone. This increases our self-efficacy, activity, proactivity, etc. The more resourcefulness we have, the more willing and able we are to face reality and to master our world.

4th Meta-Stating Flexibility
A fourth process for strengthening ego-strength involves replacing rigidity and closedness of mind with flexibility, willingness to accept change, and an openness to the flux and flow of life. In weak ego-strength we strongly feel a sense of insecurity. Then that we don’t want things to change we want things to stay the same. As we develop more personal security, we are more open to change and to adapting and to using our resources. Openness to change, which supports personal flexibility, enables us to face the world and our future with an optimistic attitude. Then, if things change, we feel fine because our security lies in ourselves and in our strength of ego to figure things out.

5th Optimistic Explanatory Style
A fifth thing that increases the strength of our ego to face reality is the ability and attitude of interpreting things in such a way that we put a positive spin on things. We call this attitude, optimism. It stands in contrast to pessimism.
Martin Selgiman identified both the pessimistic and optimistic explanatory styles in his research with laboratory animals and then with humans. The pessimistic style consists of three P's: personal, pervasive, and permanent. We take a “bad” thing, an unpleasant or unfortunate event and make it about ourselves (personal), about everything in our lives (pervasive) and about forever (permanent) and that’s a formula for pessimism and clinical depression.
Conversely, when we index the specifics of an event, we contain the “evil” or “badness” because then it is about the event and not us (non-personal), it is here in this situation and context (non-pervasive), and it is today (non-permanent). This frames the negative event so that it doesn’t contaminate us with the “evil” and infiltrate our mind so that’s all we can see and feel. It enables us to then think about other things, what we truly are and what we care about, what we can do and how we can take positive action to make a difference. This begins to create the attitude of optimism as it operates from a position of strength, confidence, possibilities, and taking pleasure in what is going right.
It is in this way that we develop sufficient ego-strength to face reality and to not be overwhelmed by frustration, disappointment, hurt, etc. We do what we can with what we have and we enjoy the process everyday.

6th Consciously raising our Frustration and Stress Tolerance Level
If you look around the human situation at all the things that can and does trigger “stress” in people or that frustrates them and make a list—you will eventually make a list of everything. And the very things that frustrate the hell out of some people thrill and excite others. What one experiences as a stressor, another enjoys as excitement. In this, both stress and frustration are in the eye of the beholder.
The strength of your self develops by framing things in such a way that we endow it with empowering meanings. Positive framing and reframing then allows us to take a new view of things which then effects how we actually feel about things. In this way, framing and reframing things can enhance our ego-strength to face, cope with, and even master the challenges of life. We often do this by developing the kinds of frames of mind that allow us to develop the insights, distinctions, and skills so that what would frustrate others gives us opportunities for development.

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OPENNESS TO VULNERABILITY, OPENNESS TO BEING REAL

The meta-state structure of openness to vulnerability, openness to being real, to being what we are, fallible, to being accountable, responsible, etc. is a very wonderful and magical state. Here's how I've put my richly textured state of openness to vulnerability together.

1) First I access my power-zone of my basic God-given responses: thinking, feeling, speaking, acting, and writing. These are mine... fallible, yes, but my fallible responses.

2) So I accept them ... and then go further, I appreciate and esteem these fallible powers as the powers I have to influence myself, others, and my world. Fallible? Sure, and that means that I have lots of room to grow. It also means that I stubbornly reject any toxic idea about being flawless or perfect. "Hell no!" I welcome warmly into my mind and emotions my right to make mistakes and to learn from them. Feedback is what I use to keep growing and developing.

3) I then use these fallible powers to esteem myself as having worth and dignity as a given and this self-esteeming foundation then allows me to not be afraid of being what I am. It, in fact, gives me the freedom to use my vulnerability and neediness to be real and authentic in my relationships. Now I can present myself as "just me." I need to put on no airs of being a "somebody" because of my money, status, degrees, intelligence, looks, fame, etc. Non-sense! I have been a "somebody" since I dropped from the womb (Oh, so that's what happened!) completely naked and having no control over my bladder for a long time! I arrived in this world a human being ... a somebody ... and I haven't had to prove anything to anyone since!

4) I accept and welcome being a response-able person who can take actions and I welcome the corrections of others. I even appoint people to "hold me accountable." In my case, I have appointed Bob Bodenhamer and Carl Lloyd to do that. I want to live up to my own goals and values and I know that they will help me to be a better person.

5) When I make a mistake, I welcome correction so that I can quickly learn, proactively make corrections, and get on with things. I refuse to wallow around feeling bad, feeling guilty, feeling inadequate. Of course, I'm inadequate. I'm human; I'm not god. And guilt - true guilt, means that I have done wrong and need to correct something. Like a "Wrong Way" sign on a highway. No need to feel bad, just turn around - go the other way!

6) I access the higher state of un-insultability based upon my innate dignity and therefore can matter-of-factly explore insults, criticisms, and rejections. Along that line, I give myself permission to be rejected. Of course, everybody won't like me. What was I thinking? Of course, everybody is not going to like everything I say, do, believe, write, etc. So I grant myself permission to be disliked. It's not that big of a deal. What, I only have 6 billion other people on the planet to relate to? That's not enough?

7) I set a frame of openness and vulnerability and trust as my basic "way of being in the world." So I live my life like an "open book." Some will want to read and hang around; others won't. If someone comes into my life and decides to use my openness and vulnerability against me, I give them a chance or two and then I do what the great Nazareth teacher said, "Don't cast your pearls before swine.. Lest they turn and tear into you and trod your pearls underfoot." Jesus' statement is in the context of relationships, "Do unto others as you want them to do until you," and "Judge not lest you be judged" (Matthew 7:1-12). It's a passage about getting along. Be open and accepting rather than judging, but also be as wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove. If someone is hurtful and ugly, get the hell out of there! Don't put up with it.