Self-esteem
Training Exercises and Resources

Resentment can consume people. Constantly thinking negatively about others can make an individual sad, angry and ultimately depressed. This strong emotion should be addressed before it becomes chronic or habitual.

The technique presented here borrows from NLP with a strong emphasis on visualisation. It is also useful to address self-resentment and self-loathing.

The power of this technique is in repetition. You can conduct this in a class, though it is best if it is carried out on an individual basis. The instructions should be provided once, and individuals should then go through the exercise without interruption or disturbance. They can then repeat this over a period of time to get its full effect.

The following exercise will help you manage envy. It borrows from the philosophy and science of positive psychology and will put you on the right path on dealing with envy. Strong emotional thoughts such as envy cannot be cured with a quick 10-minute exercise, but you do need to start somewhere, and this exercise provides the right structure to start with. You can make it into a habit and slowly chip away at envy.

Envy can come to blur the vision. If unchecked, it grows in your mind. You start feeling that you don’t actually mind if something bad happens to the person you envy, that somehow your life is second-rate and possibly not really exciting to go through. What follows is depression, lethargy and a sense of being a failure—all unhealthy stuff.

To address envy, you must first understand what it is about. By gaining perspective, you can take steps to turn it around and benefit from this emotion. The powerful 6-step formula provided here helps to achieve that.

Even admitting that you are envious of someone isn’t easy. This exercise is not something that should be carried out in a group. If you are a trainer and running a course, provide this exercise as a handout and ask delegates to go through it after the course in their own time. It would not take too much time; they should go through the exercise in a way that won’t make them feel judged for their answers.

This exercise helps delegates explore the concept of temperament, understand what it means, how it is formed and how it can influence their emotional intelligence. Temperament refers to aspects of an individual’s personality that are mainly biological or innate as opposed to learned. Temperament is basically life-long traits that we have acquired early on in life or simply inherited. Here are some examples:

• “I am shy in social settings. I feel uncomfortable if I suddenly find myself at the centre of attention. I guess it comes from my childhood when I was brought up to be a quiet kid.”
• “I was never very sporty or physical when I was growing up so engaging in sports these days doesn’t appeal to me much. Where I grow up, it was frowned upon for girls to do sports.”
• “I like talking. If I enter a room and it is quiet I have the strongest urge to talk and get everyone to listen. I got this from my mom I guess...” [Carries on talking for a while until stopped!]
• “I have always been sporty, even though I was a girl I always liked any sport even if they were predominantly for boys. I guess I got this from my dad who was very athletic.”

In this exercise, delegates explore the nature of their temperament and discuss this with others to better understand what it means.

People tend to focus on negative aspects of their personality harshly. Many exaggerate their negative traits or personal observations beyond what they really are which affects their self-esteem and self-worth negatively. This exercise helps people to look at the positive side and avoid negative and destructive generalisations.

In this activity, a group of people get to acknowledge each other’s actions and appreciate the impact of such actions on their own lives. People tend to avoid praising despite the fact that it is incredibly motivating. In addition, people also tend to shrug off praise as a way of being humble or they may feel they need to be polite rather than boasting about their actions. Both of these lead to a missed opportunity on boosting a person’s self-esteem. This activity provides an opportunity to do this systematically and in a safe environment.

It is ideal for a team of people who have been working together, know each other well and have gone through shared experiences so they can comment on each other’s actions.

In many social environments, boasting about ourselves is usually frowned on. It is often impolite to keep going on about our own achievements and show off our skills, processions and knowledge. This leads to a certain amount of conformity where we never get to praise ourselves. We are encouraged to praise others (rightly so) and everyone loves to be praised. However, we never get to acknowledge our own achievements internally. In fact, most often we are so focused on learning or owning the next thing that we forget we have come a long way already.

This lack of self-praise can lead people to devalue themselves and not see their own accomplishments as significant or worthy of sharing with others. This can in turn lead to reduced self-esteem and life-worth. Hence, it is useful to have an opportunity to self-praise in front of others.

In this elegant but powerful activity, delegates get to praise themselves in a controlled environment so there is no room to appear rude or impolite. They get to acknowledge their own accomplishments and feel good about themselves by sharing this with others. It is this sharing aspect that makes this activity so powerful by encouraging people to talk about themselves positively while having someone to listen to. It simply reminds people that they have done well, focusing their attention on the most positive aspects of their lives.

This is a simple yet powerful exercise that helps delegates discover something positive in every experience. The structure of the exercise is actually quite simple yet the power resides in asking a simple question that leads to positive thinking as opposed to asking questions that lead to self-blame and reduction of self-esteem.

Some people are naturally quiet. They don’t see much need to talk about themselves or share what they have accomplished with others. They are always in danger of getting overshadowed by extrovert types who are hell-bent to tell everyone how great they are. Between the two extremes, there is a middle ground that consists of saying enough to be noticed but not too much to become annoying. We live in a competitive world today and it is important to be able to tell others about what you have accomplished and what you are good at or you will be overlooked and forgotten.

This exercise is particularly useful for those quiet types who may need a push and a structured approach in practicing this skill. Learning this important skill will allow them to become better at talking about themselves and their ideas, values and achievements without appearing over bearing or self-centred.

You can run this exercise for an existing team or for a group of individuals from different backgrounds. Even those who are not naturally quiet would benefit from the structured approach used in this exercise to practice their story telling techniques.

This is an exercise to help team members discover their common interests and skills as well recognising each person’s unique skills and experiences. The setup is quite simple and you can easily customise it to focus on a specific idea based on your training needs. It can be used for both young and mature teams.

The power of this exercise is that it indirectly shows that there can be a lot of similarities between people in a team which will help to bring them closer together as they will acknowledge these similarities. In contrast, they also get to recognise their differences and appreciate that these differences lead to unique contributions which would ultimately make the team more powerful and creative.

In 2014 Michael Bay was invited to CES2014, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Samsung was launching a new TV and had summoned the famous Hollywood director to endorse the product on stage. As usual, such marketing is intended to benefit both parties. A director endorses a new TV for a company and in exchange gets to show clips of his new movie on the TV to promote them. Everyone is a winner. Except that in this instance things didn’t quite go according to the plan.

The launch event was broadcasted live and Michael Bay was interviewed on stage. He was asked a few simple questions, all based on what was planned and presumably rehearsed before.

Perhaps it is best if you see the video of the event for yourself to see what happened on stage when Michael Bay started to answer the questions.