Choose How You See Yourself.

I've included this video here because it shows just how widespread this problem is in society. Listen to what one woman says about being dumped. How she took the rejection as some kind of confirmation about everything she thought was bad about her. This is scary stuff.

"Do you know any ugly women?"

My sister has just stopped me in my tracks. I'd been talking about one of the women I know and somewhere along the line I must have touched a nerve. Life has not been kind to my sister recently and I suspected she was feeling sensitive about a lot of things but she deals with things differently to me. At least, I think she does.

But the truth is, I don't know any ugly women. I'm still a man. I can still make thinking with me penis into an art form. But for the most part, I understand that a beast can hide anywhere but a good person is usually easy to spot. I make mistakes. Sometimes catastrophic ones. But I'm not hanging around with anyone who has a rot in their personality.

There is tremendous pressure on women these days to look a certain way. The finest marketing and advertising brains in the world spend their days finding new way to make people and particularly women feel bad about themselves. All so they will buy this or that cream, spend thousands on this or that surgery or- if the advertising brains have done their job really well- follow each and every meal with an hour of fingers down the throat vomiting.

Out there in the world there is a deep hypnotic induction that you, as a woman, are not okay.

When someone is born, that precise pattern of a person cannot ever be reproduced. You can't make it again. Some men and women go through intense challenges, pain and emotional anguish to even conceive in the first place and the moment those tiny little miracles get out into this world what is it that we tell them? Ah yes: you're shit until you look like some nonsense the fashion industry came up with in their lunch break.

Not feeling good enough is a whirlpool belief. It attracts other negative things and they swirl around and around it and it sucks the life out of you. I should know. I went through a lot of bullying in my life. When you've had stones and coins at you, been spat at, emotionally humiliated by teachers and other stuff, you kind of get a complex about yourself. And it takes years to weed that out of the head.

And the whole thing has much greater consequences. You're prompted to not go for what you want but to go for what you think you can get. And because you've limited yourself through your thinking, what you think you can get is going to be small. So you're prompted to spend your time, energy and even your soul trying to get things you don't actually want in the first place.

For me, there were turning points in terms of how I saw myself: my therapy training and the moment I temporarily lost my left elbow. When you're left arm is basically lifeless and limp and stretched across your chest you begin to realise that maybe it is time to take care of yourself and how you see yourself. Time to make that choice to feel good about yourself. Negative self talk wasn't going to stop the two weeks of agony and three more weeks of a slightly duller pain. Negative self talk wasn't going to help me in the months of physiotherapy.

And my therapy training revealed a lot. Most of the negative stuff I believed about myself wasn't what I believed about myself. It was what other people believed about me. If you have a negative belief about yourself, stop and ask yourself where you were when you first had that belief. When you first became aware of it. Exploring that will really surprise you.

Each one of us deserves to have choices about how we see ourselves. It's not up to the fashion industry or peers to judge whether we are okay or not. It is up to us as individuals. Up to you.

The author gratefully acknowledges the influence of: Pam Gawler Wright, Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Stephen Gilligan, Jamie Smart, Adam Eason and Joseph Clough on his thinking.

Marty Drury holds the Foundation Certificate in Contemporary Psychotherapy and is an NLP Practitioner. He specialises in helping people make positive changes at very deep levels.