A Student Learns to Love Herself

Ha! Here is another end-of-the-semester entry!

I am always blown away by my students and their personal learning and growth. My Intro to Psychology classes cover a lot of facts and theories, but I offer multiple opportunities to apply the material to students' own lives.

This semester, I'm especially captured by one young lady who saw herself as painfully shy and having extremely low self-esteem and self-confidence. For her life-changing experiment, she chose to tackle these large issues. At my suggestion, she went for some powerful positive self-talk statements (affirmations) which she repeated three times a day. She also looked in her own eyes in the mirror daily, telling herself, "I love you." My suggestion was that she aim for 33-35 days in a row of the mirror strategy, and if she missed a day to start over. She also simply kept track of how many times she spoke to strangers each day, and she wrote short journal entries about her experiences in the evening.

Her paper, analyzing her experiment, was brimming with enthusiasm over her skyrocketing self-esteem and confidence. Instead of choosing one or two positive statements from the "brainstorming" list I provided, she memorized the list of a dozen or so short statements and used them all. As I recall, her list ended with, "My life is a creative adventure of self-discovery."

Since she is an artist, this dovetailed with her personal goals.

She said, "I learned to love myself! I love myself!" From self-ratings of zero on esteem and confidence in her pre-treatment week, she soared to eights, nines and tens by the post-treatment week. She discovered she could give herself the love and nurturing that she had been longing for, and when she did, the esteem and confidence naturally lifted. She plans to continue these strategies to maintain her exciting progress as she prepares for the shift to a four year college in the fall.

I don't keep student papers, so can't quote her exactly, but I was smiling all over and had tear-filled eyes as I completed marking her paper.