"Changing your words changes your thoughts, ultimately changing your life!"

About Me

Welcome! I'm so glad you chose to check my About me page. I'm grateful for you. I'm not one to talk about myself. However, in this case, it is how I share my struggles and changes with you.

My name is Norman, although friends often call me Norm for short. Here I will share more experiences that led me to write this website on Self-Esteem for you. 

I work to keep my ego in check. Because if I don't, I only hear myself. And that's sad because you are so amazing and have so many excellent experiences to share. If I'm drowning in my ego, I can't hear you. And I don't want that to ever happen.

Making Sense of Societies Paradox

As I listen to people go on and on about how special they are. It feels like they are telling it to their own reflection in the mirror. That's simply ego.

I shared some of the earlier things in my life on the Home page. The experiences that started my journey into low self-esteem, like family interactions or the lack of meaningful contact with them, public education, and church. 

I feel confident you have had similar experiences in your life.

I've primarily shared with you about family, public education, and church. Here are two excellent reasons why.

1) these are things, in one form or another, you and I have had in common, but more importantly, 2) those three areas are the most significant avenues used to train or condition us to conform to certain belief systems. You and I have been conditioned to live in a small mental box, afraid to look outside of the box, let alone boldly step out of it.

This website has so much pertinent information you will want to bookmark it now for easy access.

Societal Conditioning: Expanded

Society's and religious conditioning

You are going to see societal conditioning woven throughout this website. I encourage you to gain a broader understanding of it. It operates like the software, the analogy I shared with you on the Home page, that constantly runs in the background of your mind. Only it's on a much bigger scale.

It's not like conspiracy nonsense, but how human thinking evolves or doesn't in our global society. You have or will hear of collective consciousness or perhaps the hive mind.

What Makes Me an Expert

The path of life

What makes me an expert in the field of Self-Esteem? Not formal education and a long list of degrees. No, my experience comes from living every part of it, all the highs and lows and everything in between.

My education is in Experiential Learning. In the purest sense, I lived every second of my life in "school". Meaning my experiences educated me. While I was recovering from my physical and emotional injuries, I enrolled in college.

I pursued a BA. I paid the school a lot of money to educate me. After a huge number of classes I realized I no longer had the desire to complete it. My Experiential Learning was so much more visceral and real to me.

I love cooking, gardening and martial arts, so most of the classes I took revolved around my interests at the time. However, my real passion is sharing what I've learned about the importance of a healthy self-esteem. 

A degree for what I've experienced and studied so in-depth would be pure Experiential Learning. How would that appear in letters after my name, ELM? I am hopeful schools will one day recognize the importance of the incredible knowledge taught by life itself. But for now, I'm satisfied with my unique, informal education.

The Rest of the Story About Me

As I promised you, here is the rest of the story. I hope you can relate to some of it. Parts will seem a little heavy, but it's what launched me to reinvent my life.

I grew up as this typical kid in a lower-middle-class family. Mom and Dad, who I realized did not like each other stayed married, at least for a while, because of me, my two older brothers, and my younger sister.

And, I think, because they felt stuck. They had a family to raise and felt tied to an obligation; otherwise, they never would have stayed together as long as they did.

Church as the Reinforcer

Mom would drag me and my sister to church 2-3 times a week. While really young I noticed two opposing sides of church. The pastor would preach from the bible, telling us about the love God had for us, but in the same sentence telling us how unworthy we were and that we were going to hell.

It was a lot for a young mind to take in. I heard that God loved me, but I was falling so short of his expectations I would never gain his approval. My home and most homes are a mini version of that system. 

My young mind put 2+2 together and realized we were all charity cases. We were taught God saw us as too nasty to deal with but was obligated to love us even though he thought we were unworthy. That's how I felt at church. We were taught to feel worthless.

If we stepped out of line, God would throw us into a burning fire pit for eternity. ETERNITY!!! Well, that made little sense to me but scared the crap out of me. That was Learn to Fear 101. It only got worse.

church as the reinforcer

The Bible Teaches Against Gossiping

Speaks out of both sides of mouth

One day after hearing the same old parroted sermon at church, I walked past the pastor as he greeted people leaving the church. I overheard him telling one of his confidants that another church member was an awful person. That was my first introduction to gossip and the phrase "speaks out of both sides of their mouth, or speaks with a forked tongue."

I asked myself, "Wasn't it all supposed to be about the guy in the story named Jesus? Who loved us no matter what and showed us how to become better human beings?" 

It wasn't clear to me then, and I was conflicted. But it was eye-opening. I realized I had been fed mixed-up half-truths. And by then, I had it drilled into me from multiple directions I wasn't worth the effort.

Shocking Blow to My Self-Esteem and Defining Moment

The inevitable finally happened in my teen years. My parents divorced, and my dad left us for another, better family. My mom remarried too.

The whole thing left me surprisingly screwed up about who I was supposed to be. The balance and structure I depended on crumbled to the ground.

I had become disillusioned with public education and the churches indoctrination. I was baited by the, Be All You Can Be, military advertisements. Wanting out of my downward struggle, I joined the Marines. Wow! Talk about mind-warping low self-esteem tactics. 

The marine drill instructors are masters at crushing any last sliver of self worth you may have had. Their whole goal is to break you down mentally and physically and rebuild you. I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

The Million Dollar Question, Why Me?

Shortly after being discharged from military duty, I was involved in a motorcycle meets semi-truck crash. One morning I decided to go for a motorcycle ride when it happened.

Coming around a corner where I had the right-of-way, a semi-truck suddenly pulled out in front of me. I literally only had a couple of seconds to react.

I hit the truck in the rear tires. When I regained consciousness again, I was sprawled out on the street surrounded by people who had stopped.

It was odd; my vision was like looking through the fisheye lens of a camera. A guy was asking if he could take my helmet off.

I asked him, "Are my legs broken?" He said, "Yes." I couldn't feel anything but knew I was screwed up or nearly roadkill as I joked about myself later.

Soon I was lying on an operating table screaming why me? A few days later I woke up in an ICU. I really thought the fan on the wall was spiraling toward me. In my current state it was totally unnerving.

I let out a yell of surprise, which brought a nurse with another dose of morphine. Later, reopening my eyes, I realized I was floating at ceiling height, clearly looking down at my body lying on the bed with tubes and wires attached to it.

My body was pretty far below me. That was my first actual realization we are more than just the body.

Writing about it now for you is hard. A lot of old fear feelings want my attention.

Nature Became a Good Friend

I'm took a break from writing. It's a beautiful spring day, and my lawn needed to be mowed, and flowers wished to be planted.

Hanging out with Nature continually refocuses me and gets me centered again. Nature is a wonderful friend. She is a healer of many wounds.

As I played in my garden, I did some easy breathing exercises, leaned into the old fear stuff, and with kindness, asked it what was unresolved and what needed to be released. Learning to face fear as a messenger instead of a harbinger of loaming disaster. Now I know to ask fear, "What is the message you have for me so that I may release you and I can move on and grow?"

Now I remind myself to approach old issues with love and compassion. I will share exercises like this and more with you as my website expands and refines.

The Next Phase

After spending weeks in the hospital waiting for my body to heal, depression set in. I found my self-image and self-esteem bottoming out. All of the years of negative social conditioning hit me like a ton of bricks.

I looked like hell and felt worse. I spiraled way down in self-esteem. In my mind, all of my friends were beautiful and normal. I was this broken thing trying to learn to be "normal" again. I felt trapped, lost, and bottomed out.

It completely messed with me physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially. The physical pain part sucked, of course, but recovering from a concussion to my brain was the worst. I realized I had changed in a big way, but my family and friends had not.

I would hear things like you've changed, I don't recognize you anymore, or you are no longer fun. Ouch!

It is hard to be fun when you are devasted and in survival mode.

My Friends and Family Looked at Me Like I Was an Idiot

Because of the concussion I had difficulty stringing understandable sentences together and couldn't remember names or phone numbers anymore. It was very far from perfect, but I was in the middle of the situation, and I had to survive. I went silent.

I finally stopped talking with my friends, who now viewed me as a stranger. I couldn't blame them; they had no similar experiences to compare it to. I became super introverted.

My brain healed itself over time, but I never thought the same way again. I had begun to think more about spiritual stuff, not the confusing church parroting kind of babble, but the meaning of life kind of thoughts.

My First Experience of Energy Passed Between People

Since I was still on crutches after months of hospital beds and wheelchairs, people stared at me. At that point, I became super sensitive to loud noises, sudden changes, and bright lights.

I later learned they were symptoms of my concussion. I had begun to notice an intense feeling of people's vibes. It actually made me finally understand how it must be for girls and women whose bodies are constantly starred at and judged. How could I have been so blind? Social conditioning played a huge part. At any rate I am now grateful for fresh eyes.

Changing how I thought and choosing to "seem" more confident somehow changed the vibe between us. People still looked at me but not as strongly. I thought maybe I was on to something useful and vowed to keep experimenting.

Being stared at was unsettling and was not helping my self-esteem. I was trying to get back into everyday life. I began to carry myself more confidently more often, lol; not so easy on crutches.

Society Operates on a Pattern or Blueprint

Awakening from the hive mind

I soon found I was becoming an observer of those who observed me. It was like their intense gazes forced or lifted me to a higher level of observation.

That's when I first began to see the patterns of similarities, we all live by.

We do our best with what we know and have available, primarily the conditioning data we have been force-fed. We create our unique mental and emotional boxes and become stuck in the patterns.

The newly healed, or what I refer to as rewired, neuron pathways in my brain saw life differently than before. Naturally, I began to see certain behaviors in people that ran across society. My brain started to categorize behaviors.

I imagined each category like boxes labeled: low self-esteem, high self-esteem, fear of expressing yourself, anger issues, overdeveloped egos, controllers, and their victims, and so on.

Which type of box has society caused you to create for yourself? Do you see what I'm getting at?

I found myself trying to fit back into society's mold again. At the same time, I was seriously beginning to question the societal norm. I saw programmed people oblivious to what was happening around them. It was as if we had all been hypnotized or had never woken up when we were born.

You and I were programmed to think inside of given guidelines while made to believe we were all free thinkers. We were living in some sort of a mental matrix.

Who I Am Now

Since then, I completely turned to researching how to feel good about myself—reading dozens of books on improving my self-view. I've attended many human empowerment seminars and trainings.

The more I learned about who I am, like peeling away the layers of BS, the more doors opened for me to keep growing. Once I started taking action, action started taking me. It was like the snowball phenomenon.

Once I recognized I was an intricate part of life, it was like Life said, "OK, I see you are catching on; now let me help." All because I started taking action.

You are extraordinary!

Life and I have become partners, whereas before, I fought and resisted it all of the time. Life wants you to be more of who you already are inside—an extraordinary, exciting person.

Now I feel empowered and encouraged to give back to this amazing miracle we refer to as life. And I am starting with you.

You will start looking outside the box when you realize you don't belong there, or perhaps you have finally outgrown your cage. You will be astounded at what you find.

You will reclaim your power to choose what you want in your life and how you want to be viewed and treated by those around you. You have the right and ability to choose what words you want to describe yourself.

So let's begin by fixing your self-esteem, OK?

"Thoughts create our feelings. When our thoughts are all over the place, our feelings are as well. Most people on the planet believe their feelings are indicative of something that's true. They're not. Our feelings are only temporary reflections of our thoughts."

Wanda Vitale
TheEmpoweredEmpaths.com

"Think like Spring; always embrace renewal and growth."