RESET Your Buttons

Much of my youth was spent listening to my mother’s sage advice and wisdom. She used to say things like “Why do you let them push your buttons?  You need more self-esteem.”

She would say it so often that it got to the point that I began to wonder if self-esteem was a product I could find in the canned goods aisle at my local grocery;  peas, beans, corn, self-esteem, beets, pickles…

If only it were that easy!  Over the years I have given a good deal of thought and contemplation to my mother’s advice, and I wondered what letting someone “push my buttons” has to do with my self-esteem levels.  One day while driving down the road and listening to a tape by one of the leading authorities on self-esteem, I heard him say something that really stuck with me.  I’ll paraphrase here, but the core and heart of the matter was his contention that one of the worst things we can do to ourselves and our self–esteem is to utter the words, “Somehow I should know.”

The truth is – and it may be tough to accept in this world of ours – that you don’t know everything.  Every time you tell yourself “Somehow I should know,” you are doing yourself the worst kind of harm.  You are belittling and impugning your own ability as a human being to function by supporting this impossible belief with your thinking, feelings and actions.  You thereby diminish and destroy your self-esteem.

That’s ridiculous.  It is absolutely nonsensical to believe that “somehow you should know” how to successfully manage one hundred percent of your life one hundred percent of the time.  Instead, you should ask yourself, By whose standards am I measuring my success?  The standards that live in your head because other people put them there? The standards that you strive to achieve when by golly they forgot to give you the book that everyone else received when they were born?  The standards handed down by your parents, your preacher, your teacher, and all the rest of your life’s overlords?  It makes no sense to me that we continually do this evil thing to ourselves. I say it needs to stop now!

That is why I am writing a book on buttons – your buttons.  I want us all to know how to recognize them and how to reset them.  It’s these buttons getting pushed everyday that cause our self-esteem to go spiraling out of control.  Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, refers to it as the “amygdala hijacking.”  It’s when you actually have a chemical reaction in your brain that causes you to “see red” or even black out in extreme cases.

Some people refer to button pushing as Taking It Personally.  You’ve heard it asked and may even have asked it yourself:  Why do you take things so personally?  I have something to tell you.  You are a person.  These things that you are Taking Personally are being said about you or about someone you love or about a project in which you invested yourself.  You are personally involved, and it is only human to take them personally.

My goal is to teach you how to recognize when your buttons get pushed and to learn how to reset those buttons.  I won’t promise that the buttons aren’t going to get pushed; that’s life and life happens.  We are expected to handle it.  What may be keeping you from handling it well is the fact that you allow the old rule – Somehow you should know – to govern your reaction. 

The first step in correcting this reaction is to question the rule.  The very next time you hear those words in your head, stop and ask yourself why.