3. Secondary Endorsement

Secondary Endorsement transcript

Once you recognize the value of self-endorsement and begin to combine both intellectual and emotional self-endorsement, you can initiate the skill of creating good feelings as an effortless habit.  Your task will become much easier if you develop the skill I call “secondary endorsement.”  Secondary endorsement is endorsing yourself each time you engage in the very, very worthy act of endorsing yourself! 

 

If you’re like most individuals, you have either been discouraged from emotionally endorsing yourself or you never received effective education in this powerful skill. Your first experiences with generating emotional self-endorsement will be a bit like forging a path through the jungle.  Unless regularly cultivated, the new path will soon be overgrown until not even a trace of the hard-to-cut path remains.  The long established negligence in taking care of your emotional needs and self put-downs re-appear and will, predictably, soon overpower the new. 

When you endorse yourself, you are engaging in one of the most constructive acts available to you.  Self-endorsement inspires immediate encouragement for constructive acts whose natural rewards may not come until far in the future.  Self-endorsement is the secret of creating patience, which is a required ingredient for all sophisticated skills.  Therefore, give yourself credit each time you endorse yourself. 

 

“Hurrah! Congratulations to me for endorsing myself.  That’s worthy of a special bonus.  I deserve to endorse myself for endorsing myself.” 

 

Here is one of the most common observations:  “Behavior that is rewarded is repeated.”   Since self-endorsement is one of the most constructive means to build your mental strength, regularly practice secondary endorsement until it becomes automatic and effortless.  You will be pleasantly surprised to discover that secondary endorsement will rapidly build mental muscles that you will be proud to own.       

Secondary endorsement is the opposite of secondary blaming.  Secondary blaming is blaming yourself when you realize you continue to put yourself down.  It’s putting yourself down because you see that you are still putting yourself down and you “shouldn’t do that!”  Once you recognize this tendency of, as one person described, “shoulding” on yourself, self-putdowns will become apparent, like a blinking light bulb.  By now, you may be wise enough to label instances of blaming-in.  You are working to stop putting yourself down when you make an error, when you “do what you shouldn’t,” or “don’t do what you should have.”  But since you, like most people, are a creature of habit, it will be only a matter of time before you recognize you are still blaming yourself.  You say, “I’m so stupid; I should have learned that by now!”   Secondary blaming is far more persistent than secondary endorsement.  This is because most of us get more training in putdowns than pull-ups.  “Pull-ups,” i.e. self-endorsements, serve you better than putdowns.   

Here’s a bonus tip on secondary blaming.  When you recognize that you are engaged in blaming or any variety of negative thinking, instead of the usual put-downs because you’re still putting yourself down, remind yourself that the very act of recognizing your negative self-talk is worthy of a self-endorsement.  Instead of pulling yourself down with each act of blaming-in, endorse yourself for the important act of recognizing your negative thinking.  Then add a secondary endorsement to reinforce your new behavior.  When you endorse yourself for endorsing yourself, you pull yourself up and keep yourself up.

Just as secondary blaming is a variation of blaming yourself, secondary endorsement is a special variation of self-endorsement.  Teach yourself to become consciously aware of any endorsement you initiate when you do something worthwhile.  As soon as you recognize that you’re endorsing yourself, enthusiastically call forth images such as blinking lights, musical accolades, and cheers as your signal to automatically trigger the secondary endorsement you deserve for endorsing yourself.  This reinforcement can escalate the intensity of the immediate pleasure you experience and create the energy you need to overcome your old, established, negative patterns.  Once the patterns of blaming, avoidance, worry, and helplessness/hopelessness are established within you, they cling tenaciously until you substitute the positive pattern of self-endorsement.

 

Practice: Endorse yourself again each time you catch yourself endorsing yourself.