Watch Your Feet, Not the Mountain
A long hill, a bicycle, and the counting trick that taught me more about change than any textbook did.
Read the post →New from Lori A. Strayer, M.Ed., LPC
Solid Inside
Cultivating Authentic Self-Worth
and Lasting Inner Peace
Most of us try to build a life on a shaky foundation — the relationship we have with ourselves. After decades in the counseling room, Lori Strayer found one idea that changed things faster than anything else: treat yourself the way an ideal parent would treat a child they love. Not indulgently. Not harshly. Wisely, warmly, and for the long term.
The premise
You never outgrow the needs of a child.
Safety. Nourishment. Rest. Acceptance. Encouragement. Structure. A plan for the future. Nobody stops needing those things at eighteen. What changes is whose job it is.
Solid Inside gives that job a shape. Inside each of us there is an inner parent — the part that decides, plans, acts, and talks to us — and an inner child — the part that feels, wants, and watches. The child is always watching. Every promise you keep to yourself and every one you break gets recorded there, and that record is what becomes self-worth or the lack of it.
Ideal parents do two things well: they give unconditional love, attention, and acceptance, and they have the discipline to do hard things for the long-term good of the child. This book is about doing both — for yourself.
“Self-worth comes from one thing and one thing only: treating yourself as worthy.”
Solid Inside, Chapter Four
What you'll take away
Ideas you can use before you finish the chapter
01
The empty-chair test
Before you believe what you just said to yourself, ask whether you would say it to an eight-year-old sitting beside you. If not, it isn't true enough to keep.
02
Long-term best interest
When the path is unclear, one question cuts through: what is in my long-term best interest? It's the question good parents ask a hundred times a week.
03
Disappointment is not harm
You can say no without making the other person wrong. Give what you can afford to give, and the resentment goes away with it.
04
Stay peer
Refuse to go one-up or one-down. Nobody is above you and nobody is beneath you, and you don't have to play the seesaw to know your worth.
05
Private victories
Clean sheets. A goal nobody knows about. The things you do only for yourself speak loudest to the one audience that is always watching.
06
Watch your feet
Change is a hill, not a switch. Look down, count the pedal strokes, and be surprised later at how far you've come.
About the author
Lori A. Strayer, M.Ed., LPC
A licensed professional counselor who has spent her career in a university counseling center, sitting with young adults at the exact moment they take over the job of caring for themselves.
The parent-and-child analogy at the heart of this book began with a single session. A nineteen-year-old named Paul — flat, numb, chronically suicidal — was asked whether he was hard on himself. He lit up for the first time and listed everything terrible he said to himself daily. Lori asked him to imagine an eight-year-old version of himself in the empty chair beside him, and to say those things to that boy. He started crying immediately. “No, never.”
Twenty chapters later, that one experiment has become a whole way of living.
From the blog
Recent writing
Get Off the Seesaw
Going one-up and going one-down are the same game. There is a third option, and it is the whole basis of assertiveness.
Read the post →You Can Never Get Enough of What You Don't Really Need
Approval, achievement, and appearance cannot deliver self-worth — which is why no amount of them is ever enough. There is exactly one thing that works.
Read the post →
Get Solid Inside
Available now in paperback and ebook. If one chapter changes how you talk to yourself, it was worth the afternoon.
Order on Amazon →