The dominator’s opposite number is the person who lives out his life as a passive doormat for others to walk over.

Where the dominant personality wants to make every decision for others, the doormat would rather make no decisions at all. His cry is “Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it for you.” He seems to have surrendered all shreds of self esteem.

These two seem to be made for each other, fitting as naturally together as bread and butter.

Yes, it would appear that the passive person is willing to be the servant of others. But appearances can be deceiving.

The passive doormat, who “can’t” make any decisions of his own is actually using others. He’s forcing them to supply his decisions for him. His payoff?

If anything goes wrong with any of those decisions, it’s not his fault. He didn’t decide to do that… it was somebody else.

This is dishonest living at its most intense, of course, because the dependant personality refuses to take responsibility for his own life, instead shifting the blame for any mistakes onto someone else — anyone else.

And do you suppose there are any wrong turns in such a person’s life? You can bank on it. Then, the secondary payoff appears — the person who gave the “wrong” advice now feels an even greater duty to take care of and shepherd the passive dependant whom he just “wronged” with his mistaken advice.

Those with a dependant personality may find that making changes is their greatest challenge. After all, their self esteem is built upon a method of always being “right.” With a track record like that, it can be extremely hard to want to change.

Charles BurkeLevel: PlatinumCharles Burke, retired and living in Thailand, is the author of “inside the Minds of Winners” and “Command More Luck. His blog is located at …

For more information on how to shape your future, download the free PDF report “It’s All Good Luck – Five No-Fail Tips for Turning Bad Luck into Good… Every Time” at http://www.more-luck.com/luckyreport/

This self of ours, an ad hoc identity that we’ve thrown together on the fly, has been built up to handle many different tasks. It’s sort of like the statues you see of Buddhist gods who have a thousand arms.

One of your identity’s arms was built to keep you socially acceptable. Another was created to make sure you could earn enough money to keep eating. There are also arms for family relations, work relations, and other attitudes toward a million different issues in daily life. Some arms are more competent at doing their job than others.

Often, the arm assigned to preserving self esteem has grown quite weak over the years, due to lack of exercise.

Among these many arms is one that may have been causing you a great deal of discomfort. It’s a set of censoring voices. Your identity includes a composite of every criticizing voice you ever heard in your life. To keep you from unsafe actions, you have borrowed reproach from your mother and father when they criticized you, teachers and classmates who ridiculed you, policemen who stopped you for speeding, fierce bosses, and multitudes of others. If the original voices were harsh and unforgiving, your self esteem have suffered and shrunk.

These criticizing voices were adopted because we all depend on others to tell us whether we’re coloring inside the lines or have strayed outside the limits of what’s allowed.

Now, this is a reasonably effective system. And it works pretty well. Except…

Some of us have gone a bit overboard and adopted too many different criticisms into this part of ourselves. In a word, you may simply be too hard on yourself. We have so many rules, so many “don’ts” and “can’ts” that we have not left ourselves enough room to move.

For some of us, there is almost nothing that’s okay to do, so we keep ourselves tied up in knots. All those rules laid down by the voices we’ve adopted constantly pull us this way and that, with no safe middle ground. Meanwhile your self esteem sits huddled in the cellar of your mind, hiding from all those censors.

Charles BurkeLevel: PlatinumCharles Burke, retired and living in Thailand, is the author of “inside the Minds of Winners” and “Command More Luck. His blog is located at …

For more information on how to shape your future, download the free PDF report “It’s All Good Luck – Five No-Fail Tips for Turning Bad Luck into Good… Every Time” at http://www.more-luck.com/luckyreport/

A lot of women fear of getting older. It is curious that mostly these are not the middle aged or elderly women – in most cases they are women in their mid twenty’s and early thirty’s. This is because a woman is most flourishing and youthful in that period, and of course she is afraid to lose these qualities. Besides, nowadays everything is about being beautiful, young and thin – this is what the mass media tell us and what we think we believe. There are even dreadful cases of eighteen year old girls having botox injections in order to prevent early wrinkles (Dear God, just think of that!).

Yes, your body and your soul will change with age, but who made you believe that it is bad? Of course you should always keep good look and lead healthy lifestyle in order not to turn into a bone yard after you are fifty. I’ve personally seen women over seventy who look that stunning and attractive that it is hard to believe that they looked any greater when they were young. If you experience some fears of getting older, here are most common of them:

• Loss of youth. As stated above, woman gets even more beautiful with age. Turn around, and you will see gorgeous women like I’ve described above. Maybe they are few, but what makes you believe you won’t be one of them?

• Loss of freedom. You can’t even imagine how this fear is pointless. On the contrary, you will get more freedom with age! Your children will be grown up and independent and you will have plenty of time for yourself.

• Loss of identity. With age you will reveal more and more beautiful traits in yourself. A person hardly can cognize oneself through lifetime, if ever, and believe me – a lot of interesting discoveries are waiting for you.

• Excess weight. This is not the rule of thumb. Weight gain as you are getting older is a result of neglectful attitude towards yourself, and sometimes a hereditary trait, but everything depends on you and your will to work at yourself.

• Loss of style. As you live your life further you understand that fashion is just a fleeting fancy, and you begin to be superior to it.

As you live your long and exciting life don’t forget that first of all you are not a mother, not a wife, not a daughter, but a woman. Give yourself a pleasure of just being yourself and living to your pleasure. Go out with friends, laugh, read good books, sleep a lot, work out, participate in social life, in general – live your life without regretting anything good that has ever happened to you and continue to bring good into your life and the lives of the others.

Why do you need to join the member of women forum online community? The reasons are obvious:because inside women forum you can shortcut to the people from all over the world whose experiences, challenges, real case stories can help you make your positive input into the beauty and success of this world.

Join women forum now. More details on the site.

Most of us demonstrate a hard-hearted refusal to forgive ourselves, even for relatively minor mistakes. In fact, we often spend years criticizing ourselves for things we did way back in childhood. Our self esteem can potentially carry wounds dating all the way back to the cradle.

Of course, it’s important to forgive ourselves for errors we commit. We know this at the conscious level… but…

When was the last time you caught yourself going back over old mistakes and berating yourself all over again? Maybe you said something like “Okay, that’s over now. It’s in the past so I release it. It’s completely gone.”

Well, maybe you did. But it’s more likely you did just the opposite.

If you treated your spouse or your child with the same lack of forgiveness you give yourself, how long would you keep your family? It’s not so hard to forgive your child when she makes a mistake, but what about the child you were when you made the same kind of error?

It’s high time that child within you got the same consideration and forgiveness, too, isn’t it?

It is often said that love must begin at home. How much closer to home can you get than forgiving yourself? How would your self esteem change under such forgiveness?

A generosity of spirit toward yourself is the beginning of a comfortable peace within your own life. Now, I don’t mean you should dismiss every mistake as “cute” or ignore your own obvious need to grow and learn. That kind of cavalier behavior is not self-love. That’s what you’d do if you wanted to turn yourself into a spoiled brat.

It may take a bit of thinking and reflection to become really clear on the difference between generosity of spirit and self-indulgence.

And while we hold ourselves too inflexibly to some harsh standards, in other areas we let ourselves off far too easily.

Overslept and got to work late? That’s okay, I’ll just tell them it was a traffic jam. Broke a promise to your family? That’s okay, they’ll accept a good story if I make it sort of plausible.

So on the one hand, we fiercely torment ourselves over some mistakes, while on the other, we let ourselves slide by with endless streams of excuses (otherwise known as lies).

In neither case are we being fair and balanced to the one person we spend all of our time with. There is a more comfortable way to live, however, and it involves changing how we judge the various parts of our self. This in turn frees up our self esteem to blossom and flourish in healthy, balanced ways.

Charles BurkeLevel: PlatinumCharles Burke, retired and living in Thailand, is the author of “inside the Minds of Winners” and “Command More Luck. His blog is located at …

For more information on how to shape your future, download the free PDF report “It’s All Good Luck – Five No-Fail Tips for Turning Bad Luck into Good… Every Time” at http://www.more-luck.com/luckyreport/