Barbara Jaffe received her doctorate in Education from UCLA. She’s a Tenured Professor of English at El Camino College, in Torrance, CA where she teaches literature and composition. Her focus is on helping students find their voice as a writer and teaching other instructors how to do the same. Dr. Jaffe received awards for Outstanding Woman of the Year and Distinguished Teacher of the Year from her college. Her doctoral research focused on teacher training for basic writing instructors, combining writing pedagogy with personal success strategies. She also teaches about the Holocaust. Barbara studied at Washington D.C.’s Holocaust Museum and did advanced work at USC’s Shoah Foundation where she learned how to integrate survivor testimonies within her writing courses. She is a docent at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and her new book is When Will I Be Good Enough? Visit her at www.barbaraannjaffe.com
Ninety percent of our self-talk is negative. Whether or not you think you have problems with not feeling good enough, this statistic tells us that all of us are constantly judging ourselves and rarely do we meet the impossibly high standards that we set for ourselves. Many of us learn to survive by being people pleasers or masking our low self-esteem or self-confidence with workaholism or a long list of accomplishments. The problem is that our public image doesn’t match our self-image. Whether our difficulties stem from an alcoholic or abusive parent, our gender or birth order or body size, a school bully, being a replacement child or not measuring up to some parental ideal, in the end, we must take responsibility for our own mental and emotional health. We all have the capability of learning to love, respect and nurture ourselves. When we do this, everything changes and the doors to an amazing life open wide. Please join us Thursday to learn how you can choose to be good enough.
