The Mystery of Self Esteem

Your self-esteem is the single most important part of your character. This is the emotional part of your self-image. It is the pivot among which your inner and outer being revolves. It determines your attitude, your personality and how you behave; therefore it is the key to your future successes or failures life.

Quite simply, your self-image is formed by how much you like yourself. Whilst everyone in the world has varying degrees of self-acceptance, many generally fall into one of two categories: either they have a healthy liking and respect for themselves, or they don’t. The behaviours of nearly everyone in the world tend to originate from a deep, fundamental desire to be liked, accepted and respected. Therefore, our self-esteem can be though of as the driving force for virtually everything we as humans do throughout our lives.

We can begin to increase our self-esteem by firstly, developing a compelling self-image of the ideal person we feel we can and should be. This image should be one that isn’t beyond a person’s wildest dreams, but which is nonetheless powerful enough to make one believe it’s possible to be more that what they currently are. People you admire with qualities you value and which you feel you lack, can all be added to the mix, to create a clear and exciting vision of the future you.

The next stage is to take small, but positive and consistent steps to start behaving like your self-ideal. The more that you feel you are acting day-to-day, in accordance with how your self-ideal would act, the more positive and happy you become. You start to see the possibilities of a better future, which might not have been so apparent when your esteem was low.

It helps to carefully monitor your behaviour by making daily notes on how you fared in trying to be a better person, whether it was to be better-organised, calmer in a crisis, patient and positive when encountering problems that might have easily frustrated you in the past, ending procrastination, being better with money/people etc. By regularly reviewing your behaviour first thing in the morning and last thing in the night, you actually develop self-esteem because you are consciously taking positive actions to improve and taking that first step, creates purpose, which itself creates a new energy and excitement that all contributes to increase your self-esteem

The final ingredient however is consistency of purpose. That means that your compelling self-ideal, should always at the forefront of your mind as you go about your daily activities. This means your actions should largely be geared towards consistent reinforcement of good habits in the achievement of becoming a better person. The more consistent your positive actions are, the faster you’ll be in reaching your goal and the greater and quicker your self-esteem will rise. When you see an eventual marked change in your behaviour for the better and you become more confident than ever, it will become very tempting to ‘slack off’ and feel you’ve made it. Don’t let that happen! To safeguard your esteem, build on the hard work you would have put in over previous months/years and continue towards greater things, adopt the attitude of “I can always get better and I WILL get better!”