self esteem : Learn How to Boost Your Self-Esteem

Building self esteem is a first step towards a happy, healthy and productive life. Yet having low self-esteem is perhaps the most common flaw of our humanity. Having self-, esteem will help build your confidence. If you have self-confidence, you will feel a self-worth and respect yourself as a person. If you respect yourself you can respect others, improve your life by improving your relationships with your love ones, friends and co-workers. You will be able to achieve your goals in life and obtain true happiness in your life.

Low self-esteem can cause people to develop depression, unhappiness, insecurity and a poor confidence level. When you have low self-esteem ever little mistake that occurs in your life is taken to heart. When people critisize you, when you make mistakes, a joke directed toward you and it will cause you to run away from every opportunity that comes your way and every challenge will seem impossible to accomplish. This will cause you to feel stagnant and lose meaning and direction in your life.

You can develop high self-esteem, just like learning to read or dance. Secondly, people do not understand the importance of having high self-esteem. I cannot even begin to stress the importance of having high self-esteem; it is the key to having mental, physical and spiritual strength.

The first stage of developing strength is learning to love yourself and your life. You need to learn to be grateful of what God has given you. You need to let go of all those angry emotions inside. Holding anger inside yourself will not help you, it will only hurt you. The past is the past; you can only change the present.

You need to love yourself by accepting all your faults and putting the past behind you, but if, you focus on your faults than you will only experience an unhappy life. You need to think positively and focus on your accomplishments.

To live with a happy state of mind, you need to have high self-esteem. You need to feel that you are no different from anyone else and that you can be the person you set in your mind to be. You need to reconstruct your life. You need to put yourself in a lifestyle that will make you happy and bring you as little stress as possible.

To begin the healing process you need to develop strength, wisdom, confidence and knowledge. If you can develop these qualities, you will achieve all your goals and dreams. First, you must focus on the goals and dreams you want to fulfill. I am going to teach you the true meanings of having strength, wisdom, confidence and knowledge. I will help shoe you how to obtain and use them. These four steps will help you live a happy life and gain high self-esteem.! Below are four steps to high self-esteem.

1. Strength- the development of strength in the inner body begins in the mind. The inner body is our mind, soul and spirit. How we think and program our minds to work, helps us build mental, physical and spiritual strength. Our strength comes from how we feel about ourselves. The higher our self-esteem, the stronger we feel and in turn, we can do more for ourselves.

Yet, if you have the strength and motivation, you can make the present anything you want. To free all your negative emotions that are holding you back, you have to say to yourself. I accept myself for who I am and that I am unable to change the past. Nevertheless, I can change my future because I love myself and refuse to hurt myself by drowning in my own self-pity. You cannot rely on others. You need to learn to rely on yourself.

You have to believe in yourself, develop a sense of pride in yourself. It does not matter what others think about you, what matters is how you think about yourself. God put us on this earth to love others, not to hurt ourselves and take our anger out on others, who are usually the people we care about the most and ourselves.

2. Knowledge - is the second part of the process of change, it is another important factor in helping yourself. Knowledge comes from experience from being open minded to suggestions others may give. We may not always agree with other people's suggestions, yet it is always wise to listen to what others have to say. Some individuals may try to be controlling and may get frustrated if we do not act on what they have to say. You should to set these people straight and tell them; I will listen to what you have to say; however, that does not necessarily mean I am going to agree with you. I have my own mind, too and I need to do what is best for me.

We learn from each other and we acquire knowledge from the world around us that we should pass along to others by helping them. We need to take our experience and use it in our present life now, including the mistakes we have made in life. The mistakes we have made are where we get most of our knowledge that helps us become stronger individuals. What weakens us when we repeatedly make the same mistakes?

Do not pity yourself for the mistakes you made in life or imperfections. Studies have shown that people who have negative attitudes are more like to live chaotic lives. They are more likely to become mentally or physically ill with extremely debilitating or life threatening illnesses. Many people have a hard time focusing on the positive because they allow their negative sides to consume them... I firmly believe that focusing on the negatives will causes seizures.

Say to yourself, OK, what I have learned from these mistakes or from my shortcomings. Taking what you have learned and using it to help others is the best therapy. When you help, you feel a sense of accomplishment and self-worth. You are overlooking any negative characteristics because you are too busy focusing on helping others'.

3. Confidence- our confidence comes from our self-esteem. To have high self-esteem we need to feel good about ourselves, to get to this point in life you need to begin by starting to do things in life to make yourself happy by focusing on the future, creating direction in your life. Begin by planning short and long-term goals for yourself and confidence level will rise.

It worked for me. When I started accomplishing some of my short-term goals, I had more self-respect. I developed a greater sense of pride and my inner strength and self-worth increased.

4. Wisdom- comes from your sixth sense. We all have five senses, our sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, yet I believe wisdom to be our sixth sense. Wisdom understands the inner signals and the directions that your body sends out to you, becoming aware of what your body is trying to tell you. Your sixth sense always leads you to the right answers. It is up to us to learn to understand our inner self (spirit) and to follow the signals it sends out to us.

Listening to what our inner self has to say is essential. For example, have you ever felt like you had a feeling something was the right thing to do. You need to learn to understand your mind, so you can understand your inner soul and all the wonderful things it is capable of doing. When we listen and act on the signals our body, it gives us a stronger understanding to our body as a whole. Spiritually you can give your body what it needs.

We feed our body food to survive on a daily basis. Spiritually we need to feed our body with love, understanding and different forms of relaxation, such as meditation. I strongly suggest to everyone that you start with at least five minutes each day with some type of relaxation exercise. Either in the morning when you start your day, the afternoon if you are able too or at night before bed to release the tension that has built up throughout the day. Each week you should add five minutes until you get to hour each day.

When you do these things, you increase your level of strength, wisdom, knowledge and confidence. By having a high level of strength you feel as though, you can conquer the world. This helps you decrease your stress level.

Once you accept yourself, you can cope with the world around you and accept the fact that you can do everything you expected to do in life. Nevertheless, to accept that yourself you first have to love who you are and be proud of the person you have become. There are many things in life you are capable of doing, but you must develop the motivation and the will to get out there and JUST DO THEM!

by Stacey Chillemi