Building Self Esteem Requires Guidance

Building self esteem is getting to know who you are and liking who you are. The way to get there is with some basic guidance.

In the evenings, rather than tweet or write on walls, I usually write on my computer as I watch TV or promote my websites.

Every now and then I hear a gem of a comment that rings through as I'm working away on my lap top. And here's a gem of a statement that is the essence of self esteem. Not that anyone would ever want to say this as it certainly is as a result of tremendous misfortune. However, should one find oneself in such misfortune it's definitely what you want to be able to say and mean.

Here is the gem, “Everything I ever had is gone. All I have is who I am.” The essence of this is a person who has developed his/her self esteem on self and not on what he/she had. Very few of us actually do this as often our self esteem is tied into what we do. We're someone's husband or wife, mother or father; we're our work; we're our hobbies; we're our skills; we're our looks or physique; we're our accomplishments; we're our bank accounts or portfolios; and we're our interests.

Because we build self worth with our accomplishments and skills, when we lose them we are a set up for life crisis. Life crisis has to do with how we define ourselves. Life crisis has to do with our attachments to our definitions of ourselves. When the definition of who we are changes, life crisis is the result until we redefine ourselves. This means the average person probably goes through a half dozen life crisis during a life time. And all because of how we chose to build self esteem.

The question is: How do we build or improve self esteem or self worth? The answer is to start by appreciating everything we have the opportunity to do and accomplish and stay away from being addicted to what we do and accomplish.

Next is to know that you are a child of the universe deserving of love and respect. It's to move beyond self judgments and self criticism. You are one of a kind and can never be duplicated. But what usually stands in the way of recognizing this is that we compare ourselves with others and come up with realizations such as, “I'm not as good looking as _______.” Or “I'm not as smart as ________.” Or, “I'm not as popular as _________ .” And sure enough from a particular time in life that may seem true, but in reality its just an excuse.

For example, I always blamed my lack of success with the opposite sex with what I preceived as my poor looks. It seemed reasonable because the guys who were successful were better looking than I. Yet from time to time I noticed fellows who were in my opinion down right ugly being very successful with women and I had no answer for that. I observed their confident demur with women and asked myself, “How could they develop such a care free attitude with women? I'm a lot better looking than he is and I don't know the first thing about how to attract a woman. ” So my belief about not being good looking enough was flawed. Needless to say it was a confusing time in my life and there were a lot of disappointments with the opposite sex. I didn't like myself very much. And strangely enough from time to time I found a pretty gal that was attracted to me. And then I'd wonder what was wrong with them. “Why would they like me?”

Strangely enough I had less respect for them simply because I thought that if they liked me (and I didn't like myself) something must be wrong with them. Yet when a relationship would end, I'd be desperate in my loss and experience a life crisis. Strange!

As a young male in his twenties, I wished that there were self help mp3 downloads available for without any real guidance it took many years to sort things through and get to the point where I really liked me and was grateful for those who were attracted to me and loved me.

Ultimately I learned that the way I was building self worth led to several life crisis. The goal, however, is to get where we can know that if we have our accomplishments great, if we lose them we can be disappointed in their loss and still like ourselves. That's it in a nut shell. Fortunately there are self help mp3 downloads available for guiding one in achieving this goal.