When I started writing about self esteem and teaching “self confidence building” classes a number of years ago, I thought about what self esteem actually is. I came up with a number of things which I believe are all part of having healthy self esteem:

• feeling good about yourself
• liking yourself
• loving yourself
• being able to stand up for yourself
• being assertive
• being compassionate with yourself
• being nice to yourself
• appreciating your good qualities
• acknowledging your skills and talents
• being able to accept complements gracefully
• being able to say sorry
• being able to own your mistakes and simply saying: “Yes, I made a mistake”.

For quite a while I was looking for the missing element that could tie all of the above things together. All pieces of the puzzle are necessary for a good sense of self esteem. We all would love to have great self esteem all the time.  Is this possible at all?

I think one big step in the right direction is to try to always act from our authentic self. Our authentic self is “us”, the real us, warts and all. The more authentic and true we can be to ourselves, the better we feel. The more often we do things or act in a way that is not “us”, the worse we feel.

One example that I come across was:  a lot are people who have a job they absolutely dislike. Every day is a struggle, it gets to a point where they feel sick in the stomach just thinking about their workplace. Every morning they get up and have to brace themselves for another terrible day. They certainly are not able to be their authentic selves during their working hours. This fact alone will erode their self esteem bit by bit.

Building a solid sense of  what is your authentic way of being in the world is the foundation for good self esteem.We all have self doubts from time to time. We all make silly mistakes – we are only human. We all do things that in hindsight we wish we hadn’t done. The goal is to minimise these occurrences and to work towards acting from our authentic self all the time.  Once we get into the habit of being ourselves and feeling good about it life will become much more pleasant and our self esteem grows automatically throught his way of being in the world.

Till next time

Connie and Charly

from

http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com