A Good Self Esteem to lead blissful life

SELF ESTEEM - A Key to fun, happiness and well being in life.

Self esteem is your opinion of your self. 

We can't touch it, but it affects how we feel. We can't see it but it's there when we look at our-self in the mirror. We can't hear it, but it's there every time we talk about our-self. Self esteem is how much we value our-self and how important we think we are. It's knowing we are worthy of love and respect along with acceptance of our limitation and boundaries. It is how we see our-self and how we feel about our achievements.

Why self esteem is important in life ? 

Good self-esteem is important because it helps us to hold our head high and feel proud of our-self and what we can do. It gives the courage to try new things and the power to believe in our-self. It lets us respect out-self, even when we make mistakes. When we respect our-self, other people will usually respect us too. It also helps us to make good choices about our mind and body. If we think we are important, we'll be more likely to make good choices.

If we have good self-esteem we know that we're smart enough to make our own decisions. We value our safety, our feelings, our health and our whole self. Good self-esteem helps us know that every part of us is worth caring for and protecting.

Low self esteem and its effects

There may be “N” number of reasons why we have low self-esteem. It could be a separation in relationship, lost job, ill health, been cheated and treated unfairly – like these there are many causes which affect a person’s self-esteem. We may find that we have not been able to talk about some of the difficult things which happened to us or may not have received the support from the closest people and be trying to cope on our own. In some situation we may feel that we have been used and not valued as a person. This may make us feel not loved and wanted, unable to find affection from the dearest people and may feel not cared about. Finally at worst we may  feel that there is nobody to listen to us, left alone, isolated and unsupported. All these things can lead a person face the low self-esteem.

Let me give you few things(gifts to remember) which are yours if you are facing low self-esteem, will help you in increasing your self-esteem. 

• When you hear negative comments in your head, mentally tell yourself to stop. The typical bad voice inside you will soon loose it's power.
• Write a list of all the things that you like about yourself, what your strengths are, remind yourself of the things you do well, remember the compliments others have paid you and the small goals you have achieved.
• Put the sticky notes on your cupboards and on your laptops desktop with positive sayings like "I am doing Okay", "Today is a good day, I always do the best I can and that is good enough". Soon your mind will unconsciously absorb the message.
• Remember that your body is your own no matter what shape, size or color it is ,there are things that you cant change, such as skin color and shoe size and you should accept and love things because they are part of you.
• Remind yourself of things about your body that are okay.
• Give yourself three compliments every day, Don't just say.. "I'm so good". Be specific about something good about yourself, like - "I was a good friend to Rohini" or "I did better on that test than I thought I would" or "I have good dressing sense".  
• While you are about to go to sleep, list three things in your day that really made you and happy and always remember your parents, brothers/sisters or any special person who love you and care for you.

Finally by focusing on the good things you do and all your great qualities, you learn to love and accept yourself which is the main ingredient for strong and good self-esteem. This helps even if you have got room for improvement or not..and makes you realize that you're valuable and important. 

Now hear, when you follow these or think about yourself in the same way or even better way your self esteem shines. 

Improving your self esteem

When our self esteem is high we view life in a positive way and feel confident, enjoy the life, see the difficulties as challenges, will be assertive and can say what you want and feel. You will not allow other people to treat you badly and take advantage of you. You will be able stand-up for yourself, will believe in yourself and will believe that you are worth just as anyone else.

Friends, of course it's OK to have up's and down's in life but having low self esteem is NOT OK. Feeling like you are not important can make you sad and can keep you away from trying new things. It can keep you away from making new friends or cause a damage at every thing you do. So it's important to know who you worth a lot. 

** I learnt this while I'm desperate in making a change in myself which is like personality development. So while writing this post I used the words "WE" and "YOU" to describe situations and our relation with it.  WE- being used in a sense of "Myself along with the readers of the post" and YOU- being used to point out "the readers of the post". 

I hope this post could be helpful for my friends other readers.

Sources: self-esteem-enhances-life.com, counselling-directory.org.uk