Low Self Esteem

What impact does your self esteem have on your personal effectiveness, your relationships and the normal course of your daily life? Are you suffering from low self esteem? Would you like to understand how to build your self esteem?

Basically, self esteem is down to how you value yourself as a person, how you view your capabilities and, indeed, what you think about what other people think of you. Let’s deal with the last one first, because this should be no big deal in your life. Don’t waste your energy or time worrying about what others think of you – because they don’t, they’re wasting their time and energy worrying about what you think of them! If you’re worried about making a good impression, you’re not! Because worrying splits your focus, fragments your mind, destroys your presence and disables your ability to make any kind of worthwhile impression at all. So, first things first – forget about other people’s ideas about you – your perceptions of what their expectations may be have little or nothing to do with the reality of the moment and your own innate ability to make the most of it.

But what if the voices in your head are telling you that you’re no good, that you’re useless or that you’ll never be a success? Or, what if you just have a general discomfort with yourself as a person of value? Well, you need to ask yourself: Who’s doing the judging and who’s being judged? Are there two of you – one doing the judging and one being judged? Well, in fact, there are two of you. First of all, there’s the real you – the inner you that’s capable of achieving anything in which you believe. And, then, there’s your personality – the high and mighty judge that’s telling you that you’re not up to much.

What you’ve got to understand is that your personality is an imposter – a self-image that, like all images, is only a snapshot of the real thing. Your personality is concocted for you during your childhood years – you learn this personality by taking snapshots of people and events that made you feel good or bad about yourself. Research strongly suggests that you’re predisposed to pay subconscious attention to the negative snapshots – and this is where your feelings of inadequacy or low self esteem come from – they bubble up from your subconscious mind, they have no relevance in the here and now, they are unrelated to who you really can be, they’re simply snapshot learning that you should stop paying attention to. To put it bluntly, low self esteem is a figment of your imagination.

Don’t try to counter your perceived low self-esteem with positive thought or self-affirmation – you’ll end up having an argument with yourself! What you must to do is train your subconscious mind to focus on the present moment instead of focusing on ancient history. Take five minutes to start this process right now. Sit somewhere where you won’t be disturbed, close your eyes and simply listen to the sounds that you hear. If you get distracted – and, there’s a good chance that you will – simply pay attention to the next big sound that comes your way. This mental training or, actually, meditation, will take you out of your negative fantasy and break the spell that your personality is wielding over you.