Build More Self-Esteem

Building more self-esteem can be a very challenging thing to do. Specially because most people go about it totally wrong.

Self-esteem is not about assertiveness or confidence, leadership, influence, mind power, communicative skills or anything like that. Self-esteem is like a field on which all of these qualities can grow. If you have strong self-esteem, you have a fertile soil – but if you have a weak self-esteem, then your harvest will be meager.

Self-esteem is more important than all of these things. It in fact is the power that you can channel into refining these qualities and character traits.

If you lack self-esteem, all the leadership training in the world won’t help you to become a better leader, all the books and workshops to improve your communication skills in the world won’t help you to become as effective a communicator as you could be. If on the other hand you have a strong and healthy self-esteem, many of these qualities will develop naturally and automatically.

What is holding most people back from developing their self-esteem is fear. Fear of the unknown. Self-esteem means that you have trust into your own being, into your own self. It is about being able to embrace and encourage every part of your personality.

Most people though do not do that. They do not embrace every part of their personality. They have a certain mental self-image of themselves, that is in many cases very concrete, definite – and limited. It’s like trying to fit a size 10 foot into a size 9 shoe. Yes, it is possible, but it won’t feel good. With your personality, the pain will not be restricted to your food  – it will go down right into your core as a human being.

In order to embrace every part of your personality, you need to sometimes be willing to do things that you might not feel comfortable doing right now. Your personality is much richer than you make it out to be. Your personality is giving, entertaining, open-hearted and so much more – but you try to fit it into a timid and shallow corset.

Willing to do things that you feel uncomfortable about, leaving your comfort zone is always about making a step into the unknown. And do not kid yourself – you can do something completely new without stepping into the unknown. And you can do something that you’ve already done a hundred times, but you can step into the unknown doing so – it is not so much about which action you take, but how you do it. If you do it full-heartedly and you give everything you got, and are completely immersed in your current actions, then this will charge you up.

Stepping into the unknown, you might sometimes discover “good” and sometimes discover “bad” things. Positive and negative. But what you will always do is that you will discover yourself – a new part of your own being that you previously did not understand, or even know existed. And this is how you build more self-esteem. By being able to face your self and reveal new parts of your own personality to yourself that you have previously kept lock up in the closet.