The million dollar questions! The questions everyone has have a simple answer. And (even better)...it has the answer every human difficulties can be tackled with and overcome.
Sometimes it is easier to answer a question by saying what the contrary to the question is. So what does grind our self esteem, what does destroy our self esteem?
What is low self esteem? A person with low self esteem acts like a dog trying to bite its tail. Why? Because what activates low self esteem is fear.
And when we act from fear we go round and round in a circle and the more we act in fear the lower our self esteem becomes. Why? Well, because when we act out of fear we act dishonestly. And when we act dishonestly we lose our integrity.
Have you ever met a dishonest person who is successful? I haven’t. The basis to love yourself unconditionally is being rigorously honest.
A lot of people here will argue over this, I bet, because there is a lot of misunderstanding on what being honest really means and a lot of people find very difficult to admit they are being dishonest. We all are. Some of us say: “I am rigorously honest, I always tell people who have wronged me how much did not like what they have done and how badly they treated me and what I think of them, etc etc etc... I am being honest!”
No, you are not! Sorry to disappoint you!You are not being honest, you are being a victim...
Being honest means being honest to first being able to recognise our feelings, to accept they are our own creating and secondly to express them (it does not mean to blame someone else, or a situation, for creating our feelings - to do so it only means we are being victims).
All the feelings we feel are connected to something we have experienced in the past.
Being honest means to be brave (and not a 'moaning victim') and to have the courage to feel our feelings and share them with others, to share how we feel about a situation or a behaviour.
Owning our own feelings.
Once we are honest in this way we'll grow in self esteem, quite quickly.
We will be loving ourselves unconditionally because we will recognise our feelings and we validate them and we will express them.
We will admit we are a human being and we'll accept our flaws, we will accept our vulnerability and in this acceptance we will became invincible, we will be strong as a rock.
And once our self esteem is there we can take any risk because the shame of low self esteem is gone, it has disappeared forever.
One Action to take for a thousands smiles...