Here Are A Few Thoughts On How To Improve Self Esteem

By Eve Francis

One thing that we all learn at an early age is how to interact with others and because we are human and possess a bevy of emotions and esteem building raw materials, how those other humans react to us is all important in constructing our feelings toward ourselves. We learn that it is important to be a good listener and treat others fairly, and very definitely the way our parents treated us as infants and then children played a big part in our formation of our picture of ourselves and our feelings of self worth.

When we were kids, we never took classes or even thought about how to improve our self esteem---we didn't even know what self esteem meant---and making a good first impression or being a good listener or giving the other fellow the benefit of the doubt was just something you did to make yourself liked. That's what it all boils down to----acting and speaking with others in such a way that they like being around you, and when this dawns on you, you like having them around and it makes you feel good about yourself deep inside.

There are zillions of books in print molding away on bookshelves all over the world, telling us the ins and outs of how to improve our self esteem, but in reality all we need to know us the Golden Rule, and practice it. Good self esteem comes from feeling positively about your station in life and interacting with others in a positive way so they in turn feel the same about you. A negative self esteem is when you feel you have no purpose in life, and disdain the life you are living----quite often this feeling is accompanied by depression and listlessness, and who wants to spend much time around someone feeling like that.

Let everyone sit and think a moment and inevitably they can think of someone they have known in their past that was full of life and exuberance and very positive in their thinking, and yet physically they were extremely unattractive (as society would define the word). How did someone like that learn how to improve their self esteem to the point that people gravitated to them just to be around them and wanted to spend time with them. Folks like that have worked on their self esteem by employing the Golden Rule and living it----because when you become a good listener, are concerned about others' welfare, and genuinely like people; your actions convey that about you that you treat others as you would want to be treated.

Learning how to improve self esteem is not a hard lesson to tackle; one of the biggest hurdles for a lot of people is to get over dwelling on folks' outward appearances and the emphasis that so many people place on them. If we would all be a little more human toward each other and a little less critical of the things that don't matter all that much on the universal scale of life, then we would all have very positive images of ourselves and there would be little or no need for classes in how to improve self esteem and the like.

How to improve self esteem is a lesson that we are learning almost all of our lives on this planet. We start out as a blank slate as far as feelings about ourselves, and as we grow and interact with others, we begin to develop an image of ourselves as others react to us and whether or not they want to be around us; and this gradual self awareness of the actions of others begins to define how we feel about ourselves in a positive or negative way----in other words, our self esteem.

Your self esteem is a powerful factor in how well you succeed or not in life, and for those who for whatever reasons have a very negative esteem; learning how to improve self esteem is vital in order to produce the results that they feel would ensure them a happier life. As humans, we are very complicated animals, and the fact that we can think and rationalize and emote, produces sometimes some very anguishing battles fought internally. Only when one comes to terms with his self esteem and does something to change how he feels about himself, can true long term betterment of his situation be realized. - 31984

About the Author:

Sign Up for our Free Newsletter

Enter email address here