Self-Love is Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is your perception of who you are and how you feel about yourself. It is how valued you feel, how loved you feel by others, and especially how much you love, accept, and value yourself. True self-esteem means honouring your soul. High self-esteem is self-love.

Self-Esteem – The Mental Picture

We have a mental picture of ourselves. The way we look, what we are good at, and what our strengths and weaknesses might be. We have developed this over time.

Self-Esteem is Self-Image

Low Self-Esteem – Negative Thoughts

Do you:

• Have negative beliefs about yourself?
• Focus on your mistakes and weaknesses?
• Blow the slightest negative experience up into a massive failure or catastrophe?
• Blame yourself for your failures?

If you have a different opinion from someone else, do you think you are always in the wrong or doing something wrong? Especially if the other person appears to have higher self-esteem than you.

Do you:

• Struggle with challenges and difficult situations, and even expect them?
• Go through life expecting the worst?
• Find it hard to recognize your positive aspects?
• Find it hard to try new things, such as applying for a new job?
• Quit new things early on?
• Become self-defeating if something alarms you?

Do you:

• Obsess about the future or dwell in the past?
• Hold onto dead relationships?
• Eat badly?
• Have addictions or unhealthy patterns?
• Suffer from insomnia?
• Assassinate other people’s character?
• Take hostages; make others feel bad because you’re unhappy?
• Dread going to work?
• Get annoyed or aggressive with everything and everyone around you?
• Resist many things in life?
• Think, “I’ll never be great, strong, smart, happy, rich, pretty, handsome, or talented enough.“?
• Play the victim?
• Feel unloved and unloveable?
• See life as a prison?
• Think, “If I have higher self-esteem, I may come across as arrogant.“?

If we live with low self-esteem for long periods of time, it can gradually become embedded in our minds. This can lead to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.

High Self-Esteem – Positive Thoughts

Do you:

• Have positive beliefs about yourself?
• Focus on the positive in everything you do?
• See qualities in yourself that you admire?
• Make the most of the way you look?
• Cope well with difficulties and challenges, so they don’t have too much impact on the way you feel about yourself?
• Expect success?
• Don’t believe in failure, only feedback?
• See disappointment as just that – DIS-APPOINTMENT and an opportunity to grow?
• See a difference of opinion as a chance to learn?
• Bounce back quickly?

True high self-esteem is unconditional, positive, and self-regarding. It is affected very little by the results we are getting or not getting at any given time in life.

Where Do You Rate on Your Self-Esteem Scale? 

On a scale of 1-10. ten means you completely hate yourself. Five is right in the middle. One is that you love yourself unconditionally and hold yourself in very high regard.

Where are you on the scale?

A Belief Starts When We Choose to Believe

We all have deep-rooted, often unconscious, core beliefs and programs that form early in life. Many of them are from authority figures such as parents or guardians. Later, from teachers at school or college, from our peers and bosses at work.

Sometimes it is more ancient and karmic.

If parents spend more time criticizing than praising a child, it can be harder for the child to develop high self-esteem. Or to rise from low self-esteem. As children, we tend to adopt the opinions of the influential adults around us and form beliefs and a self-image around the way we are treated.

We begin to gather evidence to support our beliefs so that every experience is filtered and interpreted through them.

No matter how far-fetched the belief is, the mind is very skilled and will find real-world evidence to support it.

The Lens

Imagine putting on a pair of pink sunglasses. Every experience you have tells you that everything is a shade of pink. It doesn’t matter what colour things are; you always see pink.

Likewise, we can habitually see life through a dark lens.

What lens are you wearing now?

The Self-Esteem Twist 

The paradox of early life programming is that we tend to blame our parents and guardians for our lack of self-esteem. However, it is not our parents who caused our pain, but our reaction to them. This reaction creates a lack of confidence.

We know that children from the same family can have a different reaction.

When I was at school, there were two brothers, David, fourteen, and Scott, fifteen. Scott was very confrontational and violent. He had an outer edge of hardness and invulnerability. He punched and fought his way through life, fell in with a crowd of boys with similar traits, always got into trouble and found himself in juvenile court more than once. David was very quiet, shy, and introverted. He didn’t have many friends, but for the ones he had, he was loyal and loving. He turned to music and poetry as a release. It turned out that both boys were abused verbally and physically by their dad, but they reacted and dealt with it in different ways.

David once told me, “When I was twelve, I decided there was no way I would allow my dad’s behaviour to affect my life. I chose to surround myself with kind people and study so I could get away from the abuse and live a completely different life.” David is now a successful singer, songwriter, and musician.

Although today Scott is somewhat straightened out, it took a lot of trauma and counselling for him to reach that point.

Pause, take a breath, and ask yourself:

• Have I ever decided to feel bad?
• Do I feel like a victim of my upbringing?
• Do I have a pattern of abuse?
• Am I always trying to please others?
• Are my values based on other people’s opinions?
• Am I critical of others because they don’t live up to my values and expectations?
• Is it actually me who isn’t living up to my values and expectations?
• Do I think other people are always putting me down?
• Do I even notice that I regularly put myself down?

The Good Old Inner Critic

Our self-esteem can be damaged if someone whose acceptance is important constantly puts us down. Most of us have an inner critic, a voice inside that seems to find fault with everything we do. It may be modelled after a critical parent or other authority figure. Or it may be karmic.

If we find ourselves in relationships or associations with people who belittle us, we can end up focusing so much on their feelings that we lose track of our own.

It took me a long time to overcome the childhood programming of my mother saying, “Little girls are seen and not heard.” I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone in public; if I did, my mother would give me a stern, disapproving look. But it was also the energy that came with my reaction that was frightening for me as a little girl. When my mother’s friends came to visit, I daren’t look up; I daren’t breathe! My body shrank, and I felt small and helpless with fear, with a knot in my stomach that tightened when her friends spoke to me.

This stayed with me and developed into an inner critic. The negative inner voice.

When that Inner Critic Whispers or Grips, say, “STOP!” “NO! NO! WE’RE NOT GOING THERE!”

Be creative and find a phrase or mantra that works for you.

Make time and space for yourself, and do something you feel passionate about.

Emotions are energy in motion, so when you shift your mind or move in a different, uplifting way, you change the energies and transform the emotions.

Feeling Good About Yourself Differs from Person to Person

What makes you feel worthy, confident, and happy about who you are?

What we require to develop and live with high self-esteem is individual.

Honour Your Soul

As I began to walk my spiritual path, I realized I had karma with my mother but also that I had experienced many lifetimes of being silenced for speaking and writing my truth. I spent years putting myself in front of people, training, leading, teaching, speaking, and demonstrating tai chi.

All of this helped, but I had to go through the deep healing process and surrender the energies associated with karma and programming to Love and Light.

The highest level of self-respect, self-esteem, and self-worth comes from honouring your soul. It is speaking and acting with a level of integrity and honesty that reflects your higher self.

Pause and take a breath:

• Do I live by my true values or the values I think I should live by?
• What do I think good people do?
• Do I follow those values myself?
• Have my values been given to me by others?

High Self-Esteem Comes from Power Not Weakness

Sometimes we are afraid to stand up for ourselves, as it may result in losing someone’s respect or love. Some people are good at convincing us that we are wrong, even when we do stand up for our beliefs.

Self-worth comes from paying attention to how you feel or choose to feel.

If someone tells you that you are bad or that everything is your fault, don’t give your power away to them. Simply honour your feelings and look at the true cause of these feelings.

Take Your Power Back

There is an obvious difference between accepting constructive feedback and constantly feeling put down and trying to please others.

If you feel angry, frustrated, or sad:

Pause and take a breath:

• Why am I choosing to feel this way?
• Why am I reacting this way?
• Flip it – Move into High Self-Worth.
• I choose not to be hurt by the actions of others.
• I choose not to blame others for my feelings.
• I choose not to give my power away to others.
• I stand by what I believe in, but I don’t have to convince others.
• I develop strength in the face of opposition.
• I know and stand by my innermost truth and deepest feelings.
• I do not need to prove my worth to anyone.
• I am the authority of my feelings.
• I nurture myself.
• I follow my inner flow.

Walk the Self-Respect Line

High self-esteem comes from knowing that you did the best you knew how at the time, even if two days later you can see a better way. It is making yourself right rather than wrong and allowing yourself to feel good about who you are. It doesn’t come from waiting for others to respect you or treat you more positively.

No matter how good we feel about ourselves, there will be those who are disrespectful.

Remember, they are not respecting you because they do not respect or love themselves.

They cannot recognize their greater selves and cannot honour yours.

If you find yourself around people who disrespect you, simply act with dignity.

Pause and take a breath:

• My self-respect remains high and strong.
• I do not base my self-esteem on how others view or treat me.
• I honour the feelings of others as I honour my own.
• I keep an open heart and an open mind.
• Thank you for providing the opportunity for me to become strong.
• Think of something that represents Love and Light. It may be a deity, a star, the sun, or whatever works for you in the moment.
• I release and surrender my anger and frustration to the Light!
• I let my negative feelings go.
• I choose to forgive and to love.

Build Your Self-Esteem

You don’t raise your self-esteem; you build it. It takes time, and we have to work at it.

We all come to earth to learn about love and attract the people associated with our karma and programs to help us learn our lessons. The faces change, but we repeat the same experiences until our lessons are learned.

We continue to be challenged until we decide to end the pattern.

Commit to High Self-Esteem and Self-Love

Pause and take a breath:

• I acknowledge the inner critic.
• I recognize my conditioning.
• I recognize and accept my karma.
• I recognize and catch my repeating thought patterns.
• I accept who I’m being.
• Now I know who I need to be.
• I commit to being positive.
• Think of a pattern you are experiencing with people over and over.
• I ask my deeper, wiser self to show me the lessons I need to learn from this pattern.
• I ask what soul qualities I am developing from this repeating situation.

Commitment Exercise

• Draw an imaginary line on the floor a couple of steps in front of you.
• On one side is the land of good intentions, hopes, and dreams. On the other side is the land of commitment to living with High Self-Esteem and Self-Love.
• I choose to step onto the commitment side.
• I choose to live with high self-love and high self-esteem.
• By acknowledging and changing our thoughts and perceptions of who we are and how we feel about ourselves, we transform our inner state into one of self-love and self-esteem. We live in a space of self-love and extend it to the world.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.

– Buddha

To deepen your inner connection, you can join my recorded Ling Chi Healing Meditation program on The Wellness Universe’s Wellness for All program or visit my website.

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