With our tendencies to flip into social media and fake news as ways to nurture/validate our self-esteem, today’s post I felt is super important and relevant. Like any other muscle in our body we need to work at our self-esteem to keep it alive and healthy. But in a world that continues to encourage amorality and cynicism as cool, self-esteem is being sacrificed.
In my study of the topic there are six themes that I’ve seen the most as ones to keep close in our work to revive our self-esteem. Some sociologists/psychologists are calling them the pillars of self-esteem:
- Awareness
- Acceptance
- Responsibility
- Assertiveness
- Purposefulness
- Integrity
Our increased work around those behaviors and awareness of the level at which they are is huge. I read that self-esteem is the immune system of our consciousness. And, we know what happens when we don’t take care of our actual immune system, we get sick.
I love to use analogies to explain things. Makes it’s click better and it simplifies complexity. Here, Nathaniel Branden uses calcium as an analogy to describe why it’s important to work on our self-esteem:
Calcium strengthens our teeth and bones and is essential for a healthy body, while self-esteem is vital for strong psychological development. While we wouldn’t necessarily die from lack of calcium, our ability to live life fully would be significantly limited. The same goes for self-esteem: We don’t need it to survive, but we cannot live a full life without it.
If we have high self-esteem we are much less likely to create holes or problems for us to get tripped up in. Not only that, but high self-esteem gives us the resilience needed to make it through most of life’s challenges. How we view ourselves completely can change the way we play.
One of the pillars I want to talk about above is acceptance. This one is one of the most important. If you won’t accept the fact that you have an opportunity to work on your self-esteem or you don’t have a self-esteem problem, you won’t change. Change requires the accountability (another pillar) and acceptance that you need to do something different. Once you accept an undesirable behavior for what it is, you will reduce the likelihood of it happening again. It’s not the job of someone else to improve your self-esteem, it belongs completely to you.
I want to live my life with purpose (a pillar) and integrity (another pillar). How I get there is up to me. One way I practice regularly is leaving people and situations in a better place than how I originally found them.
You deserve to exist. We all do. Make that simple proclamation that you deserve to exist be the start and an accelerator for you to do the best work of your life. And, doing it completely by making sure it’s because you choose to not sacrifice your self-esteem. You’re doing it because you’ve allowed yourself to be the best version it can possibly be!
✌🏻 Shawn
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