Self Esteem

Good self esteem is important because it helps you to hold your head high and feel proud of yourself and what you can do. It gives you the courage to try new things and the power to believe in yourself. It lets you respect yourself, even when you make mistakes, and when you respect yourself, other people usually respect you too. It also helps you to make good choices about your mind and body. If you think you are important, you'll be more likely to make good choices. If you have good self esteem you know that you're smart enough to make your own decisions. You value your safety, your feelings, your health - your whole self! Good self esteem helps you know that every part of you is worth caring for and protecting. 

Low Self Esteem 

When you have low self esteem you tend to view life in a very negative way which makes everything seem hopeless, pointless, too much effort. You see yourself as being worthless, think other people are better than you, have difficulty in saying what you really feel and want. You lack confidence and find it difficult to stand up for yourself or be assertive and consequently find that often people will take advantage of you and treat you badly. This in turn may make you feel depressed. There may be any number of reasons why you may have low self esteem. It could be abuse you have suffered as a child, or as an adult, you may have had a breakdown in a relationship, been involved in a violent relationship, been bullied, lost your job, be suffering from ill health - there are all sorts of things which can affect a person's self esteem. You may find that you have not been able to talk about some of the difficult things which have happened to you; you may not have received any support and be trying to cope on your own. You may have been in a situation where you felt another person had control over you - you felt powerless to do anything about it - you may have felt used - all these things can lead to a person having low self esteem. You may not feel valued as a person, may not feel loved and wanted, may not have much affection, you may not feel cared about. You may feel that nobody is there to listen to you; you may feel isolated, alone and unsupported. 

Boosting Your Self-Esteem

When your self esteem is high you view life in a positive way, you feel confident, you enjoy life, you see difficulties as challenges, you are able to be assertive and say what you want and feel and you don't allow other people to treat you badly and take advantage of you. You are able to stand up for yourself, believe in yourself and believe that you are worth just as much as anyone else. Of course it's OK to have ups and downs in your feelings, but having low self-esteem isn't OK. Feeling like you're not important can make you sad and can keep you from trying new things. It can keep you from making friends or damage how you do at work. It's important to know you're worth a lot. 

If you think you might have low self-esteem, here are a few things that you can try to increase your self-esteem: 

• When you hear negative comments in your head, mentally tell yourself to stop. The critical voice inside you will soon lose its power. 

• Write a list of all the things that you like about yourself, what your strengths are, remind yourself of the things you do well, of compliments others have paid you, of small goals you have achieved 

• Put post it notes on your cupboards with positive sayings like ‘I am doing okay’; ‘Today is good day’; ‘I always do the best I can and that is good enough’. Your mind will unconsciously absorb the message. 

• Remember that your body is your own, no matter what shape, size, or color it is 

• Remember that there are things about yourself you can't change - such as skin color and shoe size - and you should accept and love these things because they are part of you 

• Remind yourself of things about your body that are okay 

• Give yourself three compliments every day. Don't just say, "I'm so great." Be specific about something good about yourself, like, “l was a good friend to Jill today" or "I did better on that test than I thought I would." 

• While you're at it, before you go to bed every night, list three things in your day that really made you happy. 

• By focusing on the good things you do and all your great qualities, you learn to love and accept yourself, and that's the main ingredient for strong self-esteem. Even If you've got room for improvement (and who doesn't?), realizing that you're valuable and important helps your self-esteem to shine.

How to develop trust in a relationship

When distrust, arises in a relationship there are many factors which can be causing it. Unless we understand where these feelings are coming from, it becomes easy to act out, blame the partner and put all kinds of unhealthy demands upon them. We can even believe that they are cheating when they are not.

When feelings of distrust arise, some begin to create more and more restrictions upon the partner, demand more information and make them feel closed in. This often can be the beginning of the end. In all relationships every individual needs time alone, time with friends and of course time together.

When we take away a person's individuality and freedom to grow, sooner or later the individual feels trapped. Not only does this destroy your partner's trust and good feelings about themselves, but they can easily grow to feel that there is no way to ever make you secure and happy.

The best way to develop trust is to take a moment to first understand some basic laws of healthy relationships, and what love truly means.

Loving another person does not mean possessing them, or having them there to make you feel better about yourself. This is not loving or respectful of who they are. Instead we are turning them into an object, who exists to meet our needs. We are then, not loving, but using that person.

We all must develop basic trust in our partners and ourselves from within. If a partner is truly not deserving of trust, then tracking their behavior and restriction their lives will not help at all. In fact, it usually makes matters worse. The person simply goes underground, or finds other ways to sabotage the relationship, in order to gain their freedom.

Some individuals are filled with distrust because they never resolve past hurts about being cheated on in former relationships. They then project this hurt and insecurity upon the partner they are with now. A current relationship cannot take away old wounds. Each person must take time and responsibility to work through what happened and the feelings they were left with as a result of it. Sooner or later they must realize that their partner is different and their situation is a new one as well.

If one requires that their present partner take away the pain they are feeling, they are looking in the wrong direction. No matter how loving a person is, no matter how solid the relationship, they cannot take away pain and confusion that exists within oneself. Each person must face their feelings and work them through on their own.

There are many ways to build self-esteem and to feel safe once again. Just as we work out in a gym each day, we need to work on ourselves emotionally to build the strength we need to combat fear and negativity. One exercise that can be used is - to consciously look for the good - both in your partner and yourself. Whenever you find yourself dwelling upon negativities step back, take a deep breath, and consciously choose to focus upon what is good and right in both of you. This will create calm, balance and positivity.

Doing this exercise, becoming calm and positive will not cause you to gloss over reality, but to be able to be focused and even better aware of what's going on. Needless to say, in cases where the partner does not deserve to be trusted, when there is clear evidence of wrong doing, if you are calm and positive, you will then be able to make healthier, constructive choices for yourself.

Enhancing your happiness

Your personal happiness is very important as it allows you to feel fantastic on the inside which is then reflected on the outside allowing you to be confident, creative and get all of the recognition you deserve in your home and working life. One of the ways you can improve and enhance your personal happiness is by working on all of the things in your life or things you would like to add to your life that make you happy. The best way to do this is by making a list and then one by one enhancing the happiness that you get from each one.

• Personal Connections – this includes the connections and relationships you have with your family members, your friends, your children and even your work colleagues. Every connection requires work on your part in order to acquire positive feedback from them which then makes you happy! Relationships can always do with some extra input to make things happier for both sides, so take a look at each relationship and work out what extra things you can put into each one to increase the overall happiness within them.

• Confidence – Increasing your confidence will improve your own personal happiness. There are several ways that you can do this which include updating your wardrobe as what you wear will make you feel more confident and extrovert. Another way is to look into the mirror each day in the morning and tell yourself that you are a wonderful person and that you deserve to be happy, by doing this you are placing into your subconscious a seed which over time will blossom into a full thought. This thought will always be there in the back ground making you feel complete happiness in yourself and will leave you feeling very confident. This technique needs to be repeated every day and once you adapt your thinking to this new way of thinking you will respect yourself even more!

• Prune the bad things in your life – By looking at all of the things in your life you are unhappy with will allow you to see what you can change. This can take some courage but the best way to do this is to just do it, be decisive and go for it! You may look at your list and recognize how unhappy you are with your current job, it may be stifling your creative thinking, not give you the respect you deserve for all of the input you put into your job or give you any recognition for your ideas or money that you bring into the company. All of these things can damage your personalhappiness stifling it and reducing the potential you deserve. Begin by looking for a new job, you may decide to change your career completely and try something new that you have always fancied trying but have never had the guts to do. Others will look for a new job that is within the same level of pay they are currently getting or a higher paid job, remember through it all even though it may be hard to adapt to this new way of thinking but you deserve this!    

Achieving your goal

It's impossible to achieve any goal if you are familiar with goal setting, so I have decided to spend the first section of this article to talk about How to Set Goals and in the second section I will be talking about How to Achieve Any Goal. Setting goals in your life in order to achieve something greater than yourself has benefits, and by learning how to set goals you will be able to achieve so much more than you first thought. There are lots of different reasons for creating life goals and one of the most important reasons for setting out goals for yourself is that it will give you a real sense of achievement once you break those barriers!

Goal Differences – One of the main things that you have to decide is whether the goal you have in mind is actually something you want to do not something you think sounds great and you should have. When we set out our plans and our dreams we need to be able to tell the difference between wanting a dream to come true and wishing beyond the stars, because there is a very big difference! Think things through and be prepared to have to work hard to get what you want because things will not be handed on a plate to you.




Variation Goals – This refers to the six key areas of your life: Family and Home, Financial and Career, Physical and Health, Social, Emotional Well-being and Religion. Each of these key areas need to be looked into a goals set where you need them to be in each one if at all. In some areas of your life you may find that you do not at this time need any further self-improvement but in others you may find there are several goals to be looked into and a plan drawn up.



Visualize – It takes more than just writing your goals down, to plan them and create further dreams from them, it also takes visualization. When you write down your goal really imagine it fully, visualize it happening and by doing this on a regular basis you can train your subconscious to make choices without you even realizing that will bring you nearer to your goal. The subconscious is a very powerful tool so keep a copy of your dreams, your plan and your aspirations in a clear and defined space like the front of the refrigerator or near your front door. This way you will see it always and be reminded, this then reinforces your thought patterns to create a positive and happy atmosphere.



SMART – This is another fantastic technique used by people all over the world which shows you how to set goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. By living to these rules you can manage to ensure that all of the individual goals that you set through your life are attainable and are not so farfetched that you spend your entire life searching for them.



How to Achieve Any Goal.

Having looked at how to set goals, now let look at how to achieve these goals. Success is something we all want and being successful means having to put some action into your ideas about your goals rather than remaining a dreamer and thinking of grandeur and never realizing it. Goal setting can be a relatively easy thing to do. For those who have done it, they have taken the time to be realistic and ensured that their goals are attainable. Some have even failed, sound familiar? If so, why does this happen? All too often people really want something, but once they begin their journey stop far too quickly. Giving up is the main reason for this due to the fact that they do not see enough change or progress as soon as they think they should; without any real progress at the click of a finger most people will instantly give up! Now here are some tips to help you on the road to success in your goal setting:

Visualize – Goal setting is not just about thinking about what you want, it is about really feeling it, seeing, hearing and even in some instances smelling your goal in a way you could almost touch it! By visualizing on a regular basis everything that your goal setting has achieved you will always be one step further to achieving your dreams and not giving up!



Inspiration – Taking inspiration from your idols is something we do as children growing up and now that we are adults there is nothing wrong with doing the same. Choose people that you admire and people who have the type of lifestyle you want. By taking inspiration from these people we can see that what we want to achieve is actually very tangible and with hard work and visualization we can also achieve.



Plan – Regardless of where you go in life even if it is for a short drive you have to plan ahead. Looking to the future you will also have to plan in order to get where you want to go. Guiding yourself and reaching your ultimate success is improved by having an actual plan to follow. It also helps when you are feeling low to look at your plan and realize that you do not need to feel discouraged, you are on the right track! Things just take time.



Mini Goals – When you make your plans for your goals, and know where and how you are going to get somewhere, it is a good idea to set yourself mini goals. Mini goals break up a bigger goal and give you more incentive to keep going until you reach your ultimate goal. For example, if all of your goal setting was to achieve weight loss then you would take the weight that you need to loose and set four mini goals to achieve it. If you need to lose 40 pounds and you went at this goal and only lost 2-3 pounds a week, you may feel that your goal is unattainable and give up. To prevent this you set yourself mini goals where you lose 10 pounds before you celebrate in some way and then begin the next mini goal of 10 pounds. Everything still takes the same amount of time, but you will feel as if you are getting there a whole lot quicker!

Developing self confidence

Self-confidence is something that most of us feel that we need to build up, in fact more than 3 in 5 people have self-confidence issues. In order for you to be able to address this you will need to go on a journey of personal growth where you will experience what it is like to build yourself. Improving your self-confidence permanently is no easy task and anyone who says that it is, is hugely misinformed and is only offering you a “quick fix”.



People who are have confidence in themselves experience a significant growth in their personal development and achieve more in both their professional and personal lives. By feeling confident you will be more popular and you will also notice that you are able to get more things done and on time. The reason for all of these things is the fact that when you have no self-confidence you tend to shy away from people, holding back your true personality so that you do not fulfill your potential. People with confidence issues have trouble focusing, keeping things in order, completing menial tasks and even find themselves feeling some form of depression. There are many self-help options you can use in order to shake off all of the things that have been holding you back and becoming the person you deserve to be. Follow these important beginners steps:



Take a look at your wardrobe – This may sound weird but what you wear actually affects your mood which has been scientifically proven to make a significant impression on your self-esteem. Dark colors, although will make you look slimmer; will bring down your mood. Try teaming up one black item, either a skirt or pants with something more colorful on top. For men just changing you’re “at home clothes” and choosing a few new ties will make all the difference. Tailoring is a big “Yes!” for men and women and a properly tailored suit or trouser, skirt or pants individual item can create a wide range of looks. It all depends on what you are looking for; for creating curves, hiding lumps and bumps, creating the appearance of an ample derriere can all be achieve with the right tailoring. Choosing a patterned, block color or striped top can really lift your mood and improve your self-esteem.



Posture and speed of walking: How you stand is very important, those who have bags of confidence walk tall and proud no matter whether they are having a good or bad day. The speed at which they walk is also a factor due to the fact they have a high self-esteem, they are Confident and feel like they have a purpose in life and are ready to take on the world, they have somewhere, regardless where it is, that is important to be. By adopting this attitude and walking tall with your head held high this self-improvement technique will instantly lift your mood and make you feel important again. This technique in conjunction with other self-improvement techniques has been scientifically proven to improve your self-confidence by around twenty-five percent!




Read more: http://www.infobarrel.com/How_to_Develop_Self_Confidence#ixzz1m5wASelf-confidence is something that most of us feel that we need to build up, in fact more than 3 in 5 people have self-confidence issues. In order for you to be able to address this you will need to go on a journey of personal growth where you will experience what it is like to build yourself. Improving your self-confidence permanently is no easy task and anyone who says that it is, is hugely misinformed and is only offering you a “quick fix”.



People who are have confidence in themselves experience a significant growth in their personal development and achieve more in both their professional and personal lives. By feeling confident you will be more popular and you will also notice that you are able to get more things done and on time. The reason for all of these things is the fact that when you have no self-confidence you tend to shy away from people, holding back your true personality so that you do not fulfill your potential. People with confidence issues have trouble focusing, keeping things in order, completing menial tasks and even find themselves feeling some form of depression. There are many self-help options you can use in order to shake off all of the things that have been holding you back and becoming the person you deserve to be. Follow these important beginners steps:



Take a look at your wardrobe – This may sound weird but what you wear actually affects your mood which has been scientifically proven to make a significant impression on your self-esteem. Dark colors, although will make you look slimmer; will bring down your mood. Try teaming up one black item, either a skirt or pants with something more colorful on top. For men just changing you’re “at home clothes” and choosing a few new ties will make all the difference. Tailoring is a big “Yes!” for men and women and a properly tailored suit or trouser, skirt or pants individual item can create a wide range of looks. It all depends on what you are looking for; for creating curves, hiding lumps and bumps, creating the appearance of an ample derriere can all be achieve with the right tailoring. Choosing a patterned, block color or striped top can really lift your mood and improve your self-esteem.



Posture and speed of walking: How you stand is very important, those who have bags of confidence walk tall and proud no matter whether they are having a good or bad day. The speed at which they walk is also a factor due to the fact they have a high self-esteem, they are Confident and feel like they have a purpose in life and are ready to take on the world, they have somewhere, regardless where it is, that is important to be. By adopting this attitude and walking tall with your head held high this self-improvement technique will instantly lift your mood and make you feel important again. This technique in conjunction with other self-improvement techniques has been scientifically proven to improve your self-confidence by around twenty-five percent!

How to handle Anxiety

From time to time we all worry about things but for others worrying about certain things can become more of an issue and turns into anxiety. Anxiety can be caused by a wide variety of things and affects everyone in different ways. Overcoming your personal anxiety issues may require special attention via your doctor but there are some things that you can try first to improve your self-esteem.

Here are the top tips on how to battle your inner demons, reduce your fear and improve upon your self-esteem:

Try to relax- now this may sound harder to do than it is to say it but everyone can become their own expert in no time at all! Taking time out to sit in your pajamas in front of the TV or computer is not the type of relaxation we are talking about! Neither is having a glass of wine or a beer, taking drugs or even smoking. What we are talking about here is true relaxation: yoga, deep breathing, exercise, meditation and even simple things like going for a walk in the park. All of these things will allow you to clear your mind, separate all of the things you have swirling round and sort them into the relevant piles so that you are able to deal with each problem that causes anxiety. This way you are able to take full advantage of these proven and calming techniques.



Sleep – Sleep is hugely under rated and most people do not get enough sleep each night due to anxiety, restlessness, stress and worry. Far too many people leave work and take their worries with them. Parents worry about their children and others feel stressed out by other things in their lives. All of this stress can easily turn into anxiety which will keep you from sleeping well and/or sleeping enough. Using the above technique of relaxing will ready you to enjoy a decent night’s sleep. Ensuring that you eat well and making sure that you stop drinking caffeine several hours before you intend on going to sleep will help you to keep your mind quiet. Exercise will also help to improve the amount of oxygen that your cells receive allowing you to enjoy a well rested night’s sleep.



Social life: For people who have anxiety problems they will often find that they have alienated themselves away from both their friends and their family members as they have dug themselves into a hole of which they seldom want to come out of! For those who want change and desire to learn the techniques that can help them conquer anxiety issues one of the first steps is to initiate contact with those whom you care the most about. True friends will understand if you explain to them your distance and will stand by you as well as help you to beat anxiety. Family members will do the same which will flood you with love, warmth and happiness which are wonderful things that will help you to get over your anxiety.