Self esteem is determined by how you habitually think about yourself and the events of your life. This habitual thinking pattern creates a self image that determines how you feel about yourself and it may be an image that is anywhere between being totally in line with the facts to being totally misaligned with the facts.



Some peoples' self esteem is far higher than the facts warrant while others have self esteem that is far lower than the facts would suggest it should be.

So what makes a healthy self esteem? A healthy self esteem is one that allows you to appreciate yourself and have self confidence, while at the same time keeping you grounded enough that you are aware that you could still benefit from self development.

The first step to achieving this balance is to show appreciation for who you are.

No matter who you are and no matter what your current level of self esteem is you will definitely have good points. An important step in acquiring and maintaining healthy self esteem is to appreciate those good points.

Our society tends to admire the extremes; the rich, the famous, the slim, the beautiful, the clever, the talented, and so on. While this is fine in itself, the problem exists that our society also looks down on those who aren't in those categories. This can lead to you developing self critical habits early in life and maintaining those habits throughout your life.

This low self esteem then often becomes a self fulfilling prophesy because it stops you from setting goals and working successfully towards them.

Make a decision today to appreciate all of your good points and to congratulate yourself for being so fortunate as to have all these good qualities.

The second step is to eliminate critical self talk.

It's amazing to hear how people talk to themselves when things go wrong. They will call themselves idiots. They will tell themselves that nothing ever works out well for me. They will be critical in every way without even stopping to think of the damage that they are inflicting on themselves by this verbal criticism.

Imagine that you want to help a child to learn to tie her own shoe laces. Would you be understanding of the difficulties and encouraging of her efforts or would you say "why are so stupid? Any idiot can tie their shoelaces but you are so useless that all you do is mess it up"? I sincerely hope that you would use the first method.

This first method of encouragement and understanding is exactly how you should speak to yourself. Your subconscious mind, which is where your self esteem resides, is far more like a little child than it is like your adult conscious mind. Develop the habit of speaking to yourself with respect, encouragement and understanding.

The third step is to ignore or counteract the non constructive criticism from others.

Have you ever found that sometimes other people can be unjustly critical of your goals or of your behavior? Being critical of others is simply a sign of poor personal development. It is an unfortunate truth that you will encounter these enlightened folk on a regular basis so you need to have a strategy for dealing with them.

There are basically two strategies that you could use.

The first is to ignore the comments or to not mix with people who give empty criticism.

The second is to counteract that criticism by saying to yourself mentally that the criticism is unfounded and that you refuse to allow such nonsense into your mind.

The fourth step is to set a goal and then break it into small steps and focus on the current step.

You can build your self esteem by setting goals and then breaking down the achievement of that goal into a progression of simple, easy steps. Then as you achieve each step you congratulate yourself on your progress and reinforce that you are a successful person who is making good progress toward a worthwhile goal.

The fifth step is to keep a success book

Keeping a success book is an excellent and fun way to develop a health self esteem. You simply record in the book, each and every day, at least one success you had that day. The success doesn't have to be earth shattering. As long as you achieved something, no matter how small, then it can go into the book.

This habit helps you become aware, on a daily basis, that you are actually achieving things. Also, if you have times when your self esteem is down then you can lift it by taking out your success book and reading it.

A natural side effect of keeping this book is that over time your daily successes will be getting bigger and more impressive and you will be able to see that you are actually becoming a more successful person as time goes by.

If you combine these five simple steps, and persist with them long enough for them to become habits, then you will develop and maintain a healthy self esteem that will steer your life to happiness.