This is kind of hard for people, but sometimes you feel crappy about yourself because you’re in a crappy state of Self-Esteem. You’re not your best self, and that’s okay because you don’t have to stay there. Okay? I was there.

But I got a question about self-esteem, and I know Self-Esteem is something that really impacts a lot of women. I can only speak to my experience, and if you are anything like me, you might have struggled or are currently struggling with a low sense of self-esteem. But today I kind of want to flip this subject on its head and argue that the issue isn’t that we don’t have high self-esteem. That’s not actually the problem. The problem is that we’re too focused on self-esteem.

We’ve all heard our whole lives that self-esteem is the key to success, happiness, confidence, career goals, etc, etc. That self-esteem problems and feeling crappy about yourself isn’t special to a certain group of people. Models feel crappy about themselves. Successful people feel crappy about themselves. Anybody could have low self-esteem.

The problem with self-esteem and nurturing self-esteem and making people feel good is that it’s too emotional, it’s too self-obsessed, and it’s too introspective. And here’s what I mean by that. If you’re constantly focused on yourself and you’re constantly rooting around yourself, your body, and your life for the problem areas, you’re going to feel crappy and have low Self-Esteem.

And that’s why when someone sits you down or when you watch a YouTube video and someone is saying, girl, just accept yourself. Just self-acceptance, self-love, and self-care are key to Self-Esteem.

And you’re like, why can I not do it? Why can’t I accept myself? Why is it so hard? It’s because every time you look at yourself, you know yourself better than anybody, and you’re going to see your flaws, and you’re spending so much time trying to accept those flaws.

They’re flaws. We all have them. And it’s not wrong to dislike your flaws, but it is wrong to obsess about them. There is no reason we should be doing so much introspection. So much self-obsession, so focused on ourselves. It’s natural to have low self-esteem when you’re young.

When you’re young, you are still figuring out your place in the world. You’re figuring out your identity, you’re figuring out your relationships. Are people attracted to you? What does your body look like? What are your plans for the future?

Are you going to ever get married? There are just so many unknowns. It’s normal to feel crappy and have low Self-Esteem when you lose a job. It’s normal to feel crappy and have low Self-Esteem when you fail a test. It’s normal to feel crappy and have low Self-Esteem when you feel like you’re getting out of shape.

That’s completely normal. And it’s not actually a bad thing. Those crappy feelings are part of life. We cannot avoid negative emotions and the feeling of low Self-Esteem. It’s normal to feel negative when you have a failure in life.

Taking A Realistic View Of Yourself

But you need to stop yourself from obsessing about the flaw, the failure, the issues, the unknown, and the feeling of low Self-Esteem. So what’s the real solution to all of this? Stop esteeming yourself so much. It can be difficult to accept that you might not be able to achieve something that you want. This is because most people think that they can do anything if they put their mind to it. But it reveals so much about our lives.

Number one, it reveals what we have to be thankful for, our blessings, and what we have going for us when we take stock of our lives.

Take stock of the blessings in life. And second of all, when we take an accurate look at ourselves, it reveals places where we need to improve our Self-Esteem. And in that improvement, we can actually begin to gain real confidence. And finally, when you take an accurate look at yourself and you enter reality, you start to step away from some of that emotion and you start to become more grounded in reality. We can’t always avoid the feeling of Low Self-Esteem.

Bad things will happen to us that will make us feel crappy. But if we’re self-inflicting a lot of that negativity and pain on ourselves, we’re going to be less productive and successful in life. All right, so let’s touch on that first part.

Gratitude

Basically, when we’re jealous of other people, when we’re feeling low self-esteem, we’re feeling crappy about ourselves.

We’re wanting what other people have, and we’re staring at their stuff. And I’ve heard a lot of advice, and I’ve even given this advice that when you’re feeling crappy and jealous of somebody, you should just turn their social media feed off and focus on yourself.

But the problem with that is you’re going to find someone else to be jealous of in replacement. We cannot fully box ourselves in life so that we’ll never see things we’re jealous of. We are always going to see things we’re jealous of.

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I could look out the window right now and say, oh, the neighbors have a better-looking mailbox than us. I want that mailbox. But seriously, it’s so easy to be jealous, to be envious, to want what other people have. And the antidote to that isn’t, oh, stop yourself from wanting what other people have. Like, when is that advice ever worked?

The antidote is to be grateful and content with what you currently do have. This erases jealousy in a couple of different ways, but first of all, it causes you to really reflect and realize, wow, I was being a little bit of a snobby brat because I have all of these blessings and I’m ignoring them, and looking over there and saying, I wish I had her lakes, or I wish I had his house or whatever.

And the thing is, that always turns other people into your competition. It always turns them into people who are like a threat to you. And so if you’re able to be grateful for what you have and stay in your own lane and focus on the blessings you have when you see a nice house and maybe you get to go visit one for the weekend with your friends, you’ll be like, oh, this is great.

I’m so grateful to be here, instead of looking around and thinking, I wish I had what they had. And the thing is, I have been there. I remember being a kindergartener and wanting to switch faces with my friend because I thought she was prettier than me. I’ve always naturally struggled with wanting what other people have and it is a bad look. It always made me unhappy, extremely unhappy.

And on top of that, the saddest thing, it made me unable to see all the glorious blessings I do have in life. Look at my living room FAM. Like I’m blessed. I’m so thankful for what I have. You know, I’m wearing my grandma’s sweater right now.

It’s not Zara. It’s not fancy. But I feel so cared for. I feel so grateful for what I have. And this is not something that I’ve been doing for years.

It’s been something that’s newer for me. But I cannot tell you the relief it has brought me in my life. It is so relieving to not look around all the time on social media and be like, I wish I had her Abs, her shoe collection, her fame, and her house or whatever because that was so exhausting. And when you’re wanting all this stuff, it makes you feel crappy about yourself because you’re comparing. And again, we cannot isolate ourselves from seeing awesome stuff that other people have.

That’s life. Life is unfair. Lots of people have way nicer stuff than we’ll ever have. I probably have nicer stuff than a lot of other people will really have. Everyone has their lot in life, and we cannot stop ourselves from comparing, but we can focus on being grateful for what we have to increase our Self-Esteem.

And when you’re confronted with your blessings and when you’re confronted with what you do have and you’re focused on being grateful, a lot of that jealousy just washes away. And so do those negative hating on yourself feel that you don’t have her legs, you don’t have her arms, you don’t have her butt, you don’t have her boyfriend, you don’t have their trip to Disney World.

A lot of that goes away, and a lot of that self-hatred goes away because you’re not comparing yourself to other people. So if you want to have higher self-esteem, focus on the blessings you currently have, even if it’s just two working eyes, ten fingers, and ten toes. Start there every single day. Write down five things you’re grateful for, and it’ll flow.

When I first began, I was like, I don’t know what I’m grateful for. I don’t like myself. And now I could write pages and pages and pages of things that I’m thankful for. And it’s not because my life has really changed that much. It’s because my perspective has changed towards life to be more Self-Esteem.

Self Improvement

All right, the second area, if you want higher self-esteem, is to not focus on high self-esteem. It’s to focus on self-improvement. And I’ve talked about this before. Women need to nurture things in their life to build their self-esteem. We need to nurture our bodies.

We need to nurture our social life, our relationships, our home, our goals, our talents, our faith life, and our inner soul life. All of that needs to be nurtured for us to feel like we’re improving and for us to feel confident. This is kind of hard for people, but sometimes you feel crappy about yourself because you’re in a crappy state. You’re not your best self, and that’s okay because you don’t have to stay there. Okay?

I was there. I felt crappy about myself when I was about £15 heavier than what I am now. And I know I know it’s healthy. I still looked fine. No one ever told me I didn’t look good, but I didn’t feel good.

I felt slow and tired all the time, and I didn’t feel energetic because I didn’t feel like my best self. For a long time, I worked on accepting myself, and I said, okay, just accept it. You’re just that way. Just accept yourself. Accept yourself.

But it never worked. It never worked to just accept me at that heavier weight because I felt crappy, and it did not go away. The only thing that made that go away was improving myself and working on being healthy. And I don’t look the way I envisioned I would look. I still got my big calves.

I’ll always have big calves. I cannot get rid of them. I’ll be thankful for my calves, guys, but basically, I don’t look like that model. It’s good to know that not everyone looks the same on social media and that not everyone is happy with their appearance.

But I’m happier with myself. I’m more confident because I worked on self-improvement. I lost that little bit of weight. I felt really confident. And when we nurture ourselves, when we’re really pouring into our outer beauty, we’re pouring into our relationships.

We’re pouring into our talents. We have things to be proud of. We have things to build real confidence on. It makes sense that you feel unconfident if you have nothing to be confident about. And this has nothing to do with your intrinsic value as a person.

Everyone has intrinsic value, but not everyone has things in their life that they’re proud of. You can always change your mind about what you think is the right thing to do. We can all nurture ourselves, and our lives, and accomplish things to become proud of ourselves based on real-world accomplishments, real-world nurturing, blossoming, etc.

Earn Your Esteem Through Self Improvement

It’s not earning your confidence through being perfect for looking a certain way or acting perfect all the time.

No, but we’re all going to feel better if we’re actively taking time to work on ourselves. That will always make you feel better. When I worked on self-improvement, it was not just about losing weight. It’s also about your virtues, your character traits. And so I worked on not being so lazy.

The laundry started getting done, and my kitchen is put to bed every night. Work on your inner qualities as much as your outer qualities, and you might be surprised at how confident you feel.

Work On Your Inner Qualities

A third and final area of building self-esteem is to step away from that heightened emotional state. I feel like I’m a poster child for all of these issues because on top of being lazy in the area of self-improvement, on top of being jealous of everybody, I also struggled with a heightened emotional state constantly.

I’m very emotional. If you haven’t figured that out, I got a lot of feelings. And because of that, when I would spiral into I don’t like myself, it would be so much more intense than someone who’s not as emotional as a logical person, because I feel like a logical person would just stop themselves and be like, this is dumb.

But for an emotional person, you start feeling that certain way and you can’t stop the train, and then you’re just spiraling. You’re just out of control, hitting on yourself, negative self-talk, low self-esteem, et cetera.

So one of the best things I did was to stop that emotional spiral before it even happened, by lowering the amount of emotion I applied to my personal problems, my personal issues, and my personal introspective world. Again, I always say this we cannot avoid problems in life. We cannot avoid terrible things that are going to cause us to feel some sort of way emotionally. But we do not have to obsess about our issues. We don’t have to put that emotional state on ourselves.

Step Away From That Heightened Emotional State

We don’t have to willingly step into that emotional trauma every day. We don’t. Sure, once in a while, maybe you’re on your period, you’re going to feel kind of crappy about yourself, hormones, whatever. But if every day you wake up and you’re just looking for reasons to hate on yourself, to feel crappy, to be negative. That’s a problem.

And I’m not talking about medical depression or anxiety problems from your childhood. Get counseling for that. I’ve gotten counseling in my past. It was wonderful. Highly recommend.

But there’s a level where we do a lot of this stuff to ourselves because we’re so emotional. Being so emotional is good sometimes, but if it drags you down into that Spiraly pit of despair, your emotions are not serving you, they’re causing obstacles in your life. And it doesn’t mean you don’t have to be emotional ever again. But I would highly recommend taking a break from introspective, emotional, intense feelings, blah, blah, blah. Just take a break from it.

And I know that might be easier said than done, but just stop yourself and say, no, I’m saving that for next week. I’m saving that for next month. And just go longer and longer between the times when you feel very negatively emotional towards yourself, and soon it will just stop almost together. It doesn’t mean I’m going to be a robot. I don’t even think that would be possible for me.

But it doesn’t mean I need to give in every single time. Let my emotions rule me. I know some of you are going to be like this, but we have to focus on ourselves sometimes. We have to think about ourselves, and that’s true.

Heightened Emotional State

But there is a heightened focus on self in our society. Following around for hours every single week or month, hating on yourself, and focusing on your flaws and your problems and me isn’t going to get you anywhere, and I know it won’t because it didn’t get me anywhere. I didn’t get anywhere in life or in my confidence until I stopped wallowing. I stopped with the intense emotional introspection. I stopped being jealous because I started focusing on myself.

I started focusing on the things I could improve. I started focusing on things I could be grateful for. And then on top of that final titbit, focus on helping other people. Nothing will bring you out of that state, like, introspection and self-obsession as helping other people. And yeah, you can take it too far.

You can make your whole life about other people, and that’s not good either. But if you struggle with focusing on yourself 24/7 sit down with a friend for coffee and listen to her life. Help people at the church do some volunteer opportunities and get involved with things online that help people. There are options. And the only option isn’t to sit at home, focusing on yourself, hating on yourself, and trying to accept yourself constantly.

And you can acknowledge the parts of your life that you’re not super happy with. And you can still have a happy life because you’re full of gratitude. You’re working on yourself, and you’re not overly emotional about your problems. Everyone has problems. You’re not the only one.

You might be kind of proud of yourself if you accomplish something if you work on yourself. You might feel better if you’re grateful for the blessings in your life. And we all have blessings, no matter how much or how little money we have. All right, everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. I love all of you.