Self-Esteem

Approving of yourself and loving yourself are two very different things. “I would have higher self-esteem IF…” Fill in the blank. This is a statement you might have heard before. And in this very statement we find that there is a Catch-22 when it comes to people’s self-esteem issues. The thought that you need to improve your self-esteem is, within itself, blocking you from improving your self-esteem! Did you just read that? Let it sink in. The thought that you have to fix your self-esteem might actually be holding you back from improving it. I think we can all agree that self-esteem is the same thing as self-love. The more love someone has for themselves means the higher their self-esteem.

So, when you make yourself wrong, how do you think that impacts your self-esteem? You will find that you are invalidating yourself when you seek to improve who you are in order to improve your self-esteem. When examining your self-esteem you might have asked yourself questions like, “What's wrong with me?  Why did I do that?  What's not working?  Why don’t I get it? What do I need to change”. These questions are linked to your sense of self-perception and they come from a space of conditionality. “What’s wrong with me,” implies you’ve assigned meaning to your behavior or thoughts as wrong. “Why did I do that”, implies that you think you should have done it differently. “What’s not working,” implies that you aren’t doing what you think is right. “Why don’t I get it,” means you believe you should understand something better. The common thread through all of these questions is this: you’ve assigned meaning to your actions and thoughts as wrong and if you were to change to get them “right” you would think more highly of yourself. You are trying to find improved self-esteem through the meta perspective that there is something conditional that I need to meet in order to have improved self-esteem, and that’s not possible.