Image is mine
The first step in overcoming low self esteem is Love. When you love yourself you tend to see yourself as the most beautiful person, the most successful person and the happiest person regardless of whatever challenges life throws. With self love, you treat yourself well and good, prompting others to treat you well too.
When we have the littlest of love for ourselves, we radiate, we glow and we become optimistic.. You see, low self esteem comes from a place of hate and while we know these things, it is not enough. And as self explanatory as my open remark might be, how do we really love ourselves? What are those things that we could do to rid ourselves of self hate? What are the strategies that we can possibly put in place to overcome low self esteem and see ourselves up there no matter how lowly life places us?
When writing prompts like this, I love to write from personal experiences because experience is the best teacher right? Well, I have suffered from low self esteem myself. In fact, it was not until last here that I finally overcame it 100%
In my younger years I had it worse with low self esteem. At one point, whenever I walked in public, I would always face down because I felt I was ugly. Wanna know where I got that idea of being ugly from? My classmates. Funny how some of my classmates who tagged me the ugliest girl in class were my friends.
As a really tall girl, I don't get to see people my height. All my friends were either averaged height or short. Whenever we walked on the road, they would ask me to either walk ahead or walk on the other side because I was too tall. I hated myself because I didn't feel accepted amongst my peers. If they are not shaming me with my height, they are making fun of my looks. They'll say, your lips are too fat, your nostrils are too wide and you are not beautiful enough. I struggled with these labels plus rejections till my adult years and at a time, I even considered cosmetic surgery.
I got to my adult years and it was no longer my looks that I felt bad about, I felt inadequate with my finances. I was checking with my supposed friends from way back via social media and I saw how well they were. Some of them even cut me off because they felt they were in a much higher class.
Every day from my past, I felt like the most unfortunate person. Like I wasn't good enough and I saw myself always struggling not knowing what to do. It was a battle with self, one I did well to keep inside because I didn't want my so-called friends to know that they were getting to me. I did not want to give them the satisfaction that they were trampling on my self esteem. So I cried inside and smiled outside.
Moving on, within a twinkle of an eye, everything changed for me. My starting point in building my self esteem, mastering self acceptance and self love began when I started meeting new people. People who saw the best in me and always wanted to see me win.
In these new sets of people that I met, one of them taught me gratitude. Whenever I feel less of myself, he's reminding me of my achievements. The things that I never saw as nothing, he brought the awareness to me that they were solid. He made me see how far I have come and how well I have done for myself. I was so fixated on other people's accomplishments that I was constantly downplaying mine. At that point my new found friend taught me gratitude.
According to him, I have to be grateful to be able to achieve more. This I practiced while solidifying contentment and just like that, I overcame the feeling of financial inadequacy. I started trusting in my own process, I started seeing myself grow and started feeling good about myself.
I met another friend and he taught me self love. He said hate destroys while love builds. He told me that if I'm not confident in myself, I'm setting myself up to be trampled upon. He said again, talk to yourself like you would a lover and I started doing that. From there on out, it was me feeling good about myself. It was me accepting myself just the way that I am and continuously seeing the best in me.
One thing that I have come to realise is that some people are constantly looking to portray their sad reality on us. Thus, if we don't love ourselves, if we don't accept ourselves, we would be accepting those sad realities.
Currently, I set standards on how I want to be treated and if I'm not getting it, that's my cue to exit.
Each passing day became an opportunity for improvement because I'm always accessing myself to fish out negative emotions and correct them immediately.
One example of these negative emotions is the feeling of defeat from failing. Thus moving on, every time that I fail, I never see myself as a failure again. Instead, I learn, failure became a learning curve for me and even a ladder to success.
When it comes to competition, I educated myself to understand that the only competition that I have is with my older self and in order to win, I constantly need to do better to improve.
In summary to all that I have written, surround yourself with people who brings out the best in you. That's one solid way to rise above low self esteem
Above is my response to the February Inleo prompt day 2. You can participate Here
Posted Using INLEO
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Wow, this was a serious trait facing you earlier in life. Thank God you have overcome it by listening to the heart felt communication from sincere and resilient friends,
they have helped to change your understanding and have given you the boldness to standard out.
The supposed to be your treasured friends. Thank you for sharing.