Personal Growth to Strengthen Your Self-Esteem

The way you view yourself, your perceptions, and your beliefs about who you are and what you’re capable of doing all depend on your self-esteem. Self-esteem has little to do with talent or abilities, but it is the cornerstone of personal growth.

People with a low self-esteem, or a bad view of themselves and their abilities, will think: Grow? What for? Others will get stuck on the idea that they’re incapable of going further, blaming the situation or the environment. But we all should know that personal growth is always possible.

How far can you go?

Only by knowing yourself and exploring your talents will you be able to start developing your full potential. But the potential that’s waiting to be found might be repressed due to a lack of security in yourself and a low self-esteem.

However, in the process of exploring your talents, there’s nothing you can do but face the worst of your fears: yourself. Your self-image is linked to your limitations, your past, your wounds, your particular way of being. Doubts about whether you’ll fit in, whether you’ll be able to do something or not, or whether what you drag along in your emotional backpack will keep you from moving forward – these doubts are scary.

Only by daring to be yourself, accepting who you are, and loving yourself unconditionally, will you be able to start to heal your self-esteem and, as a result, be in a position to fulfill your potential.

Make peace with yourself and accept your weaknesses

A healthy self-esteem involves being aware of both your strengths and your weaknesses. Accepting both is what makes it possible to to love yourself, and even what makes you seem “friendly” to others. Everything you carry inside forms a part of who you are. Recognizing your weaknesses will give you the strength you need for personal growth. Not doing so will make you vulnerable.

Making peace with yourself will free you from the limitations you impose on yourself or accept from other people. Making peace with yourself involves accepting those weaknesses and relying on them to take the first step towards personal growth.

What other people think doesn’t concern you

Nobody can please everybody. Trying to satisfy everybody is a fruitless effort, especially if you forget that the first person who should be proud of your actions is yourself. As much as others tell you their opinions, at the end of the day, everyone walks their own path. Your path, your life, that’s your business. What other people think of you is their business.

It’s not easy to overcome the fear of social judgment, the fear of rejection, of what other people will say, of the obstacles that it will put in your path. But what other people say and think only has real power if you let it.

Look inside and decide who you would rather satisfy: the audience or the actor. When you do this, remember that your life is not a play with a script determined by a writer who wants to satisfy a paying public.

Don’t forget that many people only see a limited version of you. Nobody can know your motives, your goals, your efforts better than you. And don’t forget about envy, which turns people with low self-esteem or poor values into monsters that only measure success by how far above other people they are, which means they have to knock them down.

Don’t let this affect you. Grow so that you can get past other people’s judgments, and see yourself the way you are and the way you want to be.