Self-Acceptance

Do you want total self-confidence?  Then one of the most important steps is to recognize your true worth as a person.  A sizable amount of the problems in your life can be traced back as a direct or indirect result of how you feel about yourself.  Remember this: YOU CAN NEVER BE BETTER THAN YOUR OWN SELF-IMAGE.

Intellectual acceptance of one's accomplishments or talents is not what I'm talking about.  Positive self-esteem is personal self-acceptance. You realize that you are a truly unique and worthy individual;  one who doesn't feel the need to impress others with achievements or material possessions.  Positive self esteem is not the same thing as an ego trip.  You are not in love with yourself in the egotistical sense.  Ironically, the person who incessantly brags or boasts displays one of the classic symptoms of low self-esteem.

You would think that those with the most success would have the greatest self-esteem but this is not always the case.  One the greatest tragedies of our time concerns those leaders, teachers, inventors, artists, and people who have made great contributions to mankind and yet are victims of their own low self-esteem.  Some of those most admired people in history have become drug addicts, alcoholics, and even committed suicide just to escape from a self that they could never quite accept and often grew to hate.

Developing positive self esteem is not just a matter of making yourself happy, it is the foundation on which you must build your whole life.  If you can hope to be free, it is a task which you must take seriously.