How do you stay calm, composed and maintain self-esteem in a tough environment? Here are some tips to consider as a starting point for self improvement.
Imagine yourself as a dartboard. Everything and everyone else around you may become Dart Pins, at one point or another. These dart pins can destroy your self esteem and pull you down in ways you won’t even remember. Don’t let them destroy you, or get the best of you. So which dart pins should you avoid?
Dart Pin #1 : Negative Work Environment
Beware of “dog eat dog’ theory where everyone else is fighting just to get ahead. This is where unappreciative people usually thrive. No one will appreciate your contributions even if you miss lunch and dinner, and stay up late. Most of the time you get to work too much without getting help from people concerned. Stay out of this, it will ruin your self-esteem. Competition is at stake anywhere. Be strong enough to compete, but in a healthy competition.
Dart Pin #2: Other People’s Behavior
Bulldozers, brown nosers, gossipmongers, whiners, backstabbers, snipers, people walking wounded, controllers, naggers, complainers, exploders, patronizers, sluffers, all these kinds of people will pose bad vibes for your self-esteem, as well as to your self improvement scheme. You can’t feel other people’s feelings for them, but you don’t have to hang around to be a target.
Dart Pin #3: Changing Environment
You can’t be a green bug on a brown field. Changes challenge our paradigms. They test our flexibility and adaptability, and alter the way we think. Changes will make life difficult for a while and they may cause stress, but change will help us find ways to improve ourselves. Change will be there forever, we must be amenable to it.
Dart Pin #4: Past Experience
It’s okay to cry and say “ouch!” when we experience pain. But don’t let pain transform itself into fear. It might grab you by the tail and swing you around. Treat each failure and mistake as a lesson. Learn and move on.
Dart Pin #5: Negative World View
Look at what you’re looking at. Don’t wrap yourself up with all the negativities of the world. In building self-esteem, learn how to make the best out of the worst situations.
Dart Pin #6: Determination Theory
The way you are and your behavioral traits is said to be a mixed end product of your inherited traits (genetics), your upbringing (psychic), and your environmental surroundings such as your spouse, the company, the economy or your circle of friends.
You have your own identity. If your father is a failure, it doesn’t mean you have to be a failure too. Learn from other people’s experience, so you don’t have to fully experience the same mistakes.
Sometimes, you may wonder if some people are born leaders or positive thinkers. The answer is NOPE.
Being positive and staying positive is a choice. Building self-esteem and drawing lines for self-improvement is a choice, not a rule or a talent. God isn’t coming down from heaven to tell you – “Chandra, you now have the permission to build self-esteem and improve yourself.”
In life, it’s hard to stay strong, especially when things and people around you keep pulling you down. When you get to the battlefield, choose the right luggage to bring and armor to use, and pick those that are bulletproof. Along the way, we will get hit and bruised. And wearing bulletproof armor ideally means “self-change”. The kind of change which comes from within. Voluntarily.
Armor of Self Change revamps 3 things:
- our attitude,
- our behavior, and
- our way of thinking.
Building self-esteem will eventually lead to self-improvement as we start to become responsible for who we are, what we have, and what we do.
When we develop self-esteem, we take control of our mission, values and discipline. Self esteem brings about self-improvement, true assessment, and determination. So how do you start gathering the building blocks of self-esteem?
- Be positive.
- Be content and happy.
- Be appreciative.
- Never miss an opportunity to compliment.
A positive way of living will help you build self-esteem, your starting point for self improvement. You don’t have to struggle on the journey alone! There are hundreds of women right here, waiting to support you. Meet them in the Woman University Salon!
