Are you asking how to improve your self esteem?

Is Asking How to Improve Your Self Esteem Even Important?

Self-esteem may not seem that important to some (they're probably feeling fine about themselves) but it has a huge impact on your daily life. It has an effect on your moods, your reactions and how people treat you. So it is important to ask how to improve your self-esteem.

Seek learning on how to get past negative emotions like anger, jealousy and blame and not let them overshadow your thinking.

Everyone experiences small episodes of these harmful emotions but if you let them be your whole focus, you will never be happy and everyone you meet will know it.

In addition, these emotions build up and create harmful physical conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Make sure you laugh every day. Watch a comedy show to lift your mood. You can’t possibly feel hopeless or angry if you are laughing.

Following are more ways how to improve your self-esteem:

1. Increase your self-esteem by doing nice things for other people. They don’t even need to know you did it. In fact, it might is better if they don’t. It will make you feel very good about yourself though, and that is what is important.
2. Stop criticizing every little mistake you make. Watch the words you say about yourself. No more "stupid" or "dummy". Everyone makes mistakes.
3. Take all those negative things you are thinking about yourself and turn them into positive thoughts and your self-esteem will be on the rise one little step at a time.
4. Learn to choose how you respond to whatever situation you may find yourself in. You can decide to calmly handle a situation with as little stress and bad feelings as possible or you can freak out yell, scream, cry and make a bad situation worse.
5. And if your emotional residue from the past is so large it doesn't feel like you have a choice, seek help – self-help, coaching or therapy. Whatever suits you.
6. Another way to make yourself feel better and give your self-esteem a little boost is to dress up now and then for no reason. It will make you feel good knowing that you look good. Do not allow yourself any criticisms about how you look, only good thoughts.
7. If you up for a real stretch, ask 3 people what they like about you. Let what they say about you wash over you. Let it in and just say, "Thank you".

The next time you ask how to improve your self-esteem, think back to this list and get to work.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Is Self Confidence Elusive For You?

Boost Your Self Confidence

Self confidence is all about how you feel towards yourself and how confident you are in your life and the situations you encounter. High self esteem means you truly love yourself and who you are inside.

For example,

• I know I am a truly good person.
• I know I wish everyone well. I also know I am an authentic person.
• I know there is no big gap between what I think and feel about something or someone and how I act.

I love those qualities within myself. I very much like who I am as a person.

Self confidence may change on a regular basis depending on the things that are happening in your life on a daily basis. The change could even be linked to not enough sleep or having a very stressful few days or even hours. Everyone has good days and bad days but if most of your days tend to be bad and you feel stuck where you are and not willing to try new things, you probably have low self confidence and, my guess is, you most likely know it. I suffered from low self confidence for years and I certainly knew it.

The good news is that you can build your self confidence but it will likely take time. With some work and a serious commitment there are techniques that you can use to build your own self confidence. You will find many of them on this site.

First you must commit to remaining positive. A positive attitude is crucial to the success of building your self confidence. Then you must stop listening to anything negative that you or anyone else says. And since this is mostly an inside job, the voices you have floating around in your head, are the most damaging or most beneficial. Good self messages sound positive. Low self esteem inner messages are negative, critical and have lots of shoulds in them.

1.   Don't allow yourself to compare yourself to other people. You are your own unique person with your own purpose for being here and it doesn’t matter what others do, say or accomplish. It has nothing to do with you – except as far as you let it run your life.
2.    Associate with positive people.
3.    Spend your time doing work and activities that you truly love.
4.    Do not go over your past mistakes in your head. Forgive yourself and move on.

Start small and celebrate all of your successes. As time goes on, your small successes will become larger successes and you will be on the road to much higher self confidence and many more opportunities to be happy.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Life Coaches Can Help You Take an Objective Look at Why You Aren'tMoving Forward

Your Life Coach Can Help You with Procrastination

Life sure does seem to be happening faster and faster. Can a life coach help with any of this?

Maybe it's my age but I hear lots of younger people voice the same observation. For whatever reason, no matter how fast-paced your life seems to be, you may still feel like you are spinning your wheels and getting nothing done and getting nowhere.

Whether you procrastinate and put off the important things you need to do or if you constantly seem to come up against a brick wall at every turn, sometimes it takes someone else to help you look at your life situation with an objective eye and see what some of the underlying issues may be. Sometimes it's self doubt and low self esteem. Sometimes it's just a shortage of needed skills. Maybe it's a combination of both.

Fear and self doubt may blind you to what is really happening. Feelings and emotions may be in the way and you may never grow past these issues and become prosperous and self-respecting. If you are working hard and still feel like you are getting nowhere, a life coach could be the key to helping you see what the issues are that are standing in your way and moving forward past them to a whole new future. Make a serious commitment now and deal with the situation before it is too late and you have missed many incredible opportunities. Go pick up the phone.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Why we all don't have what we want

Personal Power For All

I've been involved in the human potential movement or on a personal power path for 40 years. When I started on my path I didn't know I was on a path; I just knew I was in so much angst about my life and my body that I had to do something. What I did was go to a 12-Step program and found a spiritual answer or rather I began to understand how life really works - not what I had learned from my parents who actually didn't have a clue. It's not that at 37 I found all the answers. I found out there were questions. Much more important.

So my journey has wound and wound and found me living in L.A., Sausalito, Mill Valley, Petaluma, Dallas and Las Vegas - in no particular order.

• It took me out of my first marriage of 15 years into single parenthood with 4 children with lots of low self-esteem.

• It took me to other 12-Step programs. It found my second husband of 6 mos. in that 12-Step program and led me out of the marriage and the program again.

• It found me at an obscure workshop called Making Love Work by the then very unknown Barbara deAngeles and John Gray.

• It found me discovering my childhood abuse and back into another 12-Step program.

• It took me back to John Gray and Men Are from Mars . It found me my 3rd husband of 23 years.

• It took me to coaching and writing - and many other places.

My life is a miracle to behold. I have 4 lovely adult children, 6 amazing grandchildren, 2 beautiful daughters-in-law. It gave me a most precious and special relationship with my stepdaughter. It gave me friendly but far-away relationships with my other stepchildren and grandchildren.

Why did a woman who was emotionally and sexually abused as a child, who suffered from very damaged self-esteem, married 3 times(!), who saw herself as a victim etc. etc etc. get such a great current life. THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE. I DO THE WORK I UNDERSTAND MY NEEDS TO HEAL, TO GROW AND I DO IT 100%. Even when I didn't have the emotional tools to move on, I had the personal power.  Whether it's with a coach, without a coach, in a 12-step program or out - NO MATTER WHAT, I do and have done the work.

If you have that kind of personal power and commitment to your path, you have anything you want. I promise.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Who's a Fake Coach?

Life Coach - Real or Fake?

With the growing trend of life coaching, everyone is calling themselves a coach these days. I'm on twitter , a cool social networking site. It's amazing how many people who are in sales and network marketing call themselves "coach".

Elsewhere in this blog you might have read that my personal prejudice is that a life coach does not have to be certified and does not even need formal training necessarily. I learned more from receiving good coaching than I did at my very expensive training school.

That being said, if you want to hire a life coach and you find someone who calls themselves coach but has nothing to offer, it will become apparent to you when you interview the coach - whether in person or on the phone.

An authentic coach will offer you a sample session or will have an in-depth conversation before either of you could possibly consider whether you are right for the coaching relationship with each other. I used to offer a sample session but since I don't know you and don't know enough about you, I find that if we ask a lot of questions of each other, if we are forthright in our communication and I understand what you want from your coaching, I can then tell you what I can offer. I often tend to tell a potential client what I've worked on with other clients and what I've changed in my life in relationship to their needs.

Many who call me have told me that they talked to lots of coaches and they felt "sold". It takes a high level of confidence in ones self, a lot of trust in the Universe to provide the material goods required by the life coach and a strong sense of intuition to not feel fearful of not being hired. I told you in another post recently that I "fired" a client when I realized I was beginning to totally resist our appointments.

Since I usually look forward to each session with anticipation and joy and leave feeling focused, centered and empowered, I knew something was very wrong. I realized that I had been blinded during our initial interview by my ego in agreeing to work with this lawyer because he is my ex-husband's nephew and I thought it was such a "special compliment" to me seeing what our marriage status is and has been for 25 years. Well, that didn't work out. We ended on a positive note but I fell into a very human trap of satisfying my ego but not seeing that we weren't a good match to start out with.

So, again, hopefully you will know immediately if you have the right person or not to hire as a life coach. But certainly you will figure it out quickly and that's why I advise - keep interviewing until you are sure.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Are the "noes" of childhood in charge of your life? How can you beemotionally healthy?

Remember when you were a kid and you wanted some things that your parents said NO to? I'm guessing it would not have been OK for you to express anger at your disappointment. Most parents are not so OK with that but where did those feelings go? They most likely never got expressed which means they are somewhere "in" you which means most likely they need some work - some healing.

In my work as an Emotion-Based Coach, I meet both women who've had horrendous backgrounds and women whose childhood was pretty good. It's the one whose childhood was pretty good who have the most difficulty in believing that their past might be the reason their relationships don't work out or they can't seem to do the work that makes them happy or anything else that isn't working in their lives.

Here's an example from a conversation I had this week with a really quite healthy woman who is considering going through YOU University with me as her coach. When she was a kid, her dad wanted her to become a golf pro and apparently put a fair amount of pressure on her to do so. She did not become a golf pro and knows intellectually that her dad wanted the best for her but I believe that the kid in her still needs to express her feelings around being pushed into something she didn't really want to do and the somewhat powerless experience that kids often have even with the best of parents.

We all have situations like the one above in our past. Some of us, unfortunately, have much harsher ones but usually, those women hurt so much, that they try to get relief by going to therapy or being involved in spiritual and/or personal growth programs and reading self-help blogs, books and ebooks. It's the ones with the easier past who have a hard time believing that their "great" childhood could leave any negative impact on them.

It occurs to me that taking this self-assessment might help you get some insight into yourself and how the now is linked with the past.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

What to Do if You Were Taught Not to Take Care of Yourself

Selfish or Self-Care?

It seems when I was a child I was never taught about self-care or to want things. Whenever I wanted something, I was accused of being selfish.  It didn't matter if I was tired or just not wanting to do chores. I heard it so much and so often and didn't want to think I was anything bad like that, I stopped taking care of myself in many different ways. If taking care of me was selfish, than taking care of and pleasing others was unselfish . And I'd much rather be unselfish. I suspect many people and maybe more women are taught this self-defeating, unloving attitude by other women - mostly their mothers who had learned the same thing in their early lives.

If you experienced something like that dynamic somewhere in your past, you might find it difficult to rest enough, difficult to eat well, difficult to take care of your body in other ways. You might find it difficult to take care of yourself in relationships. You might judge your emotions as unworthy of a good (unselfish) person. You might also find it difficult to have healthy boundaries and difficult to stand up for what you know is right.

How do I know all of this? I know it because I have lived it in one way or another. So what do you do if you see yourself in these words?

• Start paying attention to how you treat yourself. Take a little notebook and write down the ways you see you not taking good physical care of yourself. Then get support to change those old habits. Find someone or someones who will help you understand that you are infected with wrong thinking. Funny. My mother also said, "God helps those who help themselves." I'll buy that one. So I help myself.
  

• Start paying attention to how others treat you. Are you taken advantage of in relationships? Are you expected to give more than your partner? Are you underpaid? Do you do work that is unsatisfying? Talk to someone who loves you enough to be an honest mirror and listen to what they are saying. It is most likely the truth and you most likely know it is deep down inside yourself.

Find support to learn to love yourself from the inside out.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Are You Building Healthy Relationships?

Expectations of Building Healthy Relationships

I have a friend for many years. When I first, formally started my coaching practice, she was one of my first clients. I wasn’t able yet to observe myself in the coaching process enough to be able to see if the calls were building healthy relationships between my client and myself. A couple of weeks ago she called and said I need your help. She said, "I’m overwhelmed and confused about creating my business so I either watch TV or eat to avoid the whole thing."  I agreed immediately but we didn’t really lay out what she expected from me and from the coaching itself.  One of the best tactics in building healthy relationships is to outline expectations upfront. The lack of having done that immediately showed up as a problem. She missed an appointment, then had a gas company guy come at the time of the next appt. and was heavy into negativity when we finally spoke on the delayed appointment.

I don’t perceive my job as talking a client out of their negativity. I perceive my job as working with it to change it. Subtle difference but a big difference in results for the client – and results for me. Which leads me to what I experienced that day.

When I hung up from our call I was tired and drained. I thought it was because I didn’t have enough sleep. But several hours later I had my next client appt. and although later in the day, I felt exhilarated and stoked which is how I most often feel after coaching – which I’ve used as an indicator that coaching is a gift of mine. Also, I remember learning from John Gray about a zillion years ago that if a relationship is giving you energy, it’s a good relationship and if it’s taking away energy, there are problems. He was referring to intimate relationships but what’s more intimate than a relationship between a coach and a client?

So back to my question: to coach a friend or not to coach a friend? I still don’t know if it’ll work in this case but I have begun to remedy the situation by requesting my friend to please write down her expectations of me and of our coaching. We will speak about it next week and we’ll see where we end up.

Lesson learned: When building healthy relationships you must request and layout expectations and boundaries.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Improving Self Esteem - 8 Questions to Ask Yourself

The Lonely Issue of Self Esteem

If you think you are the only one interested in improving self esteem, you are not alone. Most people think that they are the only ones that have low self esteem while the truth of the matter is that most people at some time in their life suffer from self esteem issues. I mean really, who wants to walk around all victimy these days and say, “Poor me. I’m working on improving self esteem for myself?” Anyway, self esteem issues are a pretty good subject for your old friend denial to pop right in and cover up the whole thing from your conscious mind.

So if you want to check it out, ask yourself the following to uncover self esteem issues:

• Do you settle for way less than you want in a relationship?

• Do you absolutely never let anyone see you dressed less than perfectly?

• Or do you go the other way and dress pretty sloppily quite often?

• Do you work at jobs that are way beneath your talent ability or allow yourself to be way underpaid?

• Do you tell yourself that those kinds of jobs are all that's available or that you're only doing them temporarily but find that you've actually done them for years?

• Do you let your personal environment go to the point of severe clutter and either clean up only for visitors or keep people out of your home?

• Do you secretly feel your aren't very talented?

• Do you sacrifice your wants and desires for others all or most of the time?

I'm sure many people could add to this list of questions but these are ones I can think back to from my own severe self esteem issue days.

The good news is you can change this. You can learn how to have higher self esteem. If you look around on the internet, you might run into statements like:

•    You just need to learn to love yourself and your life.
•    Let go of any anger or fear you are holding onto and be grateful for all that you have already been blessed with.
•    Forget about the past and the mistakes that you have made along the way. You can’t change them now and it will not accomplish anything by making yourself feel worse.

They sound nice and maybe even easy. But how do you accomplish those ends?

Look around this site. Every coach trained by YOU University Online has worked at improving self esteem themselves - oftentimes dramatically.

Develop your strengths and use them to gain any knowledge that can help you in the direction that you would like your life to go in. High self esteem is not a luxury it is a necessity and the only thing that will allow you to accomplish all of your goals. Since self-esteem affects every facet of life, having a healthy, realistic view of yourself is important. You also deserve to like and respect yourself and to be happy with your life and who you are. And remember, high self esteem doesn’t mean that you’ve gotten too big for your britches — it means you value yourself.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

What Does "Owning Your Power" Mean?

Introducing, (your name goes here) the great!

How Do I "Own My Power"?

Our neuroses are the raw material out of which an interesting personality may be crafted.
Original Self, Thomas Moore 2000, Harper Collins, p. 15

 

I've been a study in holding myself back. These are some of the ways I've done it:

• I’ve given certain people too much power. I think they know or can do more or better than I can. Thinking that I have tried to almost BE them. Guess what? You can't be anyone but yourself.

• I’ve protected someone close to me from the judgment of others. For example, I never wanted my mother to know when I was hurt or angry with my ex-husband. I guess I didn’t want to let her think she was right. She didn’t like how he treated me (and I didn’t like how he or she treated me). The funny thing about this is that SHE was the one who he reminded me of and who changed a happy sensitive little girl into a person who would totally ignore her own knowledge that this man was never going to be a good partner for me.

• I’ve said I was going to do something – and then didn’t follow through like the zillions of times I said I was going to lose weight – and didn’t. How loving is that to me?

How have you held yourself back? Are your boundaries being stepped on? Do you keep your word – especially to yourself?

Here’s an assignment to help you get your power back. Every day ask someone what they value in you. The more stuck or depressed you are feeling the more important it is to ask this question. The more you don't want to do it, the more you need to.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Way Beyond Ordinary- Self Esteem

Self Esteem - Where's Yours?

Are you spending your life feeling ordinary? Do you feel like you are just a "normal" person like everyone else  and that life is no big deal - particularly your life? That is what's wrong with your thinking and your self esteem. Every single person on earth is completely unique and not exactly like anyone else. Think of the miracle it takes for two people to come together and actually have all the conditions exactly right to create another human being! Think of the miracle that it takes for that little tiny creation to properly grow and develop into the unique individual that you are today!

 That is beyond ordinary. Remember that there is nothing ordinary about you.

• Focus on what you really want in life and you will begin to receive all the things that you have always wanted.

• If you love and accept yourself first, you will treat other people the same way that you want to be treated and your relationships, your work and your overall happiness will change and you will realize that you are way more than ordinary and begin to prove it to yourself  and your self esteem every day.

 YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Letting Go - Teaching How to Forgive

Do you ever find yourself going along thinking you know something or that you've resolved something, letting go and all of a sudden there's more to learn or you discover you just resolved it a bit more?

Sometimes I think an issue is resolved and then I discover there’s even more to be uncovered and resolved.

My ex-husband was in my life. We shared four children and five grandchildren. We lived a few miles apart. It's taken a lot of work on my part to be in a state of forgiveness. A lot of letting go. We had a very difficult marriage. We were too young and too unsuited to each other to have anything but a contentious relationship for a good deal of the four years we dated and the 15 years we were married.

I had been going along thinking I had forgiven him for the hurt I felt but wouldn't you know it, I learned just how much internal protection I was holding onto when it came to him. And I am sure he could feel that. I wasn't letting go. I kept seeing him as ‘weird’ until it I clearly saw, “Your four kids are half his? Are they weird? Are they part you and part him which makes them somehow defective.” Of course not! So another letting go.

Maybe some people who grow up being abused never learn how to fully relax and fully trust others. Or maybe it happens in degrees over the years. I'm not sure but what I'm sure of is that I sat next to my ex at a holiday performance at our grandson's school the Friday after realizing this and I felt completely open to him for the first time – probably since we met in 1961! And then again in those couple of weeks, another unfolding and another awareness and another letting go. We had the best conversation about a difficult family issue. It was the best conversation we’ve had in 50 years!

Life is a wonderful teacher and I felt lighter and better about myself with this burden dropped - or maybe they'll be more to drop someday in the future.

You University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

What is the definition of emotional intelligence and how can you develop yours?

From a website dedicated “to communicating scientific information about emotional intelligence” I found these definitions:

Emotional intelligence represents an ability to validly reason with emotions and to use emotions to enhance thought.

They also say: a more formal definition is...the capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

So now we have a formal definition which I might translate this way: emotional intelligence allows you to know what you are feeling, understand others' feelings and to be able to use those feelings to promote your own emotional and personal development.  

That doesn’t sound too hard, does it? Well, actually for most people it is quite difficult. It is only easy for us when we are babies because emotional intelligence is a natural part of being a human being. And just as intelligence (called by us IQ) is a measure of our intelligence capacity so too is EQ a measure of our emotional capacity.

While intelligence can be affected by a person’s environment, even more so a person’s EQ can be affected by a person’s environment. To make that perfectly clear: if as children you were not allowed or supported in continuing to express your emotions as a baby so easily does, it is as if a little plug was put in some part of your emotional expression ability. For example, you are two years old and you want to play with the water in the toilet. Mommy says “no” and picks you up and moves you away – probably closing the door of the bathroom so you cannot get back to the water. You are pissed off. But Mommy does not have time for you to have your way right now. She distracts you or is not happy with you in some way. Most likely she does not encourage your anger but likely tries to get you to be a “good little girl”.

This simple example shows you how this happens. Children often are forced to not feel or not show they feel what they actually do feel – particularly if it is anger, hurt or sadness. So those old emotions get stuck and begin to be much of the driving factor in how you live your life. They create your unconscious beliefs about yourself and your world.

The way to develop your emotional intelligence is to work with someone who can:

• Offer you tools to rid yourself of the old stuck emotions.
• Help you bring the false beliefs about yourself and the world to light.
• Provide you with tools to keep your emotional and personal growth growing for the rest of your life.

I have been working on just this very thing myself for about 30 years and from someone who didn’t even know I had stuffed a lot of unexpressed anger and who most of the time didn’t know what I was feeling and felt often very disconnected to myself, I am now considered an emotional intelligence expert. It takes work but the results are amazing.

Oftentimes people are very afraid of this kind of work because they believe they might be overwhelmed and not be able to handle the emotions that come up. However, if you find the correct help, you will discover that that isn’t the way it works at all. Somehow our own healthy desire keeps the old stuff coming up at a rate that you will be quite able to handle.

You University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Expressing Gratitude Brings Me Closer to Myself

I am 72. I was born during a World War - another "war to end all wars". I've lived through the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, entrenched fear of Communism, Middle East Wars, September 11th, jobs I hated, a challenging marriage, teenagers with troubles - sometimes very big ones, financial losses, early stages of breast cancer and many other events both personal and world events.

How can I experience all of this and still feel happy, joyous, grateful and optimistic with an inner knowing that we are all in for amazing wonders of planetary transformation? How can I have such a great life with so much expanding love of family, friends and complete strangers? How can I be seeing material success beginning to occur even within the current economic climate? Am I different than others? Am I more blessed? More special?

I think not. I think that on a personal level I have begun to understand how life works. My experience has shown me to:

• learn how to focus on what's good
• learn how to let go of the old negative tapes I've picked up from various places in my life
• tell the truth of how I feel - at least to myself
• keep expressing gratitude
• know for sure what makes me happy

By doing these I  not only create the life I want, I contribute to the positive vibrations on the planet and get to be a part of the solution.

I am no different than you. We are all one. We all effect each other by our very eye blink. With all that said, I will tell you what I am grateful for:

• I am grateful that my 79-year-old husband thinks I'm hot and just asked me to sit on his lap before he took off to teach a couple hundred inner city kids Physics.
• I am grateful that I have 5 beautiful grandchildren, 4 wonderful kids with various amazing partners, step-children, friends, clients - love abounding!
• I am grateful I am my right weight and able to maintain it and love myself in the doing.
• I am grateful for our Wii Fit and that I am willing to use it quite often.
• I am grateful for my  smartphone and my  iMac.
• I am grateful for all the wonderful connections I've made all over the world by doing social networking.
• I am grateful for knowledge of how to feed my body and keep it healthy.
• I am grateful for all the wonderful teachers I've had including John Gray and Barbara deAngelis.
• I am grateful that I could go on and on and on.

Expressing gratitude works to create the life of your dreams. What are you grateful for?

Now that you're done, I have one thing left I'd like you to do.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching