How to Be Happy with Yourself – That Is the Question

Oh, my mother would have loved to tell me how to be happy with myself.

• She’d tell me to make sure I looked good whenever I go out because you never know who you’re going to meet. What she meant by that was that maybe I’d meet the right guy that would come and take care of me the rest of my life.
  
  
  
  • Well, right away this was a problem for me since I thought I was fundamentally defective and couldn’t look good.
  
  
  • She’d tell me go to the right college (so I’d find that same right guy that I might meet when I went out looking good). I did just that. I went to Rutgers University and graduated in 3 ½ years. And I even met a guy. Today I’d call him the “right guy” because married to him I learned that how I looked or what college I graduated or choosing a guy just because he looked good enough would never make me happy. That big long 19 year relationship lesson taught me that being happy with myself is an inside job.

So if the guy’s not the answer and how I look isn’t the answer and going to a top college isn’t the answer, how can I be happy with myself?

Stop for a moment and go look in the mirror. What do you see? Is all you see only what’s wrong with you?

Or if I told you to go write a list of your accomplishments would you have a little voice piping up and letting you know that those things are no big deal? Does it say you didn’t do such a great job or that someone else did better?

Or do you know your accomplishments and like how you look in the mirror and STILL aren’t happy with yourself?

If you said yes to any of the above, you are living with some level of damaged self-esteem. Babies don’t have damaged self-esteem. They are quite pleased with themselves. You were a baby and when you were, you were quite pleased with yourself. So what happened? Why are you not happy with yourself now?

Because I grew up in a family that ended up making me feel quite lousy about and with myself and the feelings got more than I could stand, I’ve made a study of how to feel happy with myself for over 40 years. And it’s worked. I feel quite happy with myself.

So how did I do it? Or more importantly, how can you do it? How can you learn to feel happy with yourself?

I’ve discovered that the method is like a 3-legged stool. If you only have 2 of the legs, the stool will topple. If you don’t deal with all three of the areas I’m going to talk about, you probably won’t learn to feel good about yourself i.e. the stool won’t work.

Let’s talk about BELIEF as the first leg of the stool. You have some mistaken beliefs about yourself that you picked up somewhere between that baby who was happy with herself and the adult who’s reading this because you don’t feel happy with yourself. Now you may try or have tried some of the tricky things you find in self-help books or online sites and you still really can’t seem to change your inner belief that you’re somehow not ok.

The second leg of the stool is HEALING. This is the one that most people neglect. We all have a past. Something or some things happened between the happy-with-self baby you were and the unhappy-with-self adult you’ve become. If you are willing to heal your past, then you will be able to change your beliefs about yourself. Your past is holding you to those erroneous beliefs as if you had invisible leg irons keeping your there. If healing the past sounds like something you resonate with, take a look at how this emotion-based program, might help.

Now once you heal the past and can begin to see the falseness of your negative beliefs about yourself and a very interesting thing occurs. You learn how to take INSPIRED ACTION – the third leg of the stool. In other words, you trust your gut, your intuition, your hunches on how to proceed in your life and soon enough because you are connecting to your own inner wisdom, you discover you are quite happy with yourself.

This is not an overnight process but it doesn’t take too long either. In a matter of a few months, you can be on your merry and happy way with tools to take you through a fabulous and very happy rest of your life.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

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

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

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

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

Is it narcissism or is it self-care?

You Might Have to Change Friends

I have a client who is successfully navigating a healthy relationship with a man for the first time in her 46 years! Her work on herself is wondrous. She has healed a scarily abusive childhood, healed very damaged self-esteem and most recently lost over 80 pounds. In chatting with her today, she commented that she is a "bit narcissistic". When we discussed what she meant by that, I realized she was really talking about self care.

I am not a therapist and I'm not going to look for a definition of narcissism that a therapist might use. I'm going to define narcissism to be what I understand from my therapist friends. As far as I understand narcissism is pretty much not being able to see beyond your own belly button. It's all about you. You are never wrong. All roads lead to you.

This is very different than being a person who observes their behavior and wants to see where and whether she is acting from self love.

If she is truly taking care of herself - most particularly when she has never really had a good relationship with a partner in her whole life and wants some very positive change, then deep, thoughtful, very observant self care is vital. That is not narcissism. That is not whatever else others have accused you of when you wanted to take care of yourself.

You were with the wrong people. People who truly love you, want and celebrate for you as you care for yourself. That means they support you having boundaries. That means they want you to express yourself authentically. They love you. Find and hang out with only those people.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Insecurity in Relationships

Insecurity in relationships starts inside yourself and generally shows up in a whole variety of ways in the relationship. Generally that happens because you didn’t speak up about what you wanted or what might be bothering you from the very beginning. Of course on your first date or even 3 months into it, it’s natural for there to be some insecurity. You don’t really know each other yet and relationships unfold over time but looking back at my first major relationship, it didn’t take more then six months for me to see the problems in our relationship. But I was so insecure, I was afraid of speaking up. I might lose the relationship altogether and my precarious self esteem was dependent on the world seeing me as a winner because I felt like such a loser.

I’ve worked with many people as their coach and seen the insecurity in their relationships. But I’m an expert on that insecurity inside my young self and I can now tell you where it came from and how it showed up.

It came from the lack of security I had with my parents. I was yelled at, compared in a losing way to other girls and criticized unmercifully and often - by my mother. I was always afraid my girlfriends would think I was a loser – so insecurity in relationships with peers showed up first.

Then there was the pressure to be popular, date and marry – all, for me, fraught with insecurity and self-doubt. Imagine you were looking at this beautiful young woman who thought she was a loser – who probably tried too hard and took almost any little attention by a male as good enough. She gets asked out by a good looking boy in her freshman history class. She’ll never have to worry about not having a date again. And so it went. And so we married and stayed together in our really lousy relationship for 19 years.

Some of the reasons for insecurity in relationships lay in childhood as they did in mine. Until I began to gain some self esteem and learned that I was important enough to say what was bothering me and how I felt about another’s behavior toward me, I would continuously experience insecurity in relationships. So will you.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How to Determine If You Have Authentic Self Esteem

Ego or Self Esteem?

Self esteem is all about how you see yourself and how you feel about yourself as a person. Increasing your self esteem is normally considered a good thing but keep in mind that like with everything else there is an up side and a down side.

If you have a low self esteem and you raise it to a point where you feel good about who you are, this is a good thing. But if you raise your self esteem too high and you become too full of yourself, you can be hurtful to people you love. This is not such a good thing.

Many years ago on my own personal journey of finding authentic self esteem I got a very hard job selling financial products to school teachers. I worked extremely hard and succeeded mightily (at least according to those who measure success by how much money you make). My authentic self esteem, my sense of being able to accomplish a hard thing daily, did increase. But so did my need to let everyone I knew know how much money I was making. I blush to think how full of myself I was. (And I apologize to all my friends for my obnoxiousness.)

This is all about ego - that sneaking little aspect of your mind that tells you that you are either not good enough or too good. It compares you to someone else to make you wrong or it compares you to someone else to make you superior. Neither of these states constitutes authentic self esteem.

Ego feelings come from your head. Authentic self esteem comes from your heart or gut or spirit. They are in line with your essential Whoever-Created-You-Given sense of worthiness.

Examine your levels of self esteem as honestly as you can. Listen to your heart and your gut instincts to lead you to be honest with yourself. When you have an honest picture of where you may be lacking in the self esteem area, then you can proceed with specific techniques to assist you in bringing your self esteem to the level of authentic good feelings about yourself - from the inside out.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Are You Judging Yourself? Find Self Acceptance

Self Acceptance by a Coach

In a world full opposites we seem to have trouble finding our own self acceptance. I was in the last couple of minutes with a coaching call and my client said she realized why she spent her life comparing herself to others. Her mother had compared her to others when she was a child and she learned it.

Learning to compare as a child makes perfect sense to me from two perspectives:

• First we have the human perspective - the perspective we hold here on planet earth. Here on planet earth it seems as if comparing is perfectly normal. We are always looking at good and bad , smaller and bigger , better and worse . We see things in duality. If there is one, the opposite is also true. So when my mother used to say, "Why aren't you like Renee (a goodie-two-shoes who was the older-than-I daughter of my mother's childhood friend)? It made me feel - bad! So if I was bad then somebody has to be good.  And so we spend our lives comparing ourselves to others.  But self acceptance can also be learned thus we have to apply it to our daily routine.

• Then we have the broad, spiritual perspective (and I might add, the real one). In that perspective there is only ONENESS. Whether you see it as a spiritual Intelligence, God or whatever, it's very nature is oneness. And since that implies that ALL is part of that, there is no duality, no good and bad, no smaller and bigger, no comparison. All is included in the ONE. We are all encompassing.  All of us are apart of one whole.

So, from the spiritual perspective there is nothing to compare because we are all part of the same thing. It is only an illusion. When you find yourself comparing yourself to someone else checking to see if they are richer, thinner or prettier or if you are, then you can realize that perspective is learned. Now you are in control of your own self acceptance.  Every time you catch yourself, you are closer and closer to full self acceptance.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How Do You Act on Your Dates?

Relationship Advice

Are you one of those people who think that they have to show the people you date that you have the same interests they do? You probably read a magazine article that suggested you do just this type of relationship advice. DON'T DO THAT. Be yourself. Relationships come in all types but the strongest relationships have proven time and time again certain things. Following are two of them:

1. One of these things is that you need to do is to stay true to yourself and who you are. Dating is difficult but it is even more difficult if you waste your time trying to be someone that you aren’t. You see it happen all the time. People begin dating and like each other but try to convince each other that they have many things in common whether they really do or not. For example, a women might claim she is a huge football fan when in reality she knows nothing about the game and could care less. For this relationship to go anywhere, sooner or later she is going to be found out and have to come clean and admit she isn’t a football fan. You may not realize it but this is lying. Is this any way to start a relationship that has any hope to survive? And how can you ever be sure you are loved for who you are if you don't show who you are?


2. Another important piece of the relationship of relationship advice is to keep your humor. You need to be able to laugh together and about yourselves. This keeps your relationship fun and playful and there is less chance that you will be hurt over silly little things that don’t really matter. Supposedly men especially don’t like women that take life too seriously and make everything a matter of life and death. I agree the less drama in the relationship the better but I don't want my partner to take every little thing too seriously either. I hate it when he takes things personally that I never meant that way,

The better you are able to be yourself with each other and laugh with each other, the more you prove that you can work together even when things aren’t so great. A positive relationship can only really happen when both partners are happy with themselves first and then with each other and laugh a lot.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

The Old Cinderella Story and Your Self Esteem

Life Coach and Your Self Esteem

The Old Cinderella Story

You know the story. Wealthy, loving, widowed dad meets gold-digging woman. Dad marries women and brings her and her two less than lovely daughters to live in manor. Dad dies and leaves less than loving step-mother in charge of all three daughters. Step-mother is jealous of natural daughter's inner and outer beauty and treats her like a servant. One day the prince plans a ball that he wants all young women in the kingdom to attend and at which he will choose a princess. Step-mother will not provide clothes for the natural daughter and locks her in the house the night of the ball.

Along comes Cinderella's Fairy God Mother and with her Magic Wand, provides Cindy with a beautiful dress, glass slippers and turns a pumpkin into a pumpkin coach. You certainly know the rest.

The Real Scoop

Imagine this story as a metaphor for change and self esteem.  Growing up as she did – criticized, belittled, unloved – Cinderella wore her old raggedy self and felt unworthy of fulfilling her real purpose here on Earth (OK. OK. It is a bit pre-feminism to think her real purpose is to marry the Prince. But play along.)

Along comes her Fairy God Mother, waves her Magic Wand and outfits her in the accouterments of real self esteem - enough to make her beauty recognizable to her real purpose.

That Fairy Godmother just waved her magic wand. You can create magic  with a life coach but you will have to do some work. If you are willing, the results will be the same as Cinderella's. You will be transformed!

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Six Ways a Life Coach Can Help You Boost Your Self Esteem

The Life Coach Boost

Get started boosting your self esteem by hiring a life coach. Since a life coach usually helps people with any and all areas of life from career to finances to overeating, all of the work that you do with a life coach will eventually lead back to your self esteem and help to slowly (or quickly) increase it.

A life coach can:

• Help you focus on the positive


• Show you that you are deserving of all good


• Challenge you to reach for what you are worthy of


• Challenge you to reach for what you want


• Point out the positive attributes that you take for granted about yourself


• Gently (or not so gently) tell you the truth about where you are kidding yourself

As you work with the coach and overcome challenges that you face and reach the goals you set out, your regular experience of the focus just being on you with your life coach, will continue to help you raise your self esteem. The life coach will be someone other than yourself that will help make sure that you are held accountable until eventually as your self esteem and self confidence increases, you can learn to hold yourself accountable for your actions and learn to change the negative, critical voices in your head.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Is High Self Esteem Feeling Competent or Feeling Worthwhile?

High Self Esteem = Competence AND Worth

What is high self-esteem? Some say it’s the feeling of personal competence. Some say the feeling of personal worth. Or is it both? I say both.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine the areas where you may need to examine find your level of high self-esteem:

Am I able to earn my living doing what I enjoy? Does what I do to earn a living improve or take away from my self esteem?

• Do I know how to give and receive love? Or do I get stepped on and used in my relationships.
• Do I have wonderful friends? Or are my friends undermining and backbiting?
• Do I take good care of myself physically? Or do I eat poorly, sleep little or too much and do no exercise?
• Do I earn an income that is appropriate my age? Or do I go from one low-paying job to another?

Even if you answer positively for four out of the five of your answers, one area of your life that isn't working the way you'd like it to is enough to throw your life out of balance and negatively effect you high self esteem. Be honest with yourself. Do something for yourself. Think about hiring a life coach and focus in particular on the area you need a boost on.

When you have high self esteem you can accomplish what you want to in your life. When you have high self esteem you can stick to what you want to accomplish – even if it takes years. As one who suffered from low self esteem, I know how long and hard it can be but I also know the rewards of high self esteem.

As an example, in three major areas of my life, I’ll give you a little synopsis:

Relationships – from a really long and bad first marriage with two partners with clear self esteem issues,  I now have a long-term marriage with two of us feeling good about ourselves.

Career – from floundering around doing jobs I was either over or under-qualified for, I now know my talents and how to use them.

Self-care - from years of overweight and health problems I now am actually tired of my clothes because they keep fitting me.

Obviously that is not every area of my life but I think it is quite easy to see that having high self esteem makes all the difference in the world in life.

If I can do it, so can you.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Having Emotional Wellness

Loving Yourself

I left my parents home with a horribly damaged self esteem. I then stepped into a marriage that would take 19 years to see the truth of my creation.  I had created a more challenging experience than even my childhood was for me - and further eroded my self esteem. But something magical happened when I started over at age 37. The beginnings of feeling good about who I am started to blossom. This was the start of my emotional wellness.

That was over 33 years ago and I live most days now feeling quite wonderful about who I am and my positive contributions to the planet. That's what good emotional wellness feels like to me. It encompasses me as a relationship-haver, me as a life coach, teacher and writer. It includes all areas of my life. One of the most recent areas for me to feel good about is my physical self. I love how I look even though I'm 72 and have the body of a healthy 72-year-old. I love my naturally silver-tinted hair, and I love how I dress. We all have different appearances and to appreciate our outside we must love ourselves from the inside. I call this emotional wellness.

I was just putting makeup on for an event I'm attending a bit later in the day. I could contemplate plastic surgery or trying to make myself look younger but that is not who I want to be.  Emotional wellness is seeing who you are and knowing that you are exactly where you are supposed to be and loving yourself no matter what.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How do I know I have low self esteem? How to fix it?

I’m guessing if you are looking around the internet for information on low self esteem, trying to decide if you have it, you are experiencing some of the following:

• You discount yourself and don’t think you have much going for you.


• You’re pretty sure everyone else feels pretty good about themselves but you just don’t.


• You treat yourself poorly.


• You think others have all the answers for you. You don’t trust yourself.


• You let people take advantage of you.


• You have an inkling that you are not living up to your potential and you would if you actually knew what that is or what it means.


• You have poor relationships.


• You feel lousy a good deal of the time (lousy might include: fear, guilt, sadness, emotional pain, anger, hurt, blame, etc.)

Having been a person who had low self esteem for many years, I know what you feel like – and it isn’t good. And it isn’t that you are defective somehow. It’s that the people and situations that were supposed to keep your automatically-there-when-born self esteem all shiny, did not do the job that you would have wanted them to do. In other words, your childhood caretakers were less then perfect and probably suffered from similar low self esteem feelings themselves.

But you live at a time when there is help for such a thing – lots of help really. If you found this article, you’ve likely found others. Some may promise you something like “7 Secrets to Good Self Esteem”.

I am sure that articles like that have some kernels of truth and help in them but mostly they don’t go deep enough and so even though you try to make use of those secrets, you still feel most of what you always felt – lousy and lousy about yourself.

So what is the answer? How does one fix it? Well, first let me tell you that there is no Arrival Building at Good Self Esteem. Building good self esteem takes work and time. It’s a journey of sorts. The journey can sometimes be painful but it is always worthwhile.

Here’s what I’ve done for the past 30+ years which has worked so well that I now have a business training coaches who suffer from the same issues themselves and want help themselves and want to then be able to help others. So what do we do?

Well, first we insist on a certain attitude. That attitude is one of “I created everything” and it means that I have chosen to believe that I created the emotionally abusive mother I had and the sexually abusive father. Now did I really do that? Who knows ? Even some scientists today are beginning to believe that we actually do create our lives. But truly, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the attitude of self-empowerment as opposed to feeling like a victim.

When I felt like a victim, not only did I have low self esteem, I also attracted people and situations who would convince me further of my being a lousy person.

Next we require you to deal with their past experiences in a way that allows the old unexpressed feelings and emotions to be brought into the light and turned into something positive.

With a toolbox full of highly useful and reusable tools for continuing the process, you go off into the world to continue growing and finding the beautiful person who you really are.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How to Improve Self Esteem

You may repeat the same patterns over and over in your life and never realize that you end up in these situations because you don't feel that you are worthy of something better. For example, several of my clients continue to have relationship partners who do not treat them the way ought to be treated. These women are controlled and disrespected.

Once you discover that your self esteem may be lacking, it might seem like it is too late to change - but that is far from the truth.  Self esteem programs are never too late to start.

Low self esteem leads to negative thinking about yourself and negative thinking about others - to make yourself feel better than them and, therefore, make yourself feel better about yourself - the proverbial vicious cycle . The negative thinking feeds off of your lack of self worth and continues to throw more negatives at you, until you make the decision to let go of the negative and find the positive.

Here is one simple self esteem exercise. Start watching your thoughts. Simply observe them. When you notice that you have a negative thought about yourself, observe it and replace it with the truth about yourself. For example, you may think, "There I go again! I never get it right!"

1. Now you notice that you had that thought.
2. Try not to then follow that with a judgment about your negative thoughts,
3. Now replace it by saying to yourself: "Sometimes I don't get it right and sometimes I do."

Now you try it.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Love Compatibility Test: How will I know he's the one?

It would really be great if such a thing existed out there in the world. All you’d have to do is get out your trusty credit card, put in your number and the perfect questions to tell you each whether you were compatible would pop right up. And off into the sunset you’d go – either together or apart - depending on the results of the test.

That might have worked when you were 14. Some teen magazine created the test. You took it and found out yes or no.

Or you might count on the info you get from your local or online astrologer. Maybe they do know but truly, how to know if he’s the one or not is not that hard. The information is right there inside you.

Every time he makes you happy, he’s the one. Every time he does something that upsets you, angers you, hurts your feelings or makes you feel small, he is not the one. If he continues to hurt your feelings and make you feel small, he is not the one.

Now I am not so naïve as to think it’s that simple. But it could be. Here’s what you have to do to make it that simple. You have to find a way to listen to, discern and trust the emotional feedback your body gives you. You know what I’m talking about although you may not realize it.

Next time you get angry or feel sad, notice what’s going on in your body. Next time you are wildly happy, notice that and what it feels like in your body. What are you feeling right now? Are you having what you’d call a good day? Or are you having what you’d call a bad day? It isn’t the events that usually make the day good or bad. It is your emotional reaction to the events that make you interpret it as good or bad. When you start looking internally, you will know the information you are looking for when it comes to the person you are trying to know your compatibility with.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “It’s an inside job.” It is an inside job because human beings have a full range of biochemicals that flow throughout our bodies and let us know if we are happy or sad, angry or joyful. So that’s where the compatibility test answers are – inside you.

But you searched and found this article because you aren’t clear - which means something is blocking you from knowing your own truth. These are the kinds of things that block women from knowing:

1. They have a hard time understanding their emotions.


2. They started a physical relationship before they really knew the guy and become confused because their hormones and emotional vulnerability is totally triggered. This is not a moral judgment but rather a reality for women.


3. They are carrying a lot of emotional baggage from the past and it is confusing the current situation.


4. They have low self esteem and want to hold onto anyone as long as someone will stay with them.

So if you want to know if he is the one, you have to allow yourself to feel your feelings and acknowledge what they are telling you. If all this idea does is leave you feeling confused, then I can promise you you need some help in getting back in touch with your feelings. Go seek help before you make any decisions about who is “the one”.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Self Worth? Resistance Revisited

Most of my work on myself and my continuing journey is to expand my self-love and self-care having followed a lifelong path out of self esteem and self worth issues.

In light of that and because my muscles start hurting if I don’t do it, I’ve taken up yoga. I love it. So as I was showering this morning I was noticing resistance. And I don’t like resistance and I don’t want it but if I push against it, it pushes back.

So instead I asked myself what the resistance to yoga was about. And here’s what I got: it’s about allowing myself the time. My mind says, “You could be working on your coaching programs or washing dishes or .....” whatever.

I realize that my mother never let herself spend any time on self care and unwittingly made it a value to be taken on and honored. She told me with great disdain for our neighbor walking down the street in her tennis dress: “Exercising is vain.”

So, "Resistance, you are just a mask for keeping me loyal to that unconscious value. You may leave. Your job has been done. You tried very, very hard and long to hide the truth from me and did a  really great job of it.

Now I know a different truth, I AM WORTHY OF MY OWN TIME AND ATTENTION."

What are you resisting that is really good for you?


YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

13 Ways to Improve Self Esteem

Many people go through life with low self esteem. This is a sad, but true, fact that is made sadder by the fact that it doesn't have to be that way. Every person on the planet is a special, unique person and deserves all good that comes along. Everyone deserves to feel good about themselves. Many of the littlest things in life can do so much to improve self esteem.

To improve self esteem you can:

• Smile at the people who come across your path today.
• Find something funny to laugh about.
• Turn negative thoughts into positive ones and see what happens.
• See what you can learn from what happens in your life.
• List all your positive attributes.
• Ask your close friends and family what they love about you - and let it in.
• Do something for someone that they don't expect and let them express gratitude.
• Do something wonderful and kind for someone that they know nothing about.
• Compliment the grocery checkout person.
• Make a "To Do" list and check off each thing as you accomplish it.
• Do something that scares you a little.
• Learn something new.
• Forgive someone.

These things are so simple to do that you will be amazed at what happens when, for example, you do something nice for someone for no reason, do something that scares you a little, learn something new and you feel better about yourself. What have you accomplished besides spreading some joy? You have worked to improve self esteem.

There are endless possibilities to love others and yourself. And remember to accept what you can't change. Give it a shot for a day or two and see how much better you feel about yourself.

Self esteem is not a static thing. If you pay close attention and focus on each day instead of making broad statements about yourself and to yourself, you may begin to see that some days you feel not so bad about yourself. Those would be good days to improve self esteem so that on your low self esteem days, you can begin to look back and see that you are doing something to change it. Even acknowledging to yourself that you are working towards feeling differently about yourself, will help you improve your self esteem. It is not very much fun to walk around feeling badly about yourself. It tends to be a self perpetuating situation where feeling badly about yourself supports you to do things that make you feel badly about yourself. Work done to improve self esteem will change your world and you are worth it.

You University Emotion-Based Coaching