Build Your Self Esteem:
A Starter Guide

What's the difference between someone with low self esteem and a person with high self esteem? The answer, usually, is that a person with high self esteem is generally a more successful person. Which kind of person do you want to be?

So how do you stay calm, composed and maintain self esteem in a tough environment? Here are some tips you may to consider as a starter guide to self improvement.

Imagine yourself as a Dart Board. Everything and everyone else around you may become Dart Pins, at one point or another. These dart pins will 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 non-appreciative 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 healthy enough to compete, but in a healthy competition that is.

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.

Dart Pin #3: Changing Environment

You can’t be a green bug on a brown field. Changes challenge our paradigms. It tests our flexibility, adaptability and alters the way we think. Changes will make life difficult for awhile, it may cause stress but it will help us find ways to improve our selves. Change will be there forever, we must be susceptible 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.

In writing about self esteem, I hoped to anticipate questions you might have and I hope I have done a good job so far. There are more answers below that you may find useful and that you may want to share with others, so take the time to bookmark this, then read 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, we must learn how to make the best out of 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’ll never have to encounter the same mistakes.

Sometimes, you may want to wonder if some people are born leaders or positive thinkers. NO. 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 wouldn’t come down from heaven and tell you – “George, you may now have the permission to build self esteem and improve your self.”

In life, its hard to stay tough specially when things and people around you keep pulling you down. When we get to the battle field, we should choose the right luggage to bring and armors to use, and pick those that are bullet proof. Life’s options give us arrays of more options. Along the battle, we will get hit and bruised. And wearing a bullet proof armor ideally means ‘self change’. The kind of change which comes from within. Voluntarily. Armor or Self Change changes 3 things: our attitude, our behavior and our way of thinking.

Building self esteem will eventually lead to self improvement if we start to become responsible for who we are, what we have and what we do. Its like a flame that should gradually spread like a brush fire from inside and out. 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 putting up the building blocks of self esteem? Be positive. Be contented and happy. Be appreciative. Never miss an opportunity to compliment. A positive way of living will help you build self esteem, your starter guide to self improvement.

So, right now, what are you going to do? Are you going to put this away and start to read more articles about self improvement?

Or are you going to start right now to take positive steps to build your self esteem?

• Parks build teens' self-esteem (Baltimore Sun)
  
  At-risk teens find in nature a way to stay off the streets while learning skills and teamwork Mike Browning helps Isaiah Barrett, 14, use a chain saw to cut through a fallen branch along the Muskrat Trail as fellow CJC member Claude Scott observes from a safe distance. At-risk city teens are finding in nature a way to stay off the streets while learning skills and teamwork.
  


• Focusing on artwork (The Daily Iberian)
  
  New Iberia now has a place for youths to indulge in creativity and arts and crafts free while building self-esteem at the same time.
  


• Business Fine Arts for Children & Teens (FACT) (Santa Fe Reporter)
  
  FACT is an 18-year-old non-profit organization dedicated to transforming young lives in Northern New Mexico through the visual arts. After-school and summer classes at the ARTbarn community studio at 1516 Pacheco Street offer fun, hands-on art lessons that build self-esteem and encourage creativity.
  


• Older adults needed for volunteer tutoring (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
  
  The Fort Zumwalt School District is seeking adults ages 50 and older to share one hour a week during the school day with a child in kindergarten through third grade helping to build reading skills and self-esteem.
  


• Childhood obesity takes heavy toll on childrens' self-esteem (Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal)
  
  TUPELO - As a seventh-grader in Huntsville, Ala., Joel Stokes weighed in at 140 pounds. A year later, he reached his highest weight as an adolescent - 182 pounds.
  


• Fun in the shop, and college boost too (Honolulu Advertiser)
  
  While some of their classmates spent the summer at the beach or watching movies at the mall, 10 students from Waipahu, 'Aiea, Farrington and McKinley high schools were up to their elbows in grease.
  


• Youth camps help build self-esteem in Lyons (Ionia Sentinel-Standard)
  
  LYONS - Camp. The term itself conjures up references - or maybe memories - of parents sending their children away for the summer to engage and complete a variety of traditional activities.
  


• Let’s Not Forget Manners (Southlake Times)
  
  The word “etiquette� can make some kids and adults cringe. It is associated with dressing up and stuffiness. Royal Keys is a new business in Southlake that is trying to break out of that mold.
  


• DA: Manager 'well within his rights' (Lancaster Online)
  
  Held up at gunpoint by a pair of would-be robbers, a manager of a Manheim Borough business was "entirely justified" when
  


• Dewan Negara: Young offenders keep up with studies in jail (The New Straits Times)
  
  JUVENILE delinquents have every opportunity to continue with their education, Deputy Home Minister Datuk Wan Ahmad Farid Wan Salleh said yesterday. The government held the view that rehabilitation was part of the punitive process, he added.