I might ruin all creditability by making this one single statement, but the reality is, there is no end all cure to low self-esteem. I say this because we are all human who have high and low days (no matter how great our self-esteem is) where we may feel even the slightest ounce of being unsatisfied with some embodiment of who we are at any given moment. But the great news is we have the ability to control this, build up our self-esteem and confidence, and learn to love ourselves indefinitely, despite things we may want to work on about ourselves.

Have you ever walked into a room and your immediate thought goes to comparing yourself to other people in that room. As if somehow that comparison you just drew up in your mind justifies to yourself everything you hate about how you make look, how you feel, and who you are. You rationalize all the great qualities someone else possess, of which you have convinced yourself things you indefinitely lack. Many women do this and I will be the first to admit that at one point I was one of these women. Inevitably, it always falls back to the way society develops in our minds what beauty is or what a strong individual looks like, and when we don’t measure up to that definition, we unconsciously believe that we have failed society and ourselves. When I began my fitness journey about four and half years ago, I found myself drowning in the perfection of these fitness models and athletes. We all see these models overflowing our social media, it’s a fitness frenzy in America right now and people with low self-esteem, easily fall victim to comparison and yearning to be and look like them. It’s a vicious cycle, because the no matter how hard you work, no matter how great you look, feel, become, no matter how much you change, grow and better the things you feel are wrong about yourself; you will ultimately NEVER truly be satisfied with who you are, unless you stop solely focusing externally and you begin working internally on building your self-esteem, confidence, and self-love.

Now, like everything else in this world, building self-esteem and confidence doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s something that we must continuously work at every single day. The most significant influence to begin this process is by learning to shut off the negative thoughts about ourselves, so stop bullying yourself and start praising yourself. Some people may object to ‘self-help’ books, but I have found that by finding the right book for you, it can change your life and change your mindset. One thing I learned from the books I’ve read, (“The Confident Woman,” by Marjorie Shaevitz to name one) is in order to control our negative thoughts, you must universally recognize when you’re being negative. This can simply occur when you’re stuck in traffic and you begin saying, “ugh, there’s so much traffic, I hate this!” Well right there you’re resulting to unnecessary negative thinking when you could choose to think positively about this situation. This may sound trivial, but the reality is that, in order to be a more positive person toward yourself, we must learn to be a positive person in all aspects of our lives, and the results will overwhelmingly encourage us to be happier, healthier human beings! So with that, instead of picking at all the things you dislike about yourself, find the positive aspects and focus your mind on those, and take steps to work on things that you may not be fully happy with. But never obsess over those, simply realize that everyone has things about themselves they want to work on, and that is great! We should always work on bettering ourselves, but we have to discover the beauty within the things we want to better, and we do that by staying positive.

With that, there are many more ways to build our self-esteem and confidence, so look out for “Stop Bullying Yourself Pt. 2” and discover many more ways I have found that have encouraged me to ditch my bullying and embrace self-love.