Today we’re talking about the primary key to developing your self esteem. It’s obviously such a super deep topic, so I’m probably going to be doing 30-40 blog posts based on self esteem and self trust in the next three months so *this is a primer. *

Table of Contents

Self esteem is a state of mind

Self esteem, it’s a state of mind. It can fill you with happiness, confidence, cheer, joy or whatever the hell you like feeling… but it’s just a state of mind.

When people talk about self esteem, they’re talking about a baseline of emotional states. So if you’re normally down on yourself and normally carrying a lot of self doubt, then you’re gonna have a low self esteem.

If you don’t feel empowered, and you don’t feel like you’re able to do things then your self esteem is going to be low, which makes your feel super terrible about yourself.

One way to look at it is that your self esteem is like a battery. When it’s charged, you’re positive, and when you’re low, then you’re negative. It kind of dovetails with willpower a bit and we’ll talk about that later but you can get an upward spiral carrying forward by doing things that we’ve talked about in previous blogs – namely, keeping your own promises.

Self Esteem is About Self Trust

You can you can build up your self trust and create a momentum that creates kind of an upward spiral of self esteem, If you are failing at your stated goals over and over and again without any wins, you can get yourself into kind of a downward spiral in your self esteem because you’re not getting things done the way you thought you were going to.

You’re not keeping your promises – not having self integrity – you can create problems in the self esteem by having constant failures, one after another.

The Problem With Thinking Big and Goalsetting

This is a big problem that people have with goal setting; They’ll set goals that are too high or things that are out of their attainable reality in the moment.

After that, they fail the same unattainable goal, over and over again with no wins in between. They don’t take the time to break things down, to do things that they can win at the things that are within their control, which would create a positive feedback loop for keeping their own promises.

People with low self esteem – when their batteries not charged – don’t feel well in life. If you start to approach a situation with low confidence, you’re going to surprise yourself if you win. As a result you’re not as prepared to actually get the thing done and accomplish the thing that you set out to do.

Keep Your Promises To Yourself

I’ve talked a lot about having integrity with yourself. When you make a promise you got to keep it to yourself, otherwise you won’t trust yourself.

I’m convinced that’s where most of our self esteem comes from. This whole belief in who you are and your ability to get the outcomes that you’re looking for; that’s what creates the consistency and the self esteem.

How to Have Integrity With Yourself

How do you do self integrity? In the base level. You have to just keep your promises to yourself. The first problem that people have is they set their goals too big or too unattainable. They keep trying to hit the goal, over and over again, without modifying it so that it’s achievable.

There are many ways to actually achieve the small tasks that are holding back your self-esteem. You can break it up into smaller steps (small-chunking), you can delegate, or you can give up on the big, lofty plan and do things that that are more in your control that you depend on.

If your goal is, for instance, “Get a role in a movie”… a lot of that is dependent on other people’s opinions. What you *can *control is things like showing up to a lot of casting calls, and showing up to a lot of events where you can network with people who are going to be able to give you a better job. Those are the things that you could focus on, those are the goals you should be setting because that’s what you can keep a promise to yourself about.

The more and more promises you keep to yourself, no matter how small they are, they build up and create that self integrity – that belief that you’re going to follow through on the things that you said you’re going to do.

Develop Self Esteem – Failure is Fine

If you set your goals and tasks to be attainable, even if you fail at the grand outcome, you still keep your promises to yourself. . It’s keeping your promises to yourself allows you to adapt and take a proactive role in creating your future reality.

The more you see yourself with that self integrity, the better you just know you’re going to finish the shit you say you’re going to do. Then it starts to create the self esteem for you. For example, you don’t feel like you’re lying to yourself, you don’t second guess yourself. The inner voice stops saying shit like “yeah you’re not actually going to do it, bro”.

Your thinking gets simplified. “Okay, I’m deciding to do this, it’s getting done”. Then you move forward and then you’ll begin to accept yourself because you’ll have the understanding the strength to know that when you say something, you’re going to do it.

If you keep your own promises yourself, that trust is there. Then you can accept yourself – pretty much unconditionally – because you know that you’re not making empty promises to yourself. You know that you’re not going to let yourself down.

Self Trust Makes Other People Trust You

Believing in yourself like this helps you train other people how to treat you. That helps you like when they see that you keep your own promises and you follow your own boundaries to yourself.

They will also know that you expect them to keep their promises and expect them to respect your boundaries. If you sit around whining and bitching and moaning about life and not taking the action you said you’re going to do nobody’s gonna take you seriously.

You can talk about the external environment all you want, but everybody else is going to be like; “Okay, well, you keep saying you do this thing but you don’t”. And then that can reinforce that negative self esteem thing because nobody else on the outside is supporting you.

If you support yourself and you know that you have the ability to act when you say you will, other people’s opinions don’t matter all that much. If you’re not sure if you can muster up the resources to get what you said you’re going to do, then you start looking outward for that support.

That’s always fickle because other people don’t understand you to the level of depth and granularity that you do. It’s important to not let your mistakes or failures overpower you. The only thing you should be concerned about when you fail on things is that you didn’t do what you said you were going to do… that you didn’t keep your promise to yourself.

You’ll Get a Chance To Try Again, Most Of The Time

Most things, (unless they’re once in a lifetime opportunities) are repeatable. If you screw up, you can you can adapt, calibrate and then you know how to attack it again later on.

I have a buddy, Kelly, who took one of the tests to become an elementary school teacher in California.

To take this test is super hard. In order to be passed as an educator and get your certification, you have to pass this test. She took the test once, and just got destroyed. She told me; “I don’t know if I should take it again, it makes me feel really bad”.

I said “you said you wanted to be a teacher, silly. So, take the test again. After having been through experience, you can pass the thing, because you’ve seen it now, you know your adversary”. She had to wait a few weeks, because you can’t take it back to back, and then she took it again, passed it, and now she’s a full time school teacher.

like most things – even big stuff like certification tests – you can take again if you screw up. When you’re dealing with yourself worth, it’s not really the failure of the task that at hand that you should be focusing on. It’s whether or not you did what you said you’re going to do – did you study as hard as you said you were going to. Did you train as hard as you were going to? Did you submit that many job applications? Did you go to that many casting calls? That’s the type of thing that that you can judge yourself on because that’s really the only thing that matters. If you create that self trust, then your self worth will be more. Your self esteem will be much higher. And then other people will treat you better, naturally.

Be Fair To Yourself

On the flip side, you got to be fair to yourself. If you set a bunch of big, lofty goals because you want to accomplish big shit – I’m always into thinking big – you can’t expect yourself to win all of the time. You can’t have that do or die mentality on things that you don’t have the skill set to accomplish it.

People in my workshops will routinely come to me and say “yeah, I’m going to talk to 100 people today and I’m going to be super social in a day. I’m going to do it faster than everybody else. I’m really competitive”.

The goal is so big, and then they go super fast, but they don’t actually get it accomplished because they don’t have the skills to do what they said they were going to do. They have to learn the skills, (and it doesn’t take that long, especially in that case like social skill) It takes like five hours to really ingrained some good social stuff into your head through some progressive desensitization, but people like to set the big goal, so that they can get that big feeling of accomplishment

Thinking Big is Useless if You Don’t Have The Skills

If you don’t have the skills, it’s useless because you don’t actually hit the goal. Consequently, you don’t build up yourself trust or your self worth. There’s no point.

The goal didn’t get accomplished, and there’s nothing but beating yourself up going on in your internal psyche. So, what, why did you do that to yourself? That’s silliness.

What’s better is to get the bigger goal in mind, and then break it down backwards. Begin with the end in mind. Break it down to smaller taks, something that you know you could accomplish. Pick a task that stretches your skill set a little bit until you get comfortable with that skill set and then you can move forward at high speed.

Thinking Big Can Create Low Self Esteem

You have to think big, and small. I don’t know why it happens when people set these goals that are like way the fuck out of their zone. They’ve never accomplished anything like that before. There’s a fantasy story of this badass win that can take over your mind. If you just took the goal, applied yourself, and actually got it done, you’d get the self-esteem boost.

To take a big vision to completion, you still have to break it down, delegate things you can’t deal with, work super hard on things that you’re struggling on. You have to break it down so that you can get it accomplished. You can’t just blindly was shoot into the air and then expect to get any sort of consistent results.

You need to be fair to yourself when you set your goals, no matter how lofty they are. You have to break things down to the things that you can do where you keep those promises and build your self-worth.

Self Esteem Is Based On Self Trust

The point of self esteem is self trust. Self integrity. If you can trust yourself. on no matter how small a thing, you will build self esteem in that area. You can expand that out by doing it on a regular basis and create a positive upward spiral of momentum. An upward spiral of keeping your promises to yourself. You’ll feel better and better and better about your ability to finish what you started, or doing what you said you’re going to do.

Thanks for joining. And until tomorrow, Stay awesome, Stay Positive.