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

Each time you tell a person how you feel and they don’t reject your for it, trust builds. Not only that – you will have a relationship based on who you authentically are. No mask to come off later and disappoint the other person because they thought you were someone else – the one with the mask.

Anyone who is attracted to reading something called  How a coach can help you to build a sense of trust most likely has some trust issues. Those issues impact us in many ways. Following are some examples:

Personal relationships – “What if I’m myself and you leave me?” That is often the basic reason people get into poor relationships in the first place. They ignore their own inner knowledge of themselves by acting how they think the other wants them to act.

Work relationships – “Can I really allow myself to trust anyone who I don’t know well or in a job situation?”  They don’t trust people to be supportive and authentic.

Making decisions – “I’m really not sure what to do.” They have a hard time because they don’t trust themselves.

How can a life coach help you with these difficult situations?

When you talk to someone weekly who always supports your agenda, tells you the way they see things in your life quite openly and who has an attitude that your answers are in you, you begin to trust that person.

When that life coach also keeps pointing out the ways your attitudes and emotional responses are right, you begin to trust that person more. And you begin to trust yourself more.

As you experience success after success in support of yourself, you eventually become a trusting person because you know you have the information inside you that will steer you where you want to go in your life. You will know if a person is trustworthy in your personal and work relationships and you will trust yourself to make decisions.

That is one of the things an experience of life coaching can provide you.

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!

]]> http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/how-a-coach-can-help-you-to-build-a-sense-of-trust/feed 1 http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/self-esteem-issues http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/self-esteem-issues#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:00:51 +0000 allaboutlifecoaching http://allaboutlifecoaching.com/?p=785 Self Esteem Issues

If you read around this site, you’ll notice that my path in life has involved healing great self-esteem issues and body image issues. I started telling God what was wrong with my body when I was 10 years old! And that was 56 years ago.

Imagine (my guess is you know) what a barrage of make believe images your girls (and women) are hit with daily. Advertisements, billboards, magazines in the supermarket line, TV, internet, etc. etc. Does it make an impression and contribute towards self esteem issues? Does it set up an impossibly unreal image that girls and women think they are supposed to emulate? You bet it does!

My lovely husband found the following and sent it to me:

• Looking to get together with a group of women of all ages, from around the world, who are passionate about real beauty? Check out Dove.us for meaningful conversation, second opinions, moral support, or just to add your two cents.

• Come on in and feel free to speak out. Tell others about yourself. Your perspective on things just might inspire someone else. And that would be a beautiful thing.

Amazingly this is a beauty product company who is offering these programs. Those 5 little videos are well worth watching and will likely take you two minutes. Please share this with everyone you know. We can all do our part to have all our beautiful woman or all races, sizes, weights, hairstyle, hair texture, hair color, short, tall, thin, “fat” understand that everything about them is beautiful!

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!

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.

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!

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 will:

• 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.

Click here and watch the Three Magic Secrets Movie for free – a free self-help ebook!

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.

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!