How To ACTUALLY Improve Your Self-Esteem

I think that everyone wants more confidence and higher self esteem. And I know that I personally used to think about self esteem as the pinnacle. If you had high self esteem, you wouldn't get everything you wanted in your life. And I have since reversed on that position because I've seen that actually high self esteem, when it becomes the focus, can be detrimental. And it absolutely has been to me. So I want to share with you in this video a mindset that not only incorporates self esteem, but I think supersedes it and is quite frankly, more important that you can incorporate. In order to get there, I kind of have to talk about what self esteem is and how it differs from regular confidence. So in order to do this, think of a scenario where you are approaching someone. Now, this can be someone that you're interested in romantically. It could simply be, you're standing at a party, there's somebody next to you, you'd like to talk to them, but that moment of anxiety kicks in. The person who lacks confidence, their mindset is, I will be kind to myself as long as this situation goes well. And I don't think it's going to go well. So in the scenario where they do finally muster up the courage, their mental track is, you don't have anything interesting to say, they're probably not wanting to talk to you. Oh my God, that was dumb. What will you say next? Don't say that, that's stupid. And of course, because they're thinking that they behave that and the interaction goes poorly, the cycle continues. The person that has confidence actually has the same exact mindset, which is, I will be kind to myself as long as this goes well. The difference is that they have practiced enough times that they think it's going to go well. So maybe they've watched the channel, they know what they're going to say to begin with. They have some things that will revive conversation if it goes stale. And because of that, they feel good. They walk up with a smile on their face and typically the interaction goes well and that cycle continues. But of course, it. It doesn't always. And when it does, the person who lacks or just has confidence beats themselves up. Which is where we move to self esteem. And this is what I thought was everything. Self esteem isn't concerned with necessarily the outcome, it's concerned with the process. The person with self esteem says, I will be kind to myself simply by living up to my own principles and values. And if you're like me, your principles are authenticity, honesty, doing your best. So as soon as they move to Approach that individual. They have already won. They're living up to their values, they're trying their best. And when they arrive there, whether or not they know what to say, they feel great. It radiates from them. And that interaction tends to go well. That's why self esteem is so powerful now. It's been amazing, right? This is a level for me that changed my life. This took me from in a job that I didn't like to pursuing something that I was truly passionate about. It had me traveling the world with my best friends. It keeps me involved in activities that quite frankly, I don't have a ton of natural talent in like music. And I do it because I love it, right? It's not about being really good. It's about the process and the enjoyment that I get. But there's an issue with self esteem and I've encountered it firsthand. It's that sometimes we do not live up to our values, right? We don't walk up to that person. We don't do what we should. We're not honest, we're not authentic, we don't try our best. And in these situations, what I would do is beat myself up. Man, you let yourself down, right? You, you diminished your self esteem there. You're not living up to your own values. You got to do better next time. You have done better in the past, but chop chop, let's make it happen now. I thought that this was great because this is kind of the stick that motivated me to achieve all of the things that I've achieved in my life. But I started reading a little bit outside my circle and came across a concept that was very different and that I resisted. And it was this concept of self love unconditionally. The difference being that where self esteem said I have to live up to my values, self love was just because for no reason at all, you give yourself this feeling of love. And I resisted it because I thought, wait a second, all of the things that I've done in my life I did because I was nervous that if I didn't do it, I was kind of going to have to beat myself up. Right? I needed that punishment in order to drive action. We all know that pain is probably the biggest motivator to change. So if I'm just heaping self love on myself, maybe I won't approach that person. Maybe I won't move to the next level. Maybe I'll just sit and stagnate and heap self love on myself and feel great, but accomplish and do nothing, give nothing back to the world. That was what I feared. But I said, okay, I'm going to experiment with it. If that's where I do wind up, I can always switch back. And I have to say it was amazing how things changed. Far from blocking me from growth, I actually experienced a deeper level of honesty, of authenticity, of trying my best. And I want to give you some, for instance, examples because it's not exactly intuitive. So as I started being more self loving, if you will, what I realized is that there are certainly scenarios in which I don't do that approach thing that we discussed earlier. Earlier. Now to give myself credit, I do it probably more than 99.99% of people on the planet. I'm very outgoing, I'm very friendly. When I see someone that I'm interested in, I oftentimes do that, but there are certainly times when I don't. And what I realized is that because I pin my self esteem and I ride on that of doing what I know I should when I don't do it, which is inevitable, I sometimes hide the reason from myself. So for instance, I was in the gym, Sam Harris, who, who is a guy, if you don't know him, he's an intellectual, I look up to him, was walking down the stairs and rather than say anything, hey Sam, I like your book, hey Sam, I've got this channel, would you like to participate? Anything. Hey, I kept quiet and as I did that I kind of just justified it in my head which is, you know, I'm not a super fan of his and he is busy, he's got his headphones in or whatever, like didn't want to do it. As I came back to a place of self love, what I first realized was one, in that moment, of course if I was in a self loving place, I would have just said hey man, totally random, know you're busy, I love your book, it's amazing. And let him go on with his day. Or maybe I would have said, by the way, I have this channel, we're doing a breakdown, would you like to participate? Who knows? But I would have been more authentic and more honest and that happens in many other situations. Another thing that I noticed about myself as I started this self love that didn't occur to me when I was just on this level of self esteem is that I have pervasive validation seeking behaviors. And they're subtle, but they're there. So for instance, I noticed I was out in a public place, I was talking, cracking jokes and I'll perhaps crack a joke with a dark sense of humor. And some of the people will laugh, but there'll be one person who doesn't. And what I've noticed as I come from a place of self love and self acceptance is that I have a tendency to focus on that person rather than the other people who are laughing, meaning that I will spend more time almost trying to win that person over to show them that, that I'm a good guy rather than just hanging out with the people that I click with and I enjoy with that, like my sense of humor. And I'm not saying this person is necessarily a killjoy, but I will just be subtly drawn to them so that the people in the room can have a high opinion of me. And this didn't occur to me. This is important at the level of self esteem. And I think the reason is because I pinned my self esteem on authenticity and honesty when there was little breaches of that I could correct them. But this is a pervasive big breach that invades and creeps into so many of my interactions in tiny little ways. And to accept that, that on a fundamental level there's an inauthenticity would crush my self esteem that is not living up to my value. But when I come from a place of self love and self acceptance instead, I'm able to see that. And now I can adjust and I see it again. I've been dating more and one of the things that I notice is I have a tendency to feel guilty when the date doesn't go well. And I feel this tendency to force a second date so that that other person I don't know feels good or whatever rather than simply saying not a match. Nothing wrong with them, nothing wrong with me. Let's move on and not waste any more of either of our time. There's this sense of guilt in there. And again, that's not authentic. So I didn't, I think, address it from a level of self esteem. I tell you these examples to say that I thought that coming from a place of self love was going to lead to stultified growth. And it couldn't be more the opposite. I have felt more myself, more honest, more authentic, more like I'm trying my honest best from this place of self love than from this place of as long as I live up to my values. Now let me be clear. Self esteem is awesome. Absolutely have values and principles and things that are important to you. Right. I needed that faith in order to drive to those things. So I could clarify that yes, authenticity does matter to me. Confidence, know your strategies Right. It's cool to have domain level confidence. What I'm suggesting is that you implement at the base of all of this, this level of bedrock self love, which is unconditional for no reason at all. I don't care how badly you fail, I don't care if you don't try. That level of self love will not only make you just feel nice, it will actually push you to be your best self in ways that are truly and have been, for me, mind boggling. Now, this video is already getting long. I want to give you things that you can do to begin to implement this. So I have two recommendations and one announcement. The first is to say that there are two audiobooks I want to recommend courtesy of our sponsor, Audible, who sponsored this video. Those are Love Yourself like youe Life Depends on It by Naval Ravikant and Six Pillars of Self Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon. And if you've not read either of them, I will tell you a bit about them in just a second. But you can access them via Audible if you sign up with our link below, which is audible.com Charisma. With that, you get a free 30 day trial and you can choose to listen to one of those audiobooks for free if this is your first time signing up. Audible also has an unbeatable selection of audiobooks and it makes it super easy to have more books in your life, which I think is incredibly important. It's especially nice because it's if you have a commute to work where you're driving and you're in public transportation, you can still feed your brain with these really good gems. So Naval Ravikant's book, excellent primer for self love. Nathaniel Brandon's Six Pillars of Self Esteem, even though it has self esteem in the title, I think is closer to it borders on self love, especially the parts about self acceptance and self consciousness. And those have fantastic exercises for cultivating this and developing it inside of you. So if you want to sign up for Audible, you'll get access to a huge, huge, huge library of audiobooks and, and you get that free one with a 30 day trial. So I highly, highly recommend checking out one of those too. In addition, this is the announcement. I've been working probably for the last year nearly and a half on a course called Emotional Mastery. I am super excited for it and I'm going to launch it next week. And it really does deal in part with this concept of self love. It's a tough course to describe because really, in the same way that I didn't see these issues prior to doing these exercises. That's kind of what the course is about. There's things in our life that we don't necessarily recognize are holding us back, and when we do see them, it's shocking. They've been there all along, but they surprise us. And when we remove them, there's a level of happiness and joy and freedom and achievement that flows from that that is just. It was tough to conceive of beforehand, so that's really as difficult as it describes what the course is about. If you're interested in it and want to know more, you can sign up for our email list where we'll be releasing that course next week. So I hope that you have found this video interesting. Let me know. This is the kind of stuff that I've been thinking a lot about lately. And of course, if you like this video, subscribe to the channel. We're going to have a new breakdown coming out on Thursday and then some more in this vein probably next Monday. So I hope you like this and I'll see you in the next one.