It’s About The Feeling

Day 124

“What’s pretty clear is we don’t get healthy self-esteem from constantly telling ourselves how great we are, or even from other people telling us how great we are. It turns out that we feel better about ourselves when we behave in ways that we find worthy of our own respect”

– Gretchen Rubin

I came across the above quote today, and it got me thinking about what really does affect change at a deeper level. What really makes us happy when we’re not feeling good about ourselves? According to Gretchen Rubin, we can make ourselves feel better by helping other people, surmounting a fear, exercising, making something by hand, and the like.

When you do things that match with your definition of respectable behavior, I agree, it does make you feel better, if you’re having a bad day, but I’m not sure that it’s enough to raise your self-esteem.

Let’s face it, if you’re suffering from low self-esteem, and someone tells you to “bake a loaf of bread, it’ll make you feel better“, you’d think they were off their rocker. The only way that baking a loaf of bread will lift your self-esteem is if it’s the loaf to end all loaves, and God Himself comes down to break bread with you.

We know that these activities alone won’t make you feel good about yourself if you don’t already feel good about yourself, so what’s the key to a healthy self-esteem?

For me, if I’m feeling worthless and unloved, going for a run isn’t going to make me feel like a rockstar, and neither is facing a fear, unless it triggers a memory of a time when I did feel good about myself.

Ding ding ding.

“You really have to look inside yourself and find your own inner strength, and say, I’m proud of what I am and who I am, and I’m just going to be myself.”

– Mariah Carey

One of my key messages and beliefs is that you must love and believe in yourself in order to attract any kind of abundance in your life because as long as you don’t feel good about you, it will affect every area of your life and create a sense of lack. You can go back to the rules to read about how to clear limiting beliefs that no longer work for you, and reprogram your subconscious with new beliefs that serve you better.

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Blog Beats: What A Feeling by Irene Cara

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What’s at the heart of these activities is that they make you to focus on your own goodness, and whatever you focus on is what you attract. Doing things that you deem worthy of respect – positive things, bring feelings and memories of when you did have a healthy self-esteem to the fore. They remind you of a happier time when you did feel good about yourself. Those memories make you feel better and in turn, attract good vibes.

That’s the key to developing a healthy self-esteem – rediscovering your own greatness. Go within and find a better version of you. Either one from the past or one that you imagine yourself to be in the future.

It’s not the endorphins from the run, or the sugar high from the bread that make the difference, it’s the feeling of happiness that attracts more feelings of happiness and positivity into your consciousness until your negative feelings and self-doubt are no longer your focus.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!