Look inside

The image we build on ourselves is subjective and based more on the opinions or judgments of others than on who we really are. What our family has told us about our behavior, the school performance that teachers reflected to us, or bad couple experiences create something that can move far away from reality. Therefore, this construction will also be related to self-esteem, damaging it and creating negative relationships with others and with ourselves.

One of the pillars that must work on self-esteem is self-knowledge. Without it, self-esteem will always depend on external valuation and can oscillate as much as our relationships and experience oscillate.

The following guidelines are intended for us to work on self-awareness:

1. Strengths

Personal strengths are a set of 24 skills we all have, differing in the degree to which they appear in each. Creativity, one of these 24 strengths, can be very present in one person’s life, but very absent in the life of another. Knowing these strengths helps us fit them into our normal lives and empower certain aspects. They can be applied at work or in the family, but also with the partner or with oneself.

2. Emotions

Each person lives with a series of emotions more present than others. This is due to a very common poor regulation on a social level, although not so much in children. For example, the rage that appears on multiple occasions can be only real in a few situations, and in others where sadness or fear should appear, such rage continues to appear. Knowing which ones appear most often and which are absent helps us to strike a better balance.

3. Values

Values are the guide that defines our lives, but not only individually, as there are personal, family, social, even national values. And in that great dimension we can find that our own values do not fit with those of our friends or those of general society. Instead of listening to each other, we tried to fit in. We place as something necessary to start a family or have a job when our values could go more towards cooperation or life without a partner. Knowing our values allows us to listen to our real needs and align with them.

Our lives and relationships are based on many areas that can be very differentiated. However, in all these areas we find the common denominator of ourselves and our self-esteem, based on the knowledge of our emotions, our values or our strengths, and knowing that they are there, what they are and how to enhance it will help us to be better with ourselves