Summary

Low self esteem at the core comes from not knowing who you are.
- Let’s say you’re trying to buy a new jacket. You don’t know if yellow or green is better, so you ask your friend. She says green, so you bought the green one.
  - The small message you are saying is - I don’t know who I want to be, can you decide for me? So you ask your friend. Then your friend decides who you are for you.
  - This is on a small scale. You don’t have to be adamant about every single small decisions, but you can’t let people around you decide the important parts of who you are.
- Giving up your choice is to let others decide you for you. - Make sure you know your own preference and what you value. Once you know what you want you can make decisions for yourself. Remember your decisions may not be right or better than other people’s, but it is just as valuable. Learn to voice your thoughts, because you deserve to be heard.
Correctly prioritizing yourself raises your self esteem.
- At times, we don’t believe we deserve a place in life, which ruins our self-esteem. - This sounds odd. How are we not prioritizing ourselves? Yes it is important to be considerate and sacrificial to the ones we love and want to take care of, but we have to make sure that our life isn’t what THEY want our lives to be. Sometimes we have friends that want the best for us, but they are a bit too pushy. Their suggestions start to more priority than our own decisions! That should not happen. You should always be the one with the last say for your life.
  - No, we are not the king of the world, but we are normal people with great potential.
- Learn to prioritize your most important interests before others, because you can’t take care of others without taking care of yourself first. - If we want to help our friends and family, the best thing to do is actually prioritizing yourself. When we prioritize ourselves, we are growing our ability to help people. If I learned how to bake an amazing apple pie, I can share and teach that to all my friends. If I know how to build my own chair, I can teach people how to save money on their furniture. However, all these things can ONLY happen if we prioritize ourselves and grow. The reverse is also true. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we don’t have a lot of ability to help others. It also lowers our self-esteem.
Low self-esteem comes from not knowing your values.
- When we don’t know our principles, other people make our decisions using their principles. - We all have opinions. If you don’t have one, someone will probably give you theirs.
- We are most vulnerable when our self esteem rises and falls on other people’s decision. - When our self-esteem rests on how other people sees us, they have us on handcuffs. If we didn’t something they like, they can plummet our self-worth in a snap. This is the place to avoid at all cost.
Media might not have your best interest in mind.
- Especially body image, media tries to lower your self-esteem, so you feel like you need their products to be whole again. - Every commercial is trying to sell us something. Sometimes it’s funny commercials, but other times it’s things that make us feel insecure about ourselves. Like our body won’t look amazing without that treadmill or we love to go on that vacation but not having the budget. Be aware that the media is trying to sell us something, so we have to make sure we know what we want and don’t want. Don’t buy things out of feeling insecurity.
- When you are not careful with what you are absorbing, you will start to take in media’s message.