I have not.

Recently, a few of my clients are experiencing challenges in life due to their past experiences. That got me reflect on my past experiences. Has any of my past experience held me back?

I was betrayed by my best friend in my childhood days. I must admit that I wasn’t the lovable kid that parents like to have. I caused lots of heartache to my parents. I did all sorts of unethical and illegal activities that got myself into trouble.

One of those were shoplifting. At 11 years old, my friend and I decided to take a toy from our regular shopping mall, and we were successful. After that one time, I stopped that act completely. But my friend continued his adventure. Sure enough, he was caught. His parents was informed.

To reduce his caning, he told his parents that I was the one who taught him. I was punished because of that. Not that I denied my mistakes, but I was angry because this friend mentioned my name for his own benefit.

This experience created an extreme behaviour about me. I won’t let anyone who play punk with me off. I will always attack instead of hiding at a corner to sulk. I will attack first, fast and furious to ensure the person is “dead” before he has a chance to attack me.

On the other hand, this experience also causes me to be a loyal friend. I won’t make a decision that is going to hurt a friend. I will forgo an opportunity if I know that my friend is going to feel unhappy. Or I will clear it up with this friend if I know that I got to make the unfavourable decision.

The effect is that I do not forgive those who betrayed me easily. Therefore, I may be holding too much baggages that slowed me down.

Are you also holding too much of your past that slow you down?

What do you do when you are aware that your past is affecting your current behaviour?

You can make a conscious effort to shift it. You can make a decision to let go of it completely. Sometimes, some past experiences can be let go when you decide. There isn’t any struggle to let go, this is the perfect and ideal scenario.

But what about the times when letting go is not that easy. If that’s the case, you got to raise your antenna to detect any behaviour that is being affected by the past. Once detected, you are able to choose a different way of dealing with it.

For example, I will attack first, fast and furious automatically. By noticing that I’m doing it again because of my childhood experience, I have the power to choose not to attack. At the same time, I also have the power to choose to forgive. My unforgiving stems from the past, knowing that I do not like to be held ransom by my past, I get to choose.

Having the ability to choose, resume power back to you. You no longer are driven by your past but by your choice. With this choice, you break free from the shackle of your past.

So, which past are you still holding onto?

The post Haunted By The Past appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

After serving my National Service in Dec 1999, I was offered a job in a non-profit organization. Without second thought, I happily took it up. I felt great to get a job since I didn’t have to worry about the future anymore with a job.

This was the start of a life without vitality.

In actual fact, I didn’t have a plan then, I didn’t know what I want in life, I didn’t have a direction to move on. So, I grabbed whatever that came along, thinking that this was the future. not knowing that this was not the future. I was wrong about not worrying about the future because what was coming up was worth worrying about.

Life was just going through motion. No goals, no plans, no direction. There wasn’t any 1 year plan or 3 years plan. How can you not be worried if you don’t have a plan, goal and direction?

Even taking up a part time diploma course seems like a natural thing to do. I took it up because everyone else was taking up a course. The intention was to get the certificate, who cares about learning. At the same time, I wasn’t extremely passionate about the job. It’s just a job. I was following what others wanted me to do, what the society expect me to achieve. And this is worrying.

In 2002, situation started to shift. I was exposed to books on personal development, business and investment. I noticed that I was passive about my life. From school days to national service to the first job, I allowed circumstances to happen to me. I wasn’t in control of my life.

I was awaken from my dream. Just like the movie Matrix, I took the red pill and was shown the other side of the world. I was shown that life is not just about job, pay raise and certificates. I was shown that life is about purpose, passion, contribution to humanity, being authentic, experiential, breaking through limitation, challenging status quo etc.

Life is more than what I thought it should be. Life is not what the school has taught me or what my parents have told me. Study hard, work hard is not life. Life is more than that.

I learn that I can create the kind of life I desire. I don’t have to allow circumstances or environment to push me around. I don’t have to wait for things to happen, I can make things happen.

Life started shifting since then. The days of me being a walking dead has past. Life is no longer miserable. Life turns into an adventure, full of energy, passion and purpose.

Fast forward to 2013, Many examples of the “old” me are around. They are not sure of what they want in life. A stable job is life to them. They don’t have a 3 years plan, 1 year plan or even a 3 months plan. They are waiting for life to happen to them, just like my experience in 2000.

Only a few will have a goal. But even that goal is vague with no clarity or dateline. The usual thought is when the opportunity arrive for them to achieve that goal, they will take it. Otherwise, they will remain where they are. They won’t have the drive to pursue what their goal.

Three reasons how come people allow life to happen to them, which also cause them to sell their dreams. 

• School didn’t teach us to manage our life. School taught us to listen to authority, to have someone else take care of our life.
• It’s easier to have someone else manage our life for us.
• Without a goal, there won’t be pursuing, therefore no disappointment.

These three reasons stop them in designing and living the kind of life they want. They are trapped in a world full of false expectation. They are stuck in an environment where they are going after things that they don’t want, yet unable to get out of there.

To get out of that environment, all you have to shift is to believe that you can design and create exactly the kind of life you want. All you need to do is to decide to believe and act on it.

I am one of those who turn from not knowing to taking charge. Beside me, there are many others out there who believe in taking charge of their outcome and not allowing life to happen to them. You can be one of them too. Start believing it today!

The post When I Wait For Things To Happen appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

For the past 4 weekends, I was either engaged in coaching or training. If I was not doing any of those, then I was involved in another interesting project.

For the past 4 weeks, beside training and coaching, I had to submit proposals, meetings for new projects, creating new training games, new products, research. These are only the business part of my life.

The result of the busy-ness, I neglected my beautiful wife. Either I reached home later than usual or I was engaged in trainings on weekends. At the same time, I neglected myself too. Time is scarce that I didn’t have enough time for myself. I didn’t have time to reflect.

Finally, I managed to have 2 days of rest last weekend. Engaging myself with Playstation 3, reading book that I borrowed from the library and spending time with myself. Most importantly, I could hang out with my wife.

It was really a good break on last weekend to rejuvenate myself. When I look at my calendar, I’m going to get busy very soon again. I am feeling that my life is full of zest and purpose. This is the life that I choose to live.

The post A Very Busy Three Weeks appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

This is the last part of this series. We’ve gone through the internal work of building self esteem, then the external work of setting up goals, having plans and creating self-discipline. After putting in effort to build your self esteem, we are moving into a new and last area. Building your self esteem through taking care of your well being.

Not many people are taking care of themselves. Most people usually neglect their well being because we are trained to take care of others very well, but not ourselves. We tends to provide the best for our children, take good care of elderly parents at home and support our friends whenever possible. But when it come to ourselves, we leave till the last. We’ll eat the leftovers if there is any left. Others always come before us.

Unfortunately placing others before self is not good for your self esteem. By doing so, you are sacrificing yourself for others. There’s actually nothing wrong with it, but if it’s an automatic behaviour, you will suffer.

Start treating yourself well, especially after you completed a task, achieve your milestones or putting in effort.

Treating yourself well is different from celebration. Both seems the same but they are not. Celebration is pampering yourself after a job well done. Whereas treating yourself well is the small things that you do to take care of your well being.

The seven well being areas that you can look at:

1. Health
2. Emotion
3. Spiritual
4. Relationship
5. Recreation
6. Personal Growth
7. Finance

Those with low self esteem tends to neglect their well being. When your well being is not taken care, how would you feel good?

To take care of your well being, have activities that take care of your seven well being areas.

You could start practicing yoga for 20 minutes a day to take care of your health area. Or meditate for 5 minutes a day to take care of your spiritual aspect. Your life will start to change when you take care of your well being. Completing these simple activities serves as an accomplishment which helps build yourself, and at the same time you are taking care of your well being.

Generate at least three activities in each of the seven well being areas. So it may look something like this:

Health

• 10 minutes yoga
• Healthy diet
• Drink 2 litres of water

Emotion

• Acknowledge my emotion
• Expressing my emotion
• Watch funny video

Spiritual

• Meditate 5 minutes a day
• Being aware and appreciate surrounding
• Pray

Relationship

• Connect with love ones
• Catching up with friends
• Conversation with parents

Recreation

• Sing
• Explore new hobby
• Draw

Personal Growth

• Read
• Attend seminar
• Learn from Mentor

Finance

• Invest
• Save 10% more
• Reduce debt

From your well being check list, select 5 activities each day. Probably there will be repeated activities, and that’s alright. The activities doesn’t have to be tedious. Like drinking 2 litres of water doesn’t take lot of time.

Doing this correctly, you will be taking care of all seven areas of your well being daily. Compound it daily, can you imagine the level of self esteem you can build for yourself?

Go ahead to create your Well Being Daily Check List. Practice and follow your list for 30 days. After 30 days, check-in with your feeling. How do you feel after following your well being list for 30 days?

Last thing I like to leave you with to build your self esteem before we end this series. Start loving yourself more.

Do you ever felt the feeling of love? Yes, that feeling that you project onto others when you love them. The love for parents, spouse, children and friends. How about projecting this same love to yourself? Say loving things to yourself as if you are saying to your love ones.

We tends to love everyone except ourselves. We say loving things, write loving notes to others but never to ourselves. How about start doing that. Look at the mirror, and say “I love you.”

We have to be filled with love before we can fully love another. Fill yourself with love by start taking care of your well being. Your love will build self esteem in speed because love is the most powerful force in this world.

The post How Do You Build Self Esteem – Part 7/7 appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

The challenge after setting goals is to follow up on an action plan. The difficult part is to act on your goals. If it’s easy, many would have achieved their goals. Building self esteem involves determination, hard work and short-term discomfort. There is no magic wand or magic pill, just pure grit.

To build self esteem is like playing lego, putting the pieces together to form your creative work. Your self esteem is built upon fitting the smaller pieces together, eventually forming the confident you.

To achieve your goals much faster, which eventually helps your self esteem, is to work on your self-discipline. Gaining better health requires self-discipline. You eat healthily, and exercise regularly to achieve a better health. A certain degree of self-discipline is required to maintain a healthy habit of at least 30 days.

Building self esteem can’t be left to chance. You have to plan for it, it has to be intentional. That’s why you set goals and achieve them. Setting goals means you have to make it happen. You don’t leave it to chances.

One great thing about becoming more self-discipline is that you will feel better. And when you feel better, what will improve? YES, your self esteem will improve.

Whenever I take another hours to complete one more task instead of watching drama, I feel a sense of achievement. Not because I completed a task, more so because I defeated the demon in me. Feel like double shot of steroid to my self esteem.

Baby Step
Building self esteem and changing habits is a long process. If you are ready, you can take on a drastic change. Like from zero exercise routine to three times a week or from watching soap opera nightly to cutting it totally. This could be a shock to your mind which raise its resistant level.

If you are not ready to have such a drastic change, you can make the change gradually. Exercise once a week instead of pushing to three times a week too fast. Or cut down one night of soap opera instead of cutting all nights.

Let say you are going after a 3-months goal, and you have never really set anything big for yourself. You can choose to take it slow.

Instead of putting in 4 hours a day to work on your goal, put in 30 minute in the beginning. Gradually increase the time allocated to this goal weekly. Allow your mind to get use to the change. Shocking your mind can create burn out that is not good for self esteem.

Take baby step to build your self esteem. It’s a long process, so build your foundation.

Record the Change
After the baby step, it’s time to build sustainability. No point being self-discipline for a week, then fizzle off. Maintaining that self-discipline is crucial to build your self esteem. This step can maintain your self-discipline, ensure that you are on course.

You will see results by taking baby steps. You will experience changes by taking action. Record these changes down. Jot it down in a notebook or save it in a smartphone. This serves as a motivator when the chips are down.

The changes can look something like this.

10 May 2013 — Jogging — 2km
12 May 2013 — Jogging — 2.2km
14 May 2013 — Jogging — 2.3km

Or

27 Mar 2013 — Reading/exploring business opportunities — Decide on a business
2 Apr 2013 —– Call up entrepreneurs in the same field  —– Found a mentor
4 Apr 2013 —– Visited ACRA ————————————– Register a business

These changes can serve as your small wins as well. Get ready to celebrate.

Remind It’s Worth Doing
Your little voice will appear once in a while to persuade you to stop. It will generate all sort of reasons why you shouldn’t continue on this track.

Remind yourself, this is for the better future, and a better you. Maintain self-discipline is not easy, but the long term vision is to build healthy self esteem. In the process, achieving your goals as well.

Constantly remind yourself that it is all worth it.

Rewards
Reward yourself for the work well done. Reward yourself for the progressive improvement. Reward yourself for your effort. Many people do not reward themselves for doing a good job. They will reward others but never themselves.

Learn to reward yourself. Telling yourself you have done a good job builds a healthy self esteem.

This week, your exercise is already listed up there.

1. Take baby step.
2. Record the change.
3. Remind yourself.
4. Reward yourself.

Read the last post of this series. .

The post How Do You Build Self Esteem – Part 6/7 appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

In this part 5 of How Do You Build Self Esteem, we are getting down to real action. No more inner work, just real work to build your self esteem muscles.

Human being are goal-oriented. Most of us are always going after something, wanting to achieve something. Goals get us driven and gave us a purpose. Goals don’t have to be huge. A simple exercise routine can be a goal. Or attending a new cooking workshop can be a goal.

Setting goals gets you into the process of doing-ness and achievement, which is good in building self esteem. You’ll find many ways to build self esteem online but nothing beats getting into a progressive action to achieve what you set out to do. Seriously, nothing beats achieving your goals.

Those with low self esteem may face a challenge in setting goals due to their pessimistic nature. Negative thoughts will attack from all angles to ensure that they won’t set the goals. Thoughts like these.

“Don’t have to set goals. I won’t achieve it.”
“Don’t waste time. This is just a myth.”
“I am going to be disappointed again.”
“I never achieve my goals.”
“This is too hard.”

These thoughts becomes a vicious cycle in causing lower and lower self esteem. The attack of your negative thoughts stops you from setting goals, thus stop achieving. As a result, your self esteem building process comes to a halt. The solution is to break away from listening to your negative thoughts.

Following your negative thoughts is a habit. If you have been listening to your negative voice, it’s natural that you will sway to that side. Like brushing your teeth when you wake up in the morning, you don’t think about it. You unconsciously walked to the bathroom to brush your teeth, right?

Because of the habit, you listen to your negative thoughts unconsciously without filtering. When this happen, your self esteem basically spiral downwards to hell. To get out of hell requires much effort. Setting goals and achieving them requires much effort, but at the same time you get to build your self esteem step by step.

Breaking Away From Negative Thoughts

Negative thoughts came about because you think. You exercise your mind to think. Unfortunately your mind has a habit of swaying to the negative. Since thinking is the culprit, kill it. Not literally killing your mind, but stop thinking.

Train yourself to get into action more often. The more you think, the more you will be discouraged to do it by your negative thoughts.

I used to have negative thoughts when I have to do sales call.

“He may not be free to pick up my call.”
“She’s may be unfriendly.”
“Most likely he won’t buy.”

So I have a result, a bad result.

Gradually, I trained myself to pick up the phone once I received a lead. My negative thoughts didn’t have an opportunity to speak. By the time, it had the opportunity to speak, I’ve completed the calls, and create good results. I felt good, self esteem raised.

Set your goals. Make plans to achieve it.You can find a lot more details about goal setting and execution in my ebook, Dreams To Reality.

Note that you don’t have to set huge goals. It can be as simple as enrolling yourself into a new course. Have a goal, make a plan, take action, and you achieve your first goal. You can gradually increase the intensity of the goals. Start from some simple goals to build some confidence in yourself.

When the goal get intensify, you will need a better planning tool, and execution method. Get the tools here. (A small fee is required)

This week exercise is to set your goals, plan how to achieve it. This can be a tedious one, depending how in-depth your planning goes.

When I begin planning two of my goals this year, I took about 2 hours to generate a big plan for both goals. Right now I take about 30 mins each week to review, adjust and plan the details. You can probably imagine how detail my plan goes.

The more detail your plan is, the easier to attain it.

Clarity Leads To Power 

Go to Part 6.

The post How Do You Build Self Esteem – Part 5/7 appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

I had friends who did some terrible things to hurt me in the past. I couldn’t forgive them even though it was the right thing to do, I just couldn’t do it. My hair behind my neck would stand upon hearing their names. The anger would start boiling in me when someone mentioned their names.

When I saw them in any gathering, I wouldn’t be bother to speak to them. When they attempted to open any conversation with me, my response would always be a one word answer.

On 15 Apr 2013, while I was reflecting my role as a Coach, something bothered me. I wasn’t walking the talk in this area of my life. I didn’t have closure with two person in my life. I was still holding on to the hurt they brought to me. During coaching sessions, I’ll ask my clients to clear up their emotional stuff, to let go of any baggages with people. Yet I was holding to baggages

Knowing that I have to set an example and earning my right, I made a decision to let go of the baggages. Or in coaching term, it’s called doing a completion. There are many ways to do completion, and I choose the toughest one. That is to meet them in person to share my feelings with them, and finally, tell them that I am complete, and I don’t hold anything against them anymore.

I declared that I’ve completed with these two friends over a week. We are friends again. My heart is filled with love with the gap created by letting go. Now I can face them with all my heart and love when we meet again.

I’m uncertain if having these completions affect my business in anyway but I do see business results improving after letting go of the baggages. I can’t be certain if it’s a direct effect, but I can be certain that I feel much lighter.

Whenever I let go, I move faster. An article about me letting go of the lousy me.

My point in this post is:

So do you have anything you need to let go in your life?
Do you have anything to complete with anyone?
Is it time to do a completion with them?

The post The Day I Had Closure With Two Enemies appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

In this part 4, we will still be focusing on your inner work. We will be discussing about you being comfortable with yourself.

If you have been haunted by the low self esteem demon for a long time, you probably have forgotten who you really are. Low self esteem can lead you to focus so much on your limitations, mistakes and faults that you may be neglecting yourself completely.

Feeling bad about yourself leads you to spend the majority of your time comparing yourself with others and wanting to be more like them. You may compare yourself with your neighbours, siblings, celebrities, athletics, entrepreneurs, pastors, speakers, etc. In the process, you lost yourself. You forgot who you are, what’s your likes and dislikes.

I wanted to be like Ryan Giggs, a football speed master, when I was young. Then I wanted to be like Robert Kiyosaki who got wealthy by teaching financial intelligence. In the end, I modeled every mentor whom I followed. I modeled their way of speaking on stage, movements, tonality, gestures.

A person with a healthy self esteem is comfortable being himself. He is not concern about being someone else or following any celebrities. He may even be a trend setter. A person with a healthy self esteem will never feel awkward wearing shorts and flip flop to the Central Business District.

I once wore bermudas and sandals to our top shopping area, Orchard Road. This female friend asked how come I dressed so shabbily in a “high class” place. I pointed to her a Caucasian who was about 50 meters away from us, and ask her, “How come when Caucasian dressed the same way as I do, you girls never comment about their dressing, instead you girls comment that they are so cool.”

How to be comfortable with yourself?

First know yourself or remember yourself. Give yourself this chance of rediscovering you. Stand in front of the mirror, and ask yourself these questions.

• Which are my favourite TV or radio programs?
• What makes me laugh or cry?
• What do I day dream about?
• What are some of my favourite things?
• What words would I use to describe myself to someone I’ve never met?
• What movies do I like? Why?
• What music do I enjoy?
• If money is not a problem, what would you spend on?
• What is your favourite food?
• What will you not eat?
• What kind of person turns you off?

Imagine you were being interviewed on TV. How would you describe yourself? What would you say in front of the camera for two minutes?

These questions bring you closer to yourself. This may be an opportunity to get connected with yourself again, so that you can rediscover who you are.

From your answers and your “TV interview” script, check in with yourself again.

• Are you doing things that you dislike because it’s not your choice? If yes, how come you continue doing them?
• Are you not doing things that you like? If yes, how come you are not doing the things that you like?
• Are you being forced to do things that you dislike? If yes, how come you allow this to be force on you?
• Are you being bullied? If yes, how come you didn’t speak up?

The big question is: When will you finally decide to be yourself?

The whole process brings you to an awareness where you can begin to build yourself up.

Change Begins From Having An Awareness

We’ve come to the end of part 4.

Just like the previous three parts, there will be an exercise at the end. The exercise for part 4 is to laugh at yourself.

Think of three embarrassing situations that you will never tell others. Instead feeling embarrass, laugh at yourself. Laugh the situation off. Now share these three events with friends and family. Share it with close friends, share it with not so close friends.

I assure you that a breakthrough lies after this exercise.

I had my breakthrough when I shared my embarrassing moment. After sharing that event, I stop being concern of how other see me. So let me begin.

I stripped to my underwear at a hotel pool once thinking that I was wearing my swim wear. In the past, I would never share this experience.

The ability to laugh at myself build my self esteem very fast. Eventually, I became very comfortable in my own skin, not concern too much about other’s perception. Go get this exercise done. Looking forward to hear your stories and breakthroughs.

Continue to Part 5.

The post How Do You Build Self Esteem – Part 4/7 appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

I did what most sales person will do, find out what they wanted and the constrains in budget that they faced. Understanding their requirements, at least I thought I understood, I got my proposal ready on the day of our first meeting.

Little did I know this meeting would turn out to be a nightmare.

I walked into the meeting room full of confident, preparing to have a great meeting and clinching the contract. But my confident was crashed after 15 minutes with the 3-person panel.

In that 15 minutes, my proposal was thrown out. The next 10 minutes, every new ideas was objected. Obviously, we were not on the same page.

I felt extremely awkward. Thousand of thoughts were flying through my mind. They must be thinking what a lousy trainer I am. Been a while since I last felt this screwed up.

To salvage the situation, I got the panel to talk about their ideal training.

Person A: I want them to learn practical applications, not so much about mindset.
Person B: I want to have an activity that teaches them everything.
Person C: With the practical applications, they will be motivated. We need them to be motivated.

From their sharing, it became obvious why the meeting crashed. We had different expectation about training terms.

Still, they were kind enough to have me prepare another proposal in the next two days.

Walking out of the meeting room, my heart sank. Actually I could have discovered all this before the meeting to avoid the embarrassment, but I didn’t do enough. There’s nothing else I can do now, instead of beating myself, I had to act. But, I couldn’t do it.

I struggled to generate a new proposal. My heart was in chaos. I didn’t like this feeling. When my heart felt this way in the past, terrible things happened.

For four hours, I struggled. Worried that this feeling might be the fear of taking up this challenge or ego, I asked myself over and over again to ensure that it wasn’t fear. Otherwise, I have to deal with this fear first.  Though I trusted my heart, I couldn’t just turn down this deal just based on the heart. There are too many benefits that could be reaped from this deal.

I analysed again on their expectation, our differences and my style. Finally, at 8:40pm on the same day, I contacted the person-in-charge to officially turned down the deal.

Right after that, I felt completely lighten, relieved.

Lessons to be learned from this event.

• It’s ok to turned down deals. I’ve turned deals before but this was a struggle because of the size of the prospect. Be fair to the prospect and yourself. Sometimes, saying NO is better than saying yes.
• You’ll never know what is going to happen. After turning down this deal, three more opportunities showed up. Letting go sometimes is a good thing.

I’m still alive and kicking after the event. Just thought of putting this down to share the lessons I learned.

The post I Felt Like A Loser With This Deal appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.

We are in Part 3 of How Do You Build Self Esteem. In part 2, you were invited to list down your little achievements, have you completed it? If you have not, do it before you read on. I really would like to boost your self esteem. Every exercise listed in this series is to achieve this.

In Part 3, we move into the inner self to improve your self esteem. We are focusing on giving up some unsupportive beliefs. You want to strengthened your inner self before reinforcing it with an outer armour. You may have to give up certain beliefs that are not supporting your self esteem in this process.

Give Up On Rating
Seen an evaluation form? Seen the rating questions or scale on the form?

• How is the food? Rate 1 – 10
• How is the service? Terrible…Poor…Average…Good…Excellent

While businesses, organizations rate their staff to improve their organizations, we rate ourselves for other reasons. Do you realized that most invalidate themselves after rating their own performance?

• “I scored a 4 in appearance, I’m such an ugly loser.”
• “I am very poor in this, I am so useless.”

This kind of rating creates two kinds of effects. Opinion of yourself will be moving up or down depending of your rating of yourself. Let’s say you completed a task, you’ll go “Good job, you are awesome.” The next day, you lose a customer, you’ll go “What a screw up I am!”

Your self esteem becomes more volatile than the stock market chart. You’ll never be able to build a healthy self esteem. From this alone, did you notice that you are only accepting the so called “good” things about you? You build your self esteem base on the nice things about you or happened to you. Do you see that this is extremely unhealthy?

Then there another kind of scenario. Let’s say you are an achiever. You achieve high ratings in life. And high rating is all you care about. At first glance, others may perceive your healthy self esteem. But in actual fact, your self esteem comes from decorations(branded goods, luxury cars) and achievements. But really, deep inside you have a huge sense of fear. The fear of being imperfect, fear of making mistakes, fear of being expose that you are imperfect.

This is a fake sense of self esteem because you attached your identity to the decorations and achievements. A healthy self esteem won’t need external possessions to define who they are. A healthy self esteem allows you to accept both your strength and weakness. A healthy self esteem allows imperfection.

Use the three questions below to check the healthiness of your self esteem.

1. Are you constantly wanting to show your best in front of others?
2. Are you afraid that your imperfection will be exposed?
3. Do you have the fear of making mistakes?

The second effect of this kind of universal rating is a self sabotaging process. You basically rate your whole self base on one or two factors, this is a totally inaccurate way of assessing yourself.

You are too complex and multidimensional to be rated base on one or two factors. The factors listed below define who you are, you are not defined by just one or two factors.

Skills, appearance, fitness, health, ideas, thoughts, actions, integrity, character, strength, hobbies, pleasure, talents, habits, education, potential, desires, goals, achievements, weaknesses, failures, emotions, abilities, roles, morals, values, ethics, plans.

However, people usually rate themselves base on one or two factors out of that whole list. How can this be an accurate assessment?

Comment The Factual
If you really would like to rate yourself, do it with noticing the fact only. Do it without any meaning and interpretation.

Without interpretation sounds like this. “I weigh 120kg. I have to lose some weights to be healthy.”

With your interpretation sounds like this. “I weigh 120kg. I’m such a pig.”

An extremely low self esteem person sounds like this. “I’m such a pig.” Completely taking out the factual.

Few other comments that is not factual sounds like this. “I’m ugly. I’m slow. I’m not funny. I’m not charismatic. I’m not attractive.” There is not fact in these statements. You can’t measure ugly, slow, charismatic and attractive. Judging something that can’t be measure is an interpretation. Each of us has our own definition and interpretation of attractive, slow, charismatic. And that can’t be factual.

Commenting only on the fact gets you to look at one particular area and not your whole self. Looking only at one area protects you from hurting yourself and your self esteem.

Giving up this rating game. It’s doing more harm than good. With the only exception of looking at complementing yourself for scoring 4/10, and like to improve to 6/10, then you can rate yourself. Otherwise, drop it.

Exercise 3:
List out all the skills, abilities, hobbies, things that you do daily. It can be any small ability or skills. If you love fishing, put it down. If you can sew, list it down. If you can do simple house chores, write it down.

Look at your list once you are completed. Do you know that for every item on the list, there are many millions who are unable to do what you do?

This list really helped me in building my self esteem. One of the simple abilities that I wrote down was telling jokes. I didn’t think so much of it until I examined the list closely. THen I realized not everyone can tell jokes. It takes some special ability to be able to get the listeners laughing at the jokes.

I started to look at other abilities, skills and hobbies more closely, gradually building my self esteem. Of course, this is not the only method to build my self esteem. I got myself into many different activities, which I’ll reveal in the next few posts, to build my self esteem. Building self esteem is a long process.

Be persistent, and do the exercises.

Continue to Part 4.

The post How Do You Build Self Esteem – Part 3/7 appeared first on Life Coaching In Singapore - Coaching With Joe.