I wasn’t always the confident and positive person I am now. And for most of my life I lacked a strong sense of self-worth. I had to learn to love myself, to grow my confidence and become a positive person. It was a hard road to build my self-esteem.

I used to be one of those people that scoffed at self-help books, spirituality and (I kid you not) FEELINGS. As far as I was concerned, everyone should put their feelings aside and instead do the logical and “right” thing. Stop complaining, stop judging, and simply get on with things.

Ironically this sort of thinking also made me more negative. 

I would moan for hours on end about the stupidity of others, how everything would be better if people just did what I thought the obvious thing to do was.  Logical thought should override emotions and we should think clearly and critically about life, events in our lives, our own behaviours and other people, and so approach life with a certain neutrality and objectivity, like a Vulcan in Star Trek.

I thought that “venting” about my frustrations allowed me to release them, and so I would go to the pub and vent about my job, my boss, my boyfriend, my family, the stranger on the tube that walked too slowly, or stopped at the top of the escalator instead of making room for others.  Venting was good, it allowed me to release build up pressure and “move on”.

Or so I thought!

I didn’t realise it at the time, but all that venting only accomplished to keep my mind on the problem. By giving it voice, time and energy, I also gave it life, allowed it to put down roots and grow. Making me even more angry and disillusioned with life, my career, my relationships, and the rest of the human race. My anxiety was off the charts, I struggled to relax enough to fall asleep and I drank far too much alcohol. 

I thought I was so clever, so why wasn’t I more successful? Why was it that those “stupid” people seemed to flourish, get promotions, fall in love, get married, buy fancy houses and cars?   Why did they seem so happy and I was not?

Why was life so utterly unfair?

Learning Self-Worth

Somewhere along the way my own career stalled, I became disillusioned with life, and so I set of on a quest to better myself. What is it that I’m lacking that others seem to have?

It all started with being more productive, how to spend more time doing and less time procrastinating, or watching TV.

I read countless books about that. I made lists, and charts, and excel spreadsheets. With mixed results. 

I always considered myself a fairly self-aware person. I had a good idea on what drove me, what motivated me. I would examine my own thoughts and behaviours, trying to understand why I reacted the way I did, or why I felt certain things or emotions. 

Then something great happened, someone was promoted over me at work!  It was the best thing that could have happened to me.

See, there were only 2 of us in the team and so we had the same workload and the same responsibilities, and I realised in that moment that there’s nothing the other person was doing that I wasn’t also doing, that of the other person could get promoted, then why not me? This opened my eyes and sent me on a new journey of discovery, and on the path to a new found sense of self-worth. 

I suddenly started reading self-help books like it’s the end of the world. From “How to win friends and influence people” to “You are a badass” and even “The subtle art of not giving a f*ck”.

I learned how always trying to be perfect was holding me back, to value progress over perfection, how I should “lean in”, block negative people, ask my boss for a raise, how to think like a winner, how men think versus women and how that helps them. I learned a lot. But to be honest, I also learned nothing.

Book Knowledge is not the same as Wisdom

Wisdom comes not from learning, or reading books, but from living, from trying and failing, from putting yourself out there where you can get hurt. By stuffing myself full of book learning I wasn’t really learning or achieving anything. All I did was gain more paper knowledge. None of which was really helpful unless I could also put it into practise, enriching my life and becoming happier.

And so I started to put everything I’ve learned or “realised” – that knowledge and wisdom you feel I your heart and not just in your head – into practise. 

Your Mental Health Affects Your Mind And Your Confidence, and it’s Easy to End Up with Low Self-Esteem

I’ve always been a person with a lot of anxiety, only I never knew this until I broke up with my boyfriend at the ripe age of 35 and for the first time in my life started to live alone.  It’s like there was this white noise that I never noticed until it went away, I became more peaceful and happier. My sleep improved, I started to understand how to calm my mind, and I realised how important my mental health was. 

This was before mental health was being discussed on a regular basis, before we could admit to being anything other than perfect or strong mind you. These days you read about it in the mainstream press almost every day. The British Royals talk about their own challenges; they sponsor charities and man phone lines on mental health awareness days.

But back then telling your doctor you needed help only led to such helpful advice as “change your job”, or learn how to manage your stress better. 

Mental health was this scary taboo subject that was associated with bipolar disorder or other extreme disorders that made living a normal life with a normal job impossible. The rest of us were just expected to “get on with it”, “get over it”, to “suck it up”, life isn’t fair after all and we all know it.

Becoming More Confident and Increasing My Sense of Self-Worth

But I had made a connection that had seemed to escape everyone else. I realised how much my mental state affected my physical state, how I viewed life in general and how that affected my behaviour, decisions, and relationships. 

What’s more, I realised I could control it. 

In my early thirties I started to exercise on a regular basis. I’ve always been a fairly active person, but didn’t make an effort with regular exercise. I believed in eating fairly healthy but even so my diet was atrocious and I enjoyed chocolate, a lot, and regularly. 

There came a time when I made the connection that when I didn’t exercise it could often affect my mood negatively. Now it seems obvious but that was a while ago and back then doctors gave you a pill for everything. Have high blood pressure, here take this pill for the rest of your life, type 1 diabetes, well here’s a pill to make sure it doesn’t become type 2. Diet and exercise was only prescribed by the odd doctor and even then it was to walk more and restrict calories! 

But I made a connection on how I exercised, and what I ate and how that made me feel. I have always been told I was quite moody (and I was), but when I cleaned up my diet all that moodiness went away, and I had a moment of epiphany, I realised that I didn’t really have “bad moods”, what I had was low blood sugar. When I ate and exercised to control my blood sugar I was a very calm person. 

Dating, Falling in Love, Being Lonely

So when I broke up with that boyfriend and started living alone, I also promised myself I would never date anyone I wasn’t madly in love with. Too many of my friends, family or my colleagues at work were in very unhappy relationships and more often than not, they simply “fell” into a relationship after going on dates for a few weeks or months.  Think about it, how many times have you ended up in a relationship after meeting someone, going on a few dates, you like the person’s company so you hang out more and more frequently, and before you know it you are now in a committed relationship and introducing the other person as your boyfriend or girlfriend. You may even find that you do love this person; you miss them when they leave for a trip without you. But at no point were you IN LOVE! 

Well let me tell you, I have been in love and I have been in relationships where I skipped that step so I can say with 100% certainty, being IN LOVE is one of the best things that can happen to you. That warm feeling that makes your heart feel like it’s going to melt in your chest, or burst, is simply amazing! No one should go without that.  But I’m not here to tell you that falling in love is the only way you should start a relationship, I’m simply telling you that’s what I decided!

I decided I wasn’t going to simply date anyone ever again unless I was in love with them, and I wasn’t going to be in a relationship simply to avoid being alone (another reason I feel people’s end up in bad relationships).

But most importantly, I also decided that I cannot expect anyone to love me if I didn’t love myself.

That was my decision!  And boy did it make for a lot of time alone, and a lot of loneliness.

Learning To Love Myself And Becoming More Confident And Positive As A Result

But it started me on a journey of self-discovery and self-love! A journeyman that would ultimately lead to happiness and true love!

Besides making the connection between my diet, exercise and mood, and with all that time to think, I became aware of the problems in my last relationship, my own actions and mistakes. 

As women we are often told we are too emotional, too moody, too prone to crying, too weak, that we overreact, we are over-sensitive and that we “nag”!

This has led to a lot of women not voicing their opinions, their thoughts or their feelings, to keeping them inside to avoid a negative reaction. When something bothers us, instead of speaking out we keep it to ourselves in order to keep the peace. Without realising it we subjugate our own desires and emotions to that of men. Instead of speaking out, we keep the unhappiness inside. Until we suffer those “black moods” that make men flee the house for the pub where they can complain loudly to their mates that the old “ball and chain” is in a “mood again, god knows about what, probably something that happened a month ago.”

We keep it inside because life has made it very clear to us that our thoughts, feelings, and opinions are just not as important as that of a man. Society very subtly spoon feeds us this from an extremely young age. Don’t cry, be a big girl, be nice, don’t be a bitch, a lady doesn’t sit like that, that dress makes you look like a hooker, etc etc etc. We learn early on that our lives are not for us to decide.

So we keep things inside, we keep the peace, we don’t speak up. 

But while our conscious mind might have decided to keep it in, our subconscious mind doesn’t understand this behaviour, it’s not smart enough to understand why we suppress our emotions or why we are not treated as equals. Our subconscious mind is basically a monkey screaming and shouting, jumping from tree trunk to tree trunk while throwing banana peels at other monkeys.

Telling the monkey to “suck it up” is as effective as telling a real monkey in the wild to shush.

Eventually the monkey can no longer take it, the screeching becomes too much for your conscious mind to ignore and BAM! You boil over and lash out at everyone around you.

Of course all this achieves is that you now feel bad for biting someone’s head of and feel the need to apologise, or are expected to apologise. Once YOU have to apologise the original problem you had that made you mad becomes lost in the noise and is never addressed.  

In other words, you have achieved nothing except to end up with everyone upset with you while you have to apologise for YOUR behaviour. Allowing the person you were angry at to get away with THEIR bad behaviour.

How annoying and unfair! 

And now the monkey is upset about that too and starts the screeching and jumping about all over again. 

And the cycle repeats.

Sound familiar?

That certainly was me.

I had worked very hard at my mental health, my diet, I exercised but even so at frequent intervals I would “blow my top” about something and everyone will be sitting there staring at me like I’m a crazy person.

This was a cycle I wanted to break free.  And THAT was where my journey truly began.

So now I can say with pride, that in the past few years, I have become more confident, I am a person with a positive mindset, I have increased my sense of self-worth and self-esteem tremendously, and I have never been happier.

This blog, is to teach YOU, how YOU can become all those things, how you too can overcome low self-esteem, negativity and lack of self-worth, and how to build confidence in all areas of your life. I want you to enjoy live as much as I do, and hopefully much more.