The last edition of this column was titled how to confront your low-self-esteem and I had stated that the steps towards getting yourself out of this state of mental backwardness, or thinking negative of yourself is to work on your self-esteem.

Furthermore, I had also stated that it is the impression that you have of yourself that would determine how you relate to others.

“At times, some people feel that nobody likes them. They see everybody as their enemy. They always have the feeling that the whole world is against them. But the reality is that most of the time, this feeling comes from the inside of them. They have poor estimation of themselves, and as such feel that every other person out there would be thinking the same way about them. And for that reason, it should be them against the world.

It is this feeling that at times leads to extremism, radicalism and terrorism. The feeling of un-wantedness – “They hate our race. They hate our religion. They hate who we are. They hate what we represent. They hate me, therefore, I would hate and also hurt them.” This is the thinking of people with low-self-esteem syndrome.” The edition had read in part.

In this edition, I want to highlight some of the steps towards boosting your self-esteem. But before I go on, I want you to know that in this situation, what matters is you and you alone, because what other people think about you, don’t really count. What counts is what you think about yourself. You have to think right of yourself, before other people would think right of you. That is why Jesus Christ said that we should first of all remove the log from our own eyes, before we would be able to see the speck in other people’s eyes.

The first step towards boosting your self-esteem is to talk positive of yourself- It is a fact that some people have this dangerous habit of frequent negative self-talk. Put in another way. Some people have the habit of running themselves down. They see themselves as good for nothing or not being good enough for somebody or anything for that matter. To be honest, the only difference between the people who engage in this habit and those who put loaded guns on their heads and pull the trigger is that the later would die faster. But the truth is that the two are heading in the same direction – destruction.

The good book made us to understand that the power of life and death is in the tongue. This simply means that if you are talking negative of yourself, you are killing yourself, softly because saying is sowing. If you are saying negative things about yourself, you are sowing negative things in your life. Like a seed, they would germinate and bear fruits. So, if you want to improve your self-esteem, you have to start talking positive of yourself, no matter where you are in life or the condition in which you find yourself. You have to develop a positive affirmation for yourself and keep on declaring it to yourself, every minute of your life, both in good times and in bad times. The simplest way of changing your world is by changing your thought. This is because thoughts are things and we are what we think. Think and declare positive things to yourself and your life would turn around for good. For yours sincerely, my own affirmation is, I am blessed and highly favoured. I declare it to myself both consciously and unconsciously because it has become part of my being.

Joko Beck said that “Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every moment is the guru.” If this is the case which I believe it is, that nothing happens without a reason or reasons and that in every situation that we find ourselves, there is always a lesson to be learnt.

Following the above, if we close our eyes on the teacher or the lesson and focus only on the problem, it means at the end of it all, nothing would change in us. We would still remain who we are, because we didn’t learn anything. That is why somebody said that “the secret of change is to focus all your energy, not in fighting the old but on building the new." There is no problem without solution. But if you focus only on the problem, you would never see the solution.

Granted that you, like a lot of people out there, had a not-too-pleasant past, you must not focus your energy on fighting the past because it is a fight you would never win. Fighting the past is to your own detriment, because it would hinder going forward. So, instead of wasting precious time dwelling on your past, what you should be concerned with is building the new and the way to do it is to be positive about yourself and everything around you.

You don’t have to be running yourself down or condemning yourself for your actions or inactions of yesterday that is now just a memory. Another very important thing is that you don’t have to be defensive of your past. Rather, you should open and free your mind from them. You don’t have to bury your mind in the burial ground of your past. Instead, you should free it and let it hover while you work on the hurricane that would come to flush it to the farthest part of the globe.

Come to think of it. Memory is just like earthquake. No matter its magnitude, the fact is that earthquake in itself does not kill anybody. Rather, it is its consequences; that is the structures that the effect is pulling down that kill. So, if an earthquake is to be a human being, he could only be guilty of association and nothing more. In the same vein, memory, either good or bad, does nobody any harm. It is its consequences, that is if unnecessarily excited or agitated that hurts or kills.

Therefore, no matter how deplorable your past is, you should start by convincing yourself that you are the next biggest thing that is about to happen, the next positive dynamite that is about to explode. You have to take the number one, which is the sovereignty status of I am.

However, this does not mean that you are going to compete with God.

But let’s take a humble look at it. God created you in his own image and likeness. And after that, he breathed his own breathe, his own essence, that thing that made him God inside your nostrils. God could have got breeze from just anywhere and put inside you for you to become a living being. But he decided to make you an authentic part of him and that was why he used his own breath, thereby making you a chip off the block. He still did not stop at that.

When he was sending you to the world, he did not send you empty. Rather, he gave you the power of domination. He made you a conqueror from the beginning. He knew that you would be encountering problems in the world, so he gave you the power to make your problems to be submitting to you.

But this, unfortunately, is the missing link between God and man. A lot of people don’t know that they have the power of command and control inherent in them from birth. That is the reason why they don’t allow God to rest. Every day and night, they are crying to him over one problem or the other without knowing that no problem would ever exist without a solution, because we are in the world of one and opposite.

From the beginning God made the opposite of every creation. It is for this reason we have good and evil, black and white, night and day, problem and solution, question and answer, and so on. That is why if you are having a good run, you should have it at the back of your mind that every good thing would one day come to an end. On the other hand, if you are going through difficulties, you should also know that every evil, every difficulty has an expiry date. Nothing in the world lasts forever. That is why no matter how long summer lasts, don’t burn your winter coat, because you must surely need it.

Therefore,that you are having a bad run or you failed in one thing or another is certainly not enough reason to start talking down of yourself or feeling low of yourself.

Pendulum is never built to be stationary. Therefore, that your own pendulum of life swung on the negative side or is currently on the negative, does not in any way mean that the negativity has come to stay. However, you should take it as a phase that that would soon pass away.

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba once declared thus,

“Today is bad. Tomorrow, would be worse. But the day after tomorrow would be sun shine.” This is the mindset that you need to overcome the challenges in today’s world, being positive in all circumstances, instead of talking down on yourself.

Update news