A Guide to Getting It: Self-Esteem - Softcover

If you could compare your inner world to the solar system, clearly your self-esteem is the sun, with all other aspects of your self revolving around it. How light, how dark, how warm, or how cold your life feels directly relates to the strength of your self-esteem. Many psychologists work with this model, declaring that personal happiness, relationships, achievement, success, creativity, and even sex lives revolve around one characteristic: self-esteem. Deep inside, you carry an image of who you are and how worthy you are in relation to others. One life event after another can change your perception of who you are. Whether or not that perception actually corresponds to reality, this image affects everything from what clothes you wear to your choices of spouse and career.

You arrive in this world with everything needed to feel valued and unique. But, in the course of your life, layers are added that create a complex internal representation. The result is a framework for the way you carry out your life. If the layers are deep, that framework is not easily altered.

Therefore, to stay healthy, caring for your self-esteem with the same commitment that you care for your body is critical. Without a sense of self-worth, you cannot take the risks and make decisions that are necessary to lead a fulfilling and productive life. A lack of self-esteem affects all the parts of your life: career, family, love, and most important, your internal sense of well being. Having self-esteem brings confidence, assertiveness, and the ability to problem-solve. A strong sense of self-worth creates a type of self-fulfilling prophecy: when you like yourself, you begin to act in likable ways; the more belief you have in your ability to achieve, the more likely it is that you will.

The good news is that you can improve your self-esteem. The first step is to recognize that you have choices: you can either let your self-doubts control your actions, or you can work to improve the things you can change and accept those you can't. Despite the layers to your self-image, you are capable of stripping away the negative ones and replacing them with positive ones.

If you are ready to do whatever it takes to change your relationship with your self, this book offers invaluable ideas and insights from Life and Business Coaches as a guide to increasing your self-esteem. From reshaping the past to orchestrating the future, from living from the inside out to creating an outside that supports your inner self, from learning to love to loving to learn, this book is an important collection of tools to help you feel your life is shining brightly.

If you want to have a healthier, stronger relationship with your self and others, to fulfill your potential, and to trust what your own heart is telling you, I strongly recommend that you take the words presented in these chapters to heart. When you reaffirm your sense of worth, you'll rise in the eyes of the most important person--yourself!

Foreword by Marcia Reynolds, M.A., M.Ed. Past President, International Coach Federation, and author of "How to Outsmart Your Brain."

The Authors: Laura Davis, Rachell Disbennett-Lee, Jude Epstein, Laurie Geary, Marilyn French Hubbard, Loral Langemeier, Diane Menendez, Schyuyler Morgan, Laurie Sheppard, Phyllis Sisenwine, Margie Summerscales Heiler, Jordana Tiger