March 7, 2007

How To Raise Your Self-Esteem

In This Issue:

Feature Article: "How To Raise Your Self-Esteem"

Quick Tips: "How To Give Yourself An Extra Hour Each Day"

Fast Facts: "Are You Getting Enough Sun?"

* FEATURE ARTICLE *

“How To Raise Your Self-Esteem”

If you're struggling to achieve success and happiness... it may be due to a lack of self-esteem.

You don't have to accept that any more.

You can raise your self-esteem, and in this interview with Julia Nestler, Personal Self-improvement Trainer and author of How To Find The Secrets To Your Self-esteem, you'll find specific tips on how to do so...

Q: What is self-esteem?

A: High, or natural self-esteem is manifested in a wonderful feeling of inner-balance, grounded on self-acceptance and a healthy, comforting self-respect towards yourself. This is very different from self-confidence which is grounded in what you know you can deal with and accomplish. We can, for example, act in a very self-confident manner without our having high self-esteem.

High self-esteem is knowing who we are and living in harmony with ourselves without needing to have the approval of others.

Q: Why is self-esteem important?

A: Self-esteem is important because it determines how we react to the different events that occur in life. Namely, all our reactions are always based on who and what we believe we are – in other words, on how our self-esteem appears to us.

High self-esteem will, for example, make us react in a positive way to the events that occur in our lives, which means that we are free from debilitating emotions and disturbing thoughts, and therefore have control over what we can do to handle every situation that arises in our life in the best possible way.

And this control is a critical prerequisite for enhancing our ability to create success and harmony in our lives. It will also make us feel happy and increase our sense of well-being.

Low self-esteem, on the other hand, makes us react negatively to all the events that occur in our lives, because it allows debilitating emotions and disturbing thoughts to take control over us – sometimes this happens on a subconscious level we’re not even aware of. This presents us with difficulties that hinder our ability to handle the many situations in our lives in a way that is good for us.

Low self-esteem blocks real success, inner-balance and harmony in our lives in a demoralizing way. It also makes us unhappy and erodes our sense well-being.

In conclusion, our self-esteem determines what kind of life we are creating for ourselves: How happy we will be, how far we will get in life, and how much success we will experience.

We should therefore never underestimate the importance of raising our self-esteem because it has a huge impact on how our life will turn out.

Q: Why did you see the need to write and teach people about self-esteem?

A: I, personally, have experienced the great difference between low self-esteem and positive self-esteem – and most especially – what a huge impact it had on my success and sense of well-being in life.

We once came to this world in order to experience success and to live in harmony and happiness. We shouldn’t waste our lives with low-self-esteem and all the negative effects it has on our success, harmony and well-being.

Inner-balance and success is our birthright and we all have the power to get it.

We need to realize that, as long we don’t take care of our self-esteem, nothing else can help us to create real success and well-being that will last – not in the long run.

Raising our self-esteem is the most important thing we can do for ourselves in order to get what we want from life and be happy.

It’s very annoying for me to see that many people try to find success outside themselves through positive thinking, affirmations and other traditional self-development programs. We all know these programs don’t give results that last. Real success always starts from inside ourselves. And we don’t need a whole lifetime to figure it out.

We just need to know the secrets to our self-esteem, because once they are revealed, our self-esteem immediately rises. And high self-esteem leads us to long-term success – with no exceptions – and to the harmony that we all deserve to experience in life.

Q: What can someone do to raise their self-esteem right now?

Raising self-esteem is a process, which means that it needs to be accomplished step-by-step.

But here are three (3) things you can do to quickly boost your self-esteem:

1. Be kind to yourself. If some thing goes well, reward yourself! If something goes badly, learn from your mistakes.

2. Write a list on things you are good at – and read it – read it many times, over and over again.

3. Train yourself to give compliments to others, and when you receive compliments, say, “Thank you.”

About Julia

Julia Nestler is a Personal Self-improvement Trainer and author of the break-through book, How To Find The Secrets To Your Self-esteem!

For more information visit:

==> http://www.successaccelerator.net/self-esteem.html

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* HIGHLY RECOMMENDED *

“How To Get a Job... The Easy Way”

Are you eager to change jobs... but worried that you'll end up spending ages looking for a job... only to get nowhere?

You know, where you spend day after day pouring through job listings... applying for countless jobs... sending numerous cover letters and resumes...

...only to get a “we’ll keep your details on file” rejection letter... or an interview with someone who seems determined NOT to hire you?

Well, it's not so surprising when you discover that 50% of all new jobs go to "Insiders"... people who take a different - and much more effective - approach to getting the job they want.

Yet all the books, career counselors and recruiters tell us to apply for a job using the conventional "Outsider" approach!

No wonder getting a job is so hard.

Well it doesn't have to be... and it's NOT.

Not when YOU discover and apply the Insider approach to getting a job.

Read on...

* QUICK TIPS *

“How To Give Yourself An Extra Hour Each Day”

Ding!

Oh, someone's just emailed me. Better stop what I'm doing and check it...

Ever done that?

Ever done that... 60 times or more per day?

Join the club.

Now I'm pretty organized and I pride myself on my time management skills... but I must admit:

I'm an email-aholic!

Until this morning, I had my email program set to receive emails every 5 minutes. Which meant that, on an average day, I would sometimes check my email 12 times every hour! Sometimes I would take a few seconds to check... sometimes a minute or two... sometimes more.

And remember, that's just checking, scanning and reading - not responding!

Now I wouldn't necessarily receive email every 5 minutes, but I don't think it's exaggerating to say that some days I'd check my email 5 or 6 times an hour.

Which all adds up to 20-120 minutes a day (sometimes more!)... just checking email!

Frankly, I shudder to think about how much time I've WASTED hearing the "ding!", stopping work, checking my email, getting distracted, and then trying to gather my thoughts to get back to work... only to hear that "ding!" again!

Okay, so some people say you should check your email once or twice a day. Others say you shouldn't even open your email program until your high-priority work is done.

I agree that when it comes to high-priority work, you should just switch your email program off.

After all, if someone needs to get in touch with you urgently they should call you on the telephone, right?

(Although you should probably use voice mail to prevent non-urgent phone interruptions too!)

However, it may not be appropriate to only check your email once or twice a day. If you need to be "contactable" and, more importantly, able to respond to clients, colleagues and others during the day, checking your email once or twice a day might be professional suicide.

In fact, I recently read advice that you should respond to emails from clients and prospects within 4 hours. Well, depending on what you do, even that might not be responsive enough!

So how do you balance the need to be productive with the need to stay contactable?

Simple. You do what I did this morning.

I changed my email settings to receive email once every 60 minutes (not once every 5 minutes!).

Granted, there'll be more messages to check each time, but I doubt that I'll spend much more than a few minutes doing so.

So, even assuming I now spend 3 minutes checking my email, I'll still only spend a total of 24 minutes per day doing so.

By my estimate, I reckon I've just reclaimed about an hour of my life per day!

So... what could an extra hour or more each day mean for YOU?

The ability to get more done?

The ability to go home an hour earlier?

The ability to spend an extra hour with friends, family and on leisure activities?

Want to try this too?

Change your email settings, so you receive email only once per hour, or less frequently if possible.

Do this for a week... then let me know if you notice any significant improvement in your productivity and well-being!

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* HIGHLY RECOMMENDED *

“How an Ordinary Manager Transformed a Struggling Business On The Verge Of Collapse Into a $40 Million Company”

Here’s a shocking, yet true, story...

At the start of last year, a good friend of mine took the job of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at a small technology company.

The company was five years old, but hopelessly unprofitable.

It’s backers – a venture capital company – were growing impatient with the company’s abysmal performance and ordered the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to appoint someone who could commercialize the company’s technology – so they would finally have a product to sell.

Otherwise, the venture capital company would no longer fund the business.

My friend was excited about the job. He was a bit of a risk taker, and despite the pressure, looked forward to helping the company bring its product to market and build it into a profitable business.

But there was one problem.

A big problem.

The staff, the CEO warned him, were “incompetent and lazy.”

In fact, one of the reasons the CTO was being hired was to get rid of the “dead wood.”

“Frankly,” the CEO told my friend, “you’ll probably have to fire the lot of them.”

Read on...

* FAST FACTS *

“Are You Getting Enough Sun?”

Most of us are aware of the dangers of too much sun. Too much
exposure to UV rays can lead to premature aging, sun burn and skin cancer.

(I wish I understood that when I was a teenager pouring Reef Oil all over myself and lying in the sun for hours!)

But too little sun exposure can also be dangerous.

UV rays stimulate our skin to produce Vitamin D. Vitamin D helps our bodies absorb calcium, maintain strong and healthy bones, fight cancers and diabetes, and inhibit auto-immune disorders.

Only relatively low levels of Vitamin D are found in food (e.g. animal foods such as oily fish, eggs, butter, milk).

Now, most "sun-drenched" Australians, and others living in regions close to the equator typically get enough sun to stimulate sufficient Vitamin D production. But people living at high latitudes often don't get enough sun exposure, and are at risk of Vitamin D deficiency.

Those particularly at risk are:

• People who work long hours, indoors
• Those who are housebound or living in institutions
• Babies of mothers with Vitamin D deficiency
• People with dark skin (who naturally have more melanin - the pigment that reduces the amount of UV radiation getting through to the skin
• People who cover their skin and heads with clothing (e.g. for cultural or religious reasons)
• Obese people (Vitamin D is stored in fat, but if there's too much fat, the vitamin doesn't get released easily)

So how much Vitamin D do you need? The U.S. recommended daily intake is 200 to 600 IU for children and adults, however some doctors recommend double this for people with little exposure to natural sunlight.

What should you do to get enough sun? It all depends on where you live and the season, but a general recommendation is to expose your skin to natural sunlight for 10-15 minutes per day if you have fair skin, and double that or more if you have dark skin.

If getting enough Vitamin D from the sun and foods is impossible, you may need a vitamin D supplement.

None of this is medical advice - consult your doctor for specific advice on how to get enough Vitamin D.

(References: Victorian Cancer Council, March 2005; Science News, April 2005).

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