Unless you have a sense of self worth you cannot live courageously.  An inner self belief is the foundation that is required to build courage upon. When you are not sure of yourself you will falter when the going gets tough. When you don’t trust your instincts you will look around to see what others expect of you. When you haven’t taken the time to build up your beliefs in what is right and what is wrong you cannot act with any conviction. When you haven’t spent the time with yourself, learnt to accept what you see and finally come to like yourself, you will always hide. You will hide from yourself, avoid looking, distract yourself and you will hide from others. Because you are afraid that what is there is inadequate, deficient, unlikeable.

We are trapped until we take the time to get to know ourselves and accept ourselves for who we are, until we fully accept ourselves with all our strengths and our faults and imperfections. In doing this we gradually learn to care less about what other people think, and care more about what we think. We are able to act according to what we believe to be right. We become less eager to please others and more eager to please ourselves.   We can open up when we are not craving approval. Other people can take us or leave us. Not everyone will like us. And when we are no longer afraid of who we might be, are no longer ashamed of ourselves, then we don’t have to hide and we become free.

Future blog posts will address why a sense of self-worth is so lacking in our society, so difficult to acquire and what we can do to build ourselves a solid foundation for a courageous and whole hearted life.