Zohra Sarwari – The Power Of Self Esteem

			Bismillahirrahmanirrahim in the Name of God, the most beneficial, the Most Merciful, as salaam
aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato. Peace be upon you. My name is Torie. And today I'll be talking
about the power of self esteem and the importance of it. We'll start off by talking about what is
self esteem. self esteem is basically your opinion of yourself.
		

			One who has high self esteem has a good opinion of themselves. And one who has low self esteem
usually has a bad opinion of themselves. Let's now go over in depth of what is the difference
between low self esteem and high self esteem. If you have low self esteem, it is because you have a
poor image of yourself. This is where you're judging yourself, you also tend to compare yourself
here to other people at the same stage. For example, say you're 25 years old, and you haven't gone
to college and you see all these people around you who have gone to college, and they have careers.
Now you start to think, are they better than me? You then begin to think, Well, why am I not doing
		

			what they're doing? Next, you start to blame your life circumstances, other than yourself to make
yourself feel better.
		

			If you have high self esteem, on the other end, you're very happy with who you are, you're happy
with what you're doing, you're still working on areas that you're not so great at, and you're trying
your best and all that you're doing. And that makes you feel that you are improving. Some questions
I would ask myself here are, am I good at what I do? Am I a good student? Am I a good child to my
parents? Am I a good parent? Do I love what I do? Am I happy with myself? Am I happy with my
relationships? Do I think I'm successful? questions like these? Make one think if they have high
self esteem or low self esteem? If you can answer no to any of these questions, then you need to
		

			work on your self esteem. If you don't, then the low self esteem that you have about yourself will
feed into your negative thinking, and will actually make you believe the negative comments that
other people are making about you. This is very important to realize and then work on. I'll be
discussing four steps on how to deal with low self esteem.
		

			The first step that I would suggest is to stop the negative thinking, tell yourself that the past is
gone. You can't do anything about it. What has happened has happened, all you can do is ask God the
Most Merciful for forgiveness, you already know that the future doesn't belong to anyone. So all we
can do is live in the moment, God willing.
		

			The second step I would suggest is make a list of all the areas that you're not happy with yourself.
For example, your weight, your relationships, worshipping the Creator, your job, your education
level, etc.
		

			The third step I would suggest is pick one area from that pile and decide to change it to how you
want it to be. For example, your relationships. Pick one relationship that you can make better maybe
speaking to a parent or a sibling more, someone you're not talking to too much. Decide on how you
would like that relationship to be a relationship with respect and mutual understanding.
		

			As a Muslim, were told by the prophet muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam peace be upon him, no one
can be given a better and more abundant gift than patience. This can be found in Bahati and Muslim.
So to do anything one needs to have immense patience and trying, especially relationships.
Relationships only blossom and bloom, when one can understand the other side by putting themselves
in their place, and using different approaches to better get along. The fourth step is to work on
this area. For example, relationships. Do this for several weeks, when you begin to see the results
of it, then you'll notice your self confidence going up and your self esteem increasing. Now you can
		

			finally begin to judge yourself in a different way. I would suggest working on steps three and four
for all the areas that you feel you're not good enough, you will see that if you continue doing this
your confidence and self esteem will increase inshallah God willing. Having high self esteem is
vital to your success. What was a high self esteem tends to believe in himself and herself. They
tend to challenge themselves to do more things than the average person, they tend to be more
positive and have a better outlook on situations.
		

			Once you have good self esteem about yourself, you will notice your self confidence also increases.
However, self confidence increases mainly by your opinion of yourself, how others treat you and how
others think about you and by your achievements inshallah, God willing. So you make some changes in
your life that you didn't think were possible. For example, you didn't think you can learn to read
Arabic. And then you began to take some classes online and now you're doing it. This will help you
realize that you can do things you really want to do. And this one act alone will help increase your
self confidence and self esteem. Well, I hope that this has helped you better understand self
		

			esteem. For more tips, please sign up for my newsletter on www dot zorse are worried.com A salaam
aleikum wa Rahmatullahi wa barakaatuh Peace be upon you