I was in my early teens when a thought came to me that has stayed with me for the rest of my life: “I have nothing if I cannot like myself.”
I can’t tell you why I had that thought. There wasn’t anything particularly significant happening at the time. But somehow I understood that the relationship I had with myself would affect virtually every other part of my life. What I don’t think I understood then was just how complicated that relationship can be.
We talk a lot about self-esteem, and sometimes the term has become almost synonymous with telling ourselves how wonderful we are. But I don’t think healthy self-esteem means believing we are wonderful, exceptional—or perfect.
Self-esteem is not believing you are perfect. It is knowing you still have value when you are not.
Confidence and Self-Esteem Are Not the Same
We often use confidence and self-esteem interchangeably, but there is an important difference. Confidence generally says, “I believe I can do this.” Self-esteem goes deeper. It says, “Whether I succeed or fail at this, my fundamental worth does not change.” That distinction matters because it is entirely possible to be extremely confident in some areas of life while still having surprisingly fragile self-esteem.
You can know you’re good at your job but be devastated by criticism. You can run a successful business but constantly need reassurance that you’re doing things correctly. You can be socially outgoing while privately wondering whether people really like you.
You can be the person everyone else depends upon while finding it difficult to believe that your own needs matter just as much. And you can accomplish remarkable things while still carrying that uncomfortable little fear that, sooner or later, someone will discover you’re not quite as capable as they think you are.
These don’t necessarily look like problems with self-esteem. From the outside, the person may appear highly competent and confident. But underneath, something else may be happening.
Their worth is still being put on trial.
When Being Good Isn’t Good Enough
This is where perfectionism becomes particularly interesting. We usually think of perfectionists as people with exceptionally high standards. And sometimes that’s exactly what they are. But perfectionism can also be protective:
- If I do everything perfectly, nobody can criticize me.
- If everybody approves of me, I don’t have to risk rejection.
- If I never make a mistake, I never have to confront the possibility that I’m not good enough.
The trouble, of course, is that nobody can live that way successfully. Instead of producing genuine confidence, perfectionism can produce procrastination, defensiveness, anxiety, people-pleasing, over-preparation, reluctance to try unfamiliar things—and sometimes not trying at all.
After all, if making a mistake means more than simply getting something wrong—if somewhere inside it feels as though that mistake says something about who you are—then avoiding the possibility of failure begins to make sense.
The subconscious mind is very good at protecting us from things we have learned to perceive as threatening. Unfortunately, sometimes what it protects us from is growth.
Your Worth Is Not Your Performance
Healthy self-esteem allows us to make some very important distinctions:
- I did something badly is not the same as I am inadequate.
- I made a poor decision is not the same as I can’t trust myself.
- Someone rejected me is not the same as I am unworthy.
- Someone disagreed with me is not the same as my opinion doesn’t matter.
- And perhaps most importantly, I failed is not the same as I am a failure.
When we can separate what happened from what it supposedly says about us, something rather wonderful happens. We regain agency. Agency is our sense that we can make choices, take action and influence the direction of our own lives. Inadequacy can make us hesitate. Invalidation can teach us to defer to other people’s judgment. Fear of rejection can make us withdraw. Fragile self-worth can send us searching for approval. Perfectionism can make us afraid to make mistakes. And each time that happens, a little bit of our agency is surrendered.
Whose Judgment Has the Final Word?
We all receive messages about ourselves throughout our lives. Some come from parents and teachers. Some come from friends, partners, coworkers and bosses. Some come from society. And some come from people whose opinions should probably never have mattered very much in the first place.
Yet a careless comment can remain with us for decades. A teacher tells you that you’re not good at something. Someone laughs at the way you look. A parent compares you unfavorably with a sibling. A relationship ends and you conclude that you weren’t lovable enough. You make a mistake and someone makes sure you never forget it.
Eventually, we may no longer remember precisely where a belief began. We simply know, I’m not good at that. I shouldn’t do that. People like me don’t succeed at that. I always mess things up. What will people think? And this is where I think we sometimes misunderstand personal power.
The problem isn’t that other people have power over us. It’s that somewhere along the way, we learned to give their judgments authority over our own. That authority can be reclaimed.
You Don’t Have to Excavate Your Entire Past
I have always tended to approach personal growth by looking forward rather than spending endless amounts of time looking backward. That doesn’t mean the past doesn’t matter. Of course it does. Our experiences help create the beliefs and expectations we carry into today. But our histories are extraordinarily complicated. There usually isn’t one comment, one rejection or one painful experience responsible for everything we believe about ourselves. And I don’t believe we necessarily have to identify and analyze every one of them before we can move forward.
You don’t have to spend your life excavating everything that ever happened to you. You can begin changing what those experiences taught you to believe about yourself.
That distinction is one of the reasons I have always found InnerTalk so useful. Rather than continually asking, “Where did this belief come from?” we can also ask, “What would I rather be telling myself today?”
Reclaiming Your Inner Power
That is the thinking behind Reclaiming Your Inner Power: Ultimate Self-Esteem. This isn’t simply a collection designed to make you feel good about yourself. Its nine programs approach the underlying relationship you have with yourself from several different directions:
Eradicating Inadequacy — because believing you are incapable makes it harder to act with confidence.
Releasing Anxiety — because when so much of your inner energy is tied up in apprehension, it becomes harder to think clearly and move forward.
Healing Emotional Pain — because old hurts can continue influencing the choices we make today.
Healing from Invalidation — because what you think, feel and need matters, even when someone else has taught you otherwise.
Healing the Past — because yesterday can teach you without being allowed to control today.
Freedom from Worry — because energy continually invested in what might go wrong is energy unavailable for living now.
The collection also includes Echo-Tech: Have It All!, OZO: Inner Peace, and Power Imaging: Well-Being and Self-Esteem, approaching self-worth, inner peace and personal empowerment through three additional InnerTalk technologies.
Together, these nine programs were compiled to address the many different beliefs and emotional patterns that can quietly take agency away from us. Because self-esteem is rarely about just one thing. Reclaiming your inner power can mean strengthening the entire inner environment from which you think, choose and act.
Free to Become More
There is an extraordinary freedom that comes when your worth is no longer dependent upon getting everything right. Imagine feeling free to make mistakes—not because mistakes don’t matter, but because they don’t define you. It really is okay to keep on trying until you find the best fit for you. You can attempt something you’ve never done before, knowing that being a beginner is simply part of learning. You can change your mind when new information gives you a better understanding.
You can hear someone else’s opinion without automatically accepting it—or automatically rejecting it. You can consider what they have to say, decide whether it has value for you, and then make your own choice. That’s agency.
And perhaps most importantly, you can be honest with yourself. When discovering something you would like to change doesn’t threaten your sense of worth, self-examination becomes less frightening. You can recognize a weakness without deciding you are weak. You can acknowledge something you could have done better without turning it into evidence that you aren’t good enough.
When you no longer have to prove that you are good enough, you become freer to get better.
You may also be interested in Rescripting the Child Within. This title complements this collection beautifully because some of the judgments we continue carrying as adults were first absorbed when we were far too young to evaluate whether they were fair, accurate—or even really about us.
The goal isn’t to remain trapped in the past. It is to stop allowing what you learned then to unnecessarily limit who you can become now. Please explore Reclaiming Your Inner Power here.
I Have Nothing If I Cannot Like Myself
Perhaps that teenage version of me understood more than I realized when she thought: “I have nothing if I cannot like myself.” All these years later, I think I understand those words a little differently.
When we genuinely like and respect ourselves, we don’t have to believe we’re perfect. We don’t have to win everyone’s approval. We don’t have to allow someone else’s judgment to become our truth. And we don’t have to prove our worth every time we make a decision, take a risk or try something new. We can simply ask: What do I think? What can I learn? What feels right for me? Who do I want to become from here?
Healthy self-esteem doesn’t remove our desire to grow. It gives us a secure foundation from which to grow.
When we genuinely like and respect ourselves, we have a much stronger foundation from which to decide who we want to become.
And that, I believe, is where agency—and real inner power—begins.
Warmly,
Ravinder Taylor
“I bought your self-esteem program some months ago. I didn’t feel any different at first but after a week people around me at work started responding much more positively towards me. I can honestly say that your products work.”
~ I. R.