When you trust your decisions, your self-esteem will grow. People with poor self-esteem often second-guess themselves and defer to others' opinions. While it's true that there are people who know more than you do on almost every topic, there is one subject on which you are the world's leading expert, and that subject is you.

When you are working to build your self-esteem, try setting one intention at a time. Sometimes when we are trying to change things that make us unhappy, we do really well at making a list of grievances but find it difficult to begin the work. We may become stuck feeling negative because of the number of things we wish were different. To avoid becoming overwhelmed, set one intention each day that will help you build self-esteem.

Building strong self-esteem requires us to make sure we're not masking our feelings from ourselves. A natural extension of that is feeling strong enough to express your feelings to others. That doesn't mean we have to act out on negative feelings by doing things that could hurt ourselves or others. It means that we are not wrong to experience the gamut of emotions. We can work on being honest about how we feel to build our self-esteem.

Resiliency is the ability to bounce back from a situation that throws you off, and there's a direct correlation between it and self-esteem. When your self-esteem is strong, you have the confidence to leave your comfort zone because you aren't worried about your ability to recover if things go south. You can build healthy self-esteem by focusing on improving your resiliency.

Building strong self-esteem is easier when you take the time to build a set of life goals that define your personal vision of success. Goals provide us with direction and help clarify the changes we need to make in our journey to healthy self-esteem.

Building healthier self-esteem takes courage. Your courage will help you make the changes you choose to make to your actions and attitudes that will allow you to feel more confident and self-reliant. But where do you find the courage to become the person you wish to be? How do you begin to practice courage to build strong self-esteem?

One of the ways you know you have healthy self-esteem is when you take charge of your own happiness instead of expecting others to fulfill your needs. People with poor self-esteem worry that they are not making others happy but rarely think about learning how to give themself satisfaction. If you find that you look for happiness externally instead of learning how to satisfy yourself, read on about my last couple of weeks and how taking charge of my own happiness helped my self-esteem.

A sure sign of healthy self-esteem is being your own best friend--loving and accepting yourself exactly as you are. This is a bottom-line requirement for strong self-esteem. Often, we only recognize the things about ourselves that disappoint us and pay no attention to our talents and accomplishments.

Creating a plan of action for self-esteem building increases your chance of creating healthy self-esteem. Once you develop both the awareness that your self-esteem is low and the desire to improve the way you think of yourself, you are ready to craft a solid action plan to build your self-esteem.

The forced isolation of the pandemic offers us a unique opportunity to focus on how to build self-esteem. Many of us are spending this time alone without the support that we have learned to rely on. This can be very intimidating as we are forced to do things for ourselves that we are not used to doing, but it can also be very freeing by allowing us to experiment and practice new skills without the world watching. It can be a perfect time for building self-esteem.