Knowing how to build self esteem. Getting out there and meeting new people. Dating the best woman for you. All of these are the dreams of the men we encounter at The Art of Charm. However, there’s often times a nemesis standing in the way of achieving these dreams — oneself. Before you can go out and conquer the world you first have to conquer the part of yourself that’s holding you back from success. But how do you do that?
Challenge Yourself
If you want to know how to build self esteem, you have to accept that change is often difficult and even painful. You have to embrace this difficulty and pain as a part of the process. Any serious weightlifter will tell you that there comes a point where you start enjoying the pain associated with pumping iron. It’s at that point that you’re really going to take off. Similarly, if you start challenging yourself and enjoying the challenge involved in self-improvement you’re going to go a lot further than constant resistance.
Which brings us to our next point…
Critique Yourself
Without critique, there’s no growth. It doesn’t really matter what you’re doing or trying to do. You need to be able to honestly look at the places where you didn’t do all you could and call yourself out. You need to be able to look at where you did try as hard as you could and figure out why it didn’t work out anyway. This is how you begin to make improvements over your baseline; By looking at ways you can do better what you did in the past.
Forgive Yourself
At the same time, constant critique can be a source of inaction. Often times, people are their own worst critics. What this means is that, even more than being criticized by someone else, you’re afraid of the critique you’re going to level at yourself. Forgiving yourself is powerful and necessary. You have to accept that you’re not going to get everything you want all of the time. You have to level with yourself for being a human being who sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. Often this can be the hardest part of defeating the nemesis within.
Reward Yourself
But one way that you can keep moving on is to reward yourself. You can do this in very concrete ways, like treating yourself to something nice if you meet certain physical fitness goals or goals for going out several times in the course of a week. However, you can also — and really ought to — also do this in smaller, more subtle ways. For example, the very act of acknowledging that you did something well, congratulating yourself on it and not allowing negativity or cynicism to creep in can be one way of rewarding yourself.
