What do you know about yourself? What do you see in yourself, and how do you project yourself? Everything in your life depends on how conscious you’re and what is backing your consciousness.

What are the things you must focus on when high self-esteem is the backbone of your consciousness in life? Let’s look at some of them and how they will help you.

The Self.

When a person is suffering from low self-esteem, every act of self-care and almost all actions dedicated to self-progression in life are tagged as selfishness.

These sets of people don’t know who they are; for most of their lives, they don’t care. They’re always in a dedicated service to what other people want; the more useful they are as a pawn in other people’s agenda in life, the more useful they think they are.

The first and most critical level of consciousness for growth and direction in life is self-identification. Who is Gideon? Who is Damola? Who am I?

Without the consciousness of who you are, you’re just another tool for everyone to use at will and neglect when they’re done.

There are unique qualities that inform the purpose a person carries; these qualities are not always the most obvious or clearest parts of you, but they are always there, manifesting in small ways and showing their influence from time to time.

The only way for you to identify and cultivate your uniqueness is to be conscious of yourself. You need to be deliberate in assessing your life all the time to really identify who you are.

You are not a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a pastor, or a musician; these are titles acquired or given, but there is something unique about being that lawyer, doctor, accountant, musician, or pastor.

That uniqueness is who you really are, and without it, you are just another person stuck in a professional web or stuck in the circle of life doing what you’re told to do.

Your uniqueness is what low self-esteem seeks to take away from you every day, because it’s the same thing that makes you stand out, and when you suffer from low self-esteem, all you will always seek is how to fit in.

Consciousness of self, purpose, personal direction, and individual uniqueness that makes you a special person in life demands that you have high self-esteem.

Identifying and Taking Opportunities.

Helen, Helen, are you okay? Why can’t you tell them you can do it? Why do you need to tell them to go somewhere else? I was screaming on top of my voice at the time to a friend.

What was her reply? But I haven’t done it for money before. I was screaming, but it’s one day you will start doing it for money, na.

The consciousness of opportunity and the ability to give things a chance all depend on how you see and carry yourself.

You’re most likely going to remain a Helen who passes on opportunities for improvement simply because you’re not conscious of your abilities.

You will miss different forms of opportunities when you’re not conscious of who you are. Lack of consciousness of who you are also blinds you to knowing what you need and what you can do – this level of blindness will consistently steal opportunities from you.

Consciousness is an act of being deliberate about everything around you, from who you are to what you want and how to identify the things you need.

The right to this level of deliberate living is only possible when you have high self-esteem. It’s a level of living when you don’t wait for people’s permission to be who you want to be and to do what you need to do.

Learning.

One of the greatest pillars of high self-esteem is competence, which means your ability to learn what you need to do what you want and become who you want to be in life.

Learning is not something that just happens; learning is a conscious and deliberate process. Learning demands that you see yourself as someone deserving of the outcome of the lessons you’re seeking to learn.

People who suffer from low self-esteem don’t see the need to learn because they think some things in life are not for them. They don’t think they have what it takes to do some things; they’re never conscious of what they need to learn.

They would rather lead a beggarly life, waiting for handouts from others, waiting for others to validate them, instead of learning what it takes to be the best versions of themselves.

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Learning, growing, and fixing things as you go in life must be a deliberate process that comes through a detailed consciousness of who you are and what you need to be who you want to be in life. Outside of this, you cannot have intentional growth in life.

A deliberate person is an inquisitive person, someone who does not just do things because that’s the way it’s been done, but wants a clear picture of what they want; this is a major drive in the quest to learn and improve.

Learning is how you grow after knowing yourself, identifying opportunities, and taking charge of your life. You must learn as much as you can because the more competent you become, the higher your self-esteem will be.

Being conscious and being deliberate give you insight into details, and these details, in turn, enlighten your opinion and knowledge, which in turn inform your decisions.

These decisions are not only necessary to build your self-esteem but also critical to sustaining it.

Life must be driven by the consciousness towards something, and the only way to be conscious of something and become deliberate about it is to believe that you’re worthy of something great, which only comes through high self-esteem.

For the week and beyond, be conscious and deliberate, and remember that faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

We can provide many dictionary definitions of the word “consciousness,” and all of them will indicate being alert and aware of what is going on around/with you. So, let’s use this short definition this week.

Being alert and aware of what is going on around you or with you defines your consciousness, and the level of your consciousness determines how deliberate your actions are.

Life did not just happen; life is a conscious and deliberate effort of the creator. Things do not just happen; people put conscious, deliberate effort into making things happen.

It is expected that if you have any specific ambitions in life, you must know what they are, plan how to achieve them, and put in deliberate effort to achieve them.

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Ambitions without the consciousness of the work it will take, and the willingness to do that work, are simply wishful thinking. It’s a waste of time and mental energy.

Let us take the life of an average person growing up, for example: you are taught to work hard, focus, and be disciplined in whatever you do; you’re taught to listen to teachers in school, elders in the community, and pastors/imams in religious homes.

You go to school to study a course, which is often influenced not by what you know or think is best for you, but by what your parents think or how they influence you; then you follow a path from there, from what the teachers say to what the employers say.

Millions of people follow this routine because it’s embedded in the society they grew up in, not because they sat down, came to a conclusion, or deliberately analyzed what they need, how things evolve, and how everything else around them will work for them.

They just do what they need to do to get by and fit into the circle created for them.

The only way to be something real, something you would identify as yourself or yours, is by being deliberate about the things you do. Without this, all you’re left with are the particles sprinkled from everywhere by everyone into your life.

You need to build high self-esteem because it is the key to the confidence you need to be original enough to know what you need and not bow to what people want you to do.

Your life is not yours until you have the required level of awareness that gives you the consciousness required to be deliberate about every action you take each day.

People are more concerned with what others want them to do and what is considered good for society, but are largely unaware of what they need or what their purpose in life is.

It is low self-esteem when your awareness focuses on what people want or on what you can do to look good to others, rather than on what you need to be who you want to be in life.

One of the most critical ways to become conscious in life is for you to remove yourself from every external string, no matter what those strings are.

There are parental strings, family and friend strings, the strings of educational institutions, religious and political institutions, and every other thing society wants from you.

You need to be free of these strings to become conscious of yourself and then decide what you want in life and how you want to live your life.

The foundation for being free from these strings is building high self-esteem, because when you suffer from low self-esteem, it becomes impossible to take enough charge of yourself to free yourself from external strings in life.

After the foundation is laid, there are other ways to build on it.

We’ll continue next week to discuss three major factors in becoming conscious enough to be yourself and live your own life, and how self-esteem is tied to building these factors.

Have an amazing week ahead, and never forget that faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

The first point we are going to discuss is understanding the principle that Life is Hard.

This is the stage where you have to clear your doubts and face the truth. The stage where you need to let go of fairytales and embrace real stories.

This is the stage where you need to understand that motivation is not about the grammatical combination of the speakers but about your willingness to face and take responsibility.

This is the stage where you need to understand the single fact that there is no result without work; no goal can be achieved through wishful thinking alone. This is the part where you understand that every success is based on the solid foundation of hard work.

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Here is also where you must understand that mere work is hard, and hard work is harder, keeping in mind that the best results in life come through hard work, which is harder than just doing the bare minimum.

Luck reacts to work; don’t count on it to come to your aid and rescue you when you do not want to face the simple truth. The lucky people are the ones who take steps to put themselves in a position where luck will see and meet them.

These positions require hard work and an enormous struggle to get into. So, do not count on luck as your only plan.

You have to let go of that old mentality—the one that anything comes easy. You have to realize again and again that any path without an obstacle leads nowhere important in life.

Only unimportant things come easily; everything of great value in life comes with a high price. Only unimportant substances are given out in life as freebies, most of which are always an extra liability.

Understand this basic, because if you do, you’ve taken the first step in going through the hardships of life with ease.

The second point of consideration is understanding that failure is a necessity to move forward.

Life is hard, and for most people, failing at something feels harder than a rock, but for people who want to move through life with ease, it is important to understand that failure is an ingredient for finding ease.

In life, the question is not whether you will have problems, but how you will deal with them. The question here is not whether you will fail, but what you will do after you fail.

If you take failure the wrong way, then life becomes even harder than its natural hardness, but if you understand the principle that failure is a recipe to move forward in life, then you will find moving through the hardness of life easier.

Nobody gets it right on their first try; every champion has failed at some point in their life.

They’ve been rejected at some point, but the important thing is that through every failure, they refuse to see a negative end, but rather positive lessons to apply to their other challenges in life.

If you haven’t failed at anything before, you haven’t tried anything worth it. If you have tried and failed at something before and given up because of that, it’s because you have the wrong perspective about life and about failure.

The people who keep going after each failure are the people who already understand these basic principles: that life is hard, that failure is a necessity for you to move forward, so giving up as an option for them doesn’t exist anymore.

Failure should be seen as a stepping stone and not a stumbling block; the lesson learned in the process of failure should be duly applied in making progress and making your next step more appropriate.

It took Thomas Edison 1,000 tries to invent the light bulb. He got it right and championed an invention on his 1,000th try, after 999 attempts and failures.

Mr. Edison’s reaction to the 999 times is where you need to fix your mind. Mr. Edison said he only found 999 ways not to create a light bulb. If you approach failure with this mindset, it would make going through life easier.

If you lack this mindset, every failure will add more misery and bitterness, making your life way harder than it should be. Remember that the bed full of roses today is a result of the work of someone who slept without a bed and only had a stone pillow.

Life is hard; failure makes it harder, but that is if you fail to understand the purpose of failure.

Once you understand that failure is meant to make you learn and get better at whatever you’ve set your hand on, going through the hardness of life now comes with ease, even in the face of failure.

This new ease would not only push you forward in your journey but also allow you to set out on other adventures and encourage you to reach for things your fear of failure had kept out of reach.

Understanding the concept of Perseverance and Consistency.

This would be the third point establishing that life’s inevitable hardness could be eased by knowing the right substances and ingredients.

Every time a success story is told, there is something always constant in those stories: ‘hard work’.

Hard work is something we’ve all been taught right from the beginning of our lives; everybody understands they have to work very hard to make it in life. Unsurprisingly, this is a testament to the harsh reality of life.

What most people were not taught is that hard work can be invested without seeing results if the right commitment to achieving those results is not deployed to back up those hard efforts.

Perseverance and consistency are the backbone of easing the hardness; they are the tools that build the house after hard work has laid the necessary foundation.

Understanding that life is hard is one thing; moving forward when you don’t get results on a particular thing is another. But all the lessons learned are there to help you understand the importance of perseverance and consistency.

These two ingredients are the important features that give you results eventually when you’ve pulled through the hardness of life with all other lessons learned.

Without them, there is no going forward because every little setback, every little difficulty, will look like the end of the road for you.

Life is hard, and only the strong and consistent can crack through it. That’s my version of ‘tough times never last, but tough people do’.

As you go into the new week and the rest of the year, one thing you must understand is this: life becomes very easy when you embrace the hard work that must be done to get the things you want.

Once that is done, difficulty no longer looks like pain, but a ladder to gain.

Have an amazing week ahead, and don’t forget, faith, hope, and love will give you all the strength you need.

In life, everybody wants to win, everybody wants to be successful, rich, and famous, everybody wants to be at the top of the pyramid with the best securities you can imagine to prevent them from slipping and falling.

We all envision life to be the best it could be, and sometimes we even envision life bringing the best of it to us. Nobody likes hardship; nobody wants to suffer. We all want everything to go as smoothly as they can, but nothing in life comes easy.

This is a phrase we should already be familiar with, but another phrase that stands in total contradiction to this is another popular phrase (or phrases) we are also used to: “Life is easy,” “Life is hard.”

The truth is, once you understand the principle that Life is hard, everything else becomes easier.

Thus, if you master the principle in the saying that “Nothing in life comes easy”, then you will be able to go through the hardness of life with ease.

Without a proper understanding of this principle that Life is hard, every little obstacle in life will always look like the end of the road to you.

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Lots of people give up on so many journeys in life because all they focus on is the saying that “Life is easy.” They’re fixated on those who have completed their journey and covet the ease they now enjoy.

So when they face difficulty on a journey, they seek a new one without difficulty, and they keep seeking and starting a new journey.

The truth is, no path without an obstacle leads anywhere important in life.

That speaks of our physical life. Mr. Mathew said in his writings that the kingdom of God suffereth violence and the violent takes it by force.

Right before Mathew, in the beginning, God himself promised man that his life would be hard and promised the woman a hard life too. Now that’s God and a spiritual leader you can follow.

I’m quite sure He was not talking about physical violence or anything that comes in that region, but was only emphasizing the fact that nothing comes easy and life is hard in every realm, be it physical or spiritual.

The process of life is similar to that of building: to construct a building from scratch, be it a skyscraper or a hut, requires work on each level and hard work.

The process of constructing the building involves several stages, each with its own challenges.

Only when the difficulties and challenges are solved and overcome will the building stand; if the builder refuses to face challenges and overcome difficulties, the building will not stand.

The building stands as a result of hard work; the builder went through a difficult process to put the structure up, and now living inside it is easier because much of that effort has been invested in it.

The process you have to go through to enjoy those things you want in life, those good things in your head, those big dreams you have, is like building your own house from scratch: digging and laying your foundation, overcoming the challenges and difficulties.

These processes are hard; they are not the easy part of life, but they are the most important part of it.

Without these hardships and difficulties, there would be no ease, success, or achievement.

John F. Kennedy said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty”.

When you look at hardship as it is, then it becomes harder and more difficult to crack. As much as this work is about making you understand that Life is hard, it is also about showing you how to navigate this hardship in an easy way.

To achieve whatever you set out to achieve, if you understand the principle that Life is hard, everything else becomes easier.

What are the things that are hard in life? The answer is that virtually everything in life is.

Work is the foundation of everything good, and not just work but hard work.

The truth remains that nobody likes to work, let alone work hard. Everybody wants everything to be served on a platter to them. Even when some people can have it this way, it is impossible to defile the principle of life that requires hard work.

Whatever anybody has on a platter today is a result of someone’s hard work before him, someone who faced the hardship to lay the foundation for what is now being served on a platter.

Back to our question: work, love, trust, riches, forgiveness, spiritual things, and anything else you can think of in life are all just bundles of hardship; the approach you take to address them, your attitude toward them, is what makes them easier or harder.

Earlier, it was stated that, as much as this work is set out to make you understand the simple principle that life is hard, it has another purpose: to make you understand that things get easier when you understand how they are and approach them with the right mentality and attitude.

The things enumerated below will show you how to crack the hardness of life and go through it, knowing it’s hard but handling it in the easiest and most peaceful way available.

Have an amazing week ahead. See you next Monday.

Remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

One of the core aspects of life and also a great dysfunctional aspect that people seek to master is relationships.

What works for one person might not work for another; people get tagged as selfish all the time, and in the process of trying to prove they’re not, many people self-destruct.

Building relationships with others is a vital aspect of life, and it’s such a core requirement in living a good life that the absence of good relationships can be conclusive proof that a person will never live their best life.

No matter the divide you belong in life, no matter the religion you practice, building great relationships is not negotiable, because without it, you will have to live alone, and life is not designed to be lived alone.

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People try so many ways to build relationships; many try to buy their way in with money, some want to use charms and aura, and some simply want to manipulate. People try so hard, in different ways, because it’s crucial to life.

Whether you know it or admit it, the foundation of life itself is based on human relationships; the progression of life is based on it, and the conclusion of life is also based on human relationships.

To a great extent, the summary of your life will be determined by the kind of relationships in it.

A piece of advice before I continue: while you push yourself to be the best that you can be, ensure that as much as you can, you also push the people in your life; you will need them.

If life is hugely dependent on great relationships, then what does it take to build great relationships?

While this episode of the newsletter might not be exhaustive on the issue, I promise you that it will change your life and not only give you great people, but first, it will make you an amazing person.

The schools are not going to teach you this; the churches or the mosque might also not have the time for it. They might tell you to build relationships, but how do you do that?

The Foundation of all Useful Tools in Life.

Everything good that you need in life is only achievable when you’re a person of high self-esteem. This is a conclusive truth that nothing will change.

Building great relationships is the same; if you’re a person of low self-esteem, it’s impossible to build great relationships.

You’re either going to be a burden to someone else, or you will be an oppressor of someone else; either way, a person who doesn’t have a defined self-concept cannot make the right selections for great relationships in life.

The two sides of self-esteem are a core divider to many things in life; building relationships is one of the places where these sides show the most.

Don’t forget our introduction; many people will try different ways to build relationships because they know it’s a core aspect of life. Each person’s level of self-esteem usually determines how they try to build relationships.

The person who is bent on manipulating others to see them as who they’re not; the person who only lies; the person who throws money around; the servant who never stops to consider what they need because they don’t want to seem selfish.

All these people are trying different ways based on how they see and carry themselves in life.

The first question you want to ask yourself is this: Am I a person of good self-esteem?

Do I believe that I have what it takes to overcome challenges? Do I see myself as a competent person, and do I see and carry myself as a person who is deserving of the best things in life?

This is the place to start, because if you’re on the opposite side of this mindset, it’s a practical impossibility for you to build great relationships; people will constantly have to bear with you, and you will constantly have to bear with people, but not on your own terms.

According to high self-esteem, what does it take to build great relationships in life?

The Three Way Intersection.

These three things I am going to teach you will not only allow you to build great relationships, but they’re also factors that will help strengthen your self-esteem in the process.

1. Integrity.

Integrity is the foundational pillar in building relationships, and everything else is tied to it. What is integrity?

Integrity is a person’s ability to identify who they are and stay true to their identity in everything they do.

The first and most important form of integrity is integrity to self because, without it, nothing else exists; you have to first be your own person before you can be a person to another person.

Integrity is your ability to be your own person.

Integrity is how you build your personal image and brand, and your personal image and brand will determine who you will attract in life.

This is the buying and selling in human relationships.

2. Maturity.

The way you have your own image and brand is the same way others will have theirs. An adult relationship is not an attempt to clone yourself into other people, and it takes maturity to understand and tolerate this.

Being a mature person is the only way you can accommodate others and their brand in your life without thinking that their brand is an existential threat to yours.

Every great relationship in life is built around maturity, the ability to tolerate and accommodate differences, without thinking that others are a threat to you.

This is why the security that high self-esteem provides is a core necessity in ensuring great relationships in life.

3. Abundance Mindset.

The abundance mindset is the way to set boundaries and walk away from things that don’t suit your brand as a person.

People will come with a lot of things, and if you don’t have the competent mindset that you’re enough to learn and achieve what you want in life, before you know it, you will compromise your integrity and find yourself in a relationship that you shouldn’t be in.

The abundance mindset gives you reassurance that nothing is do-or-die; it means that you know that you’re not going to fail because someone is not in your life.

This is what gives you the confidence to choose based on what you need and based on what you can also give to others.

As you start a new month, I want you to see that only people with a certain mindset can implement these guidelines in building great relationships.

Integrity is your foundation, maturity is your accommodation and having an abundance mindset is how you select those who can live with you in your space.

Have a great day, week, and month ahead, and remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

Life flows from total dependence to independence and finally to interdependence. No one can have a complete awesome experience in life if they don’t progress through these ranks of life.

The progression through the ranks produces different substances, virtues, and values; different combinations of mindset and other beliefs that make people who they are.

At a point, everyone comes to the realisation of the fact that they’re at a place in life where they’re also allowed to form these virtues and beliefs for themselves.

In total dependence, you’re a baby; you can’t think, you’re simply just reactive to every feeling and emotion, and other people care for your needs and ensure you’re fine.

In independence, you can think for yourself, you can fend for yourself, people don’t necessarily have to take care of you, and you can take care of yourself.

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Finally, in interdependence, you realise that life itself, if lived by yourself alone, will be incomplete; it will be one-sided. You realise that work, business, community, building, and so on and so forth require the input of other people.

It is at the point of interdependence that life will consistently require of you what you’ve acquired through your time of dependence and independence, which is what we call character.

Character is the summary of a person’s acquisition in their life; everything you have or will have in life will always be summarised into how they make you act as a person.

This is the reason why mental acquisition in life is just as important as any form of material acquisition, because material acquisition without the needed mental fortitude will eventually lead to a destructive life.

The foundation for all mental acquisition in life is high self-esteem. If a person suffers from poor self-esteem, there is no tenable foundation to build mental strength, which is a needed requirement to live an interdependent life.

What is Character?

Character is the quality of the substance you produce as a person, in relation to yourself and to other people, flowing from your foundational belief system.

The strength of an interdependent life is built on strong character, and without the right set of character, you cannot effectively collaborate with other people, which is the summary of an interdependent life.

Low self-esteem is the belief that you’re an incompetent person, which means your first response to challenges in life is that you don’t have what it takes to overcome them, and secondly that there are good things in life that you’re not worthy of.

In your progression from total dependence to independence, if you suffer from low self-esteem, which is the stage where self-esteem is being built or damaged the most in a child, it will become difficult for you to build the right character to face life.

Character is built out of belief systems, which means that as a human thinks, so is the way the human will be.

A person who sees life through the scope of low self-esteem will never be able to focus on building the right character needed to live a good life.

Such a person is most likely going to:

Look down on themselves.

Look down on other people.

Have trust issues.

Suffer from a lack of discipline and motivation.

The person will most likely suffer from a lack of honesty.

Gives up free will for group thinking.

Not being able to keep their own words to themselves, because bad character starts from what you do with yourself and then spills into what you do with other people.

High self-esteem, on the other hand, says that you perpetually believe, irrespective of where you are or who you are in life, that you’re a competent person who has what it takes to face and overcome challenges in life and that you’re worthy of the best things in life.

When this is the foundational fundamental of how you think and see yourself, it will always help you build day-to-day character that supports that belief system.

High self-esteem is the most important tool that gives you self-security so you can collaborate with other people with peace of mind.

There are three subsects of high self-esteem that automatically put you ahead in the character chat in life; they are:

Integrity: Your ability to keep your words to yourself and to others.

Maturity: Understanding there can always be more than one perspective to life.

Abundance Mindset: Knowing there is enough for everyone in life.

How to Build Character Through High Self-Esteem.

1. Focus on value identification.

This is where you have to ask yourself: What values and virtues do I want to be identified with as a person?

You need to have a mind of your own to do this, because when you’re suffering from low self-esteem, other people control your narrative for you.

What kind of person do you want to be? Once you answer this question, the next thing is to identify the values that will make you this kind of person and get to the second thing you have to do.

2. Prioritise around those values.

Once you identify the values you want to live by, the next thing you must do is to prioritise your life around these values in a way that they become repetitive to you.

The more you prioritise your life around these values, the more they will appear in your life and become your dominant reality.

3. Disregard Comparison.

The only comparison you should do in life is how much better you’ve become from who you were the other day. When you compare in order to compete with others, it will end up tainting your character because comparison for competition will always lead to alteration based on what others are doing, not based on who you are.

High self-esteem and the character needed to lead a great life go hand in hand, and as you face another week, I want you to know that building a great life will only happen by possessing and living a life of great character.

Have an amazing week ahead, and remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

Back in December 2016, I met this guy during this program that I was part of, and he was a great guy, young, and full of dreams.

I am always excited to see people who carry a great level of optimism about life and want to do a lot of things. It didn’t take long before we became a little bit closer.

Once I got closer to him, I discovered that, despite all his dreams and how optimistic he always sounded, he was very cautious about when he would eventually start doing anything about them.

In an effort not to be the new nosy guy, I let him have his space and time without putting any pressure on him to do anything or on us to collaborate.

I was very big on independence at the time. I would rather face the world alone than make you think I need you for anything; it was almost like the mindset of Abraham and the King of Sodom.

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But after my growth over the past years, I’ve discovered that life is meant to be lived interdependently, not independently; we all need each other to build a great life and a great world. Your independence must support another’s, and vice versa.

After some time, I decided to ask him about a particular plan he had been discussing, and at that point, I had a very clear revelation of what was going on.

The guy is a great talker without the confidence to do anything about what he was talking about.

I spoke to him about the fact that he has a lot of things written down and in his head, but isn’t doing anything about them, and his response was that he was waiting for the best time while he analysed the opportunities.

We all have many names for it: overthinking, analysis paralysis, overanalysing, perfectionism; whatever name you choose, the real problem is that people lack the self-esteem to make the necessary moves because of what is in their heads.

My job this week is to expose the problem and find a lasting solution.

My law of the output states that: Your effort is equal to the level of your self-esteem, as your self-esteem is the summary of your self-concept.

You can write everything you want to write in life; you can dream all the dreams you want to dream, but when it comes to the time to act, the kind of energy that your mind and body produce will rise or fall to the level of your self-esteem.

Your self-esteem is the most accurate description of how you see yourself in life, and every other action in your life depends on how you see yourself in life.

The law of the output states that: if you believe you’re competent, that you have what it takes, you act; if you believe that you’re worthy of it, you deserve it, you go for it.

In the mindset of self-esteem, beautiful dreams without corresponding action are a clear indication of low self-esteem.

This is why people never start.

The mindset that starts and keeps going is the one that is supported by the two foundational pillars of high self-esteem. The belief that I am a competent person, the belief that I am created with worth, and I deserve the best.

Your biggest incentive to start will never be people’s affection, acceptance, or the promise of glory; your biggest incentive to start will always be that I believe that I can do it, and I believe that I deserve it. This is also what will keep you on track during challenging times.

If you’re finding it hard to start, check the incentives you’re keying into.

The Standards.

Your belief determines the standards that you will uphold and the actions you will take, and the source of that belief, where all the standards come from, is the level of your self-esteem.

I want you to listen to what low self-esteem will tell you and imagine the standards that will follow.

“I am not a competent person, I don’t have what it takes, these kinds of things are not meant for people like me, I will do something else.”

Every day, this is the voice of a lower version of self that doesn’t understand that challenges are the necessary fuel for creativity in life, and that without obstacles, there will be no need for growth.

Every single standard you decide to set must be something that pushes you to action every day, because high self-esteem drives you to act, and if you say you have it, it must lead to corresponding action.

On the other side of the equation, high self-esteem says:

“I am competent, so I can learn. I will go out every day to give my best. I deserve the best, so I will work for only the best, and expect only the best.”

Outline what you need to do, break them down into small, actionable steps, and get to work on them. Your inability to do this shows there is a self-esteem gap to be closed.

We’ll continue from here next week, and remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

The middle of the year is quite a significant time because, a month after this one, you’re getting really close to the start of another year.

People are always concerned about their dreams, how years come and go, and whether they’re progressing the way they want to, which takes a heavy toll on their self-esteem and confidence.

Being the best you want to be at anything in life is a daily choice, and doing so means you can establish what you want and follow the path to it every day.

One of the biggest problems is that weeks turn into months, and then into years, without people achieving what they want out of life because they refuse to choose themselves.

People don’t choose themselves because they believe the essence of their life is tied to what other people in their lives want them to be, and what other people will accept.

Their parents, teachers, friends, leaders and community- everyone will always conclude that they have a more important opinion than you and that they know how you should live your life.

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If you lack the ability to choose yourself, you will forever be caught in the web of an unproductive life because you’re only serving the purpose of other people and living a life that has nothing to do with you.

Unproductivity is not just about not working or not achieving things; you can achieve a lot and still be unproductive. Any achievement that doesn’t bring you closer to the fulfilment of who you are as a person is an unproductive achievement.

This type of unproductivity steals you away from yourself and subjects you to low self-esteem for the rest of your life, because the more you do, the less fulfilled you are, and this will wreck havoc on your soul.

This is why, for you to build high self-esteem, it’s critical to know what it means to choose yourself in every situation in life, and this is how to do it.

Know Yourself.

You cannot choose a life you don’t know.

The biggest question in the art of choosing yourself and why that is critical to your self-esteem is that, in answering the question, everything else becomes very clear to you.

The question is simple: What is my life all about?

The ingrained self-esteem is natural; you were created with it; everyone carries good self-esteem from birth, but the lived self-esteem is either good or bad, high or low, depending on what you grow up to believe and how you see and carry yourself.

This is why one of the most important questions in building high self-esteem is: What is your life all about?

You have a life, and it is not until you know what you want that life to stand for that you can stand and say, I am going to choose myself.

Choosing yourself is not at the expense of anyone else; choosing yourself is the reinforcement of your path in life through the standards you created to guide you to where you want to be.

It means that it’s impossible for you to choose yourself when you cannot say what your life is all about.

When you can say, “This is who I am,” and build standards and virtues around truly being that person, your confidence, carriage, and self-esteem will grow.

Accept Responsibility.

It is one thing to know who you are, and it is another to accept the responsibility for who you are. The art of accepting responsibility for your life is the only way to show that you’re choosing yourself, and it’s also one of the major ways to build high self-esteem.

When there is something to fix, fix it.

When there is something to learn, learn it.

When there is something to stop, stop it.

When there is a relationship to break, break it.

When there is a relationship to mend, mend it.

Always be at the forefront of things that reemphasise that you have a life and you’re ready to live it.

Don’t say that this happened because other people made you do it; you will never build your self-esteem if you live that way.

This is what it means to always choose yourself, to be right at the front, making choices based on who you are, not on what other people want you to be.

This is another week to choose yourself, because it is the only way to grow into someone with a life they’re proud of and to build something fulfilling in the long term.

This is also one of the major drivers you need to push yourself to your goals for the rest of the year.

Have an amazing week ahead, and don’t forget, faith, hope, and love will give you all the strength you need.

We are in the middle of the year, and I know that you’re either looking at it with so much gratitude so far, or with so much anger, wondering what you’ve achieved in the last six months.

There is nothing that distorts the way you see life more than the constant rush of emotion that overwhelms you when you think about life – the emotion that makes it seem as if there is nothing good about you in life.

The source of all bad emotion is an internal fault in how you see and carry yourself. I like the example of Thomas Edison’s failure so much because it shows that the ultimate solution lies in how you see yourself and carry yourself.

He failed a thousand times in attempting the same thing and only got it right after that. What did he say? He said he only learnt 999 ways that it won’t work.

He never saw failure; he never looked at himself and said, “You’re a failure.” One of the most important factors in sustaining that level of fortitude, even when things are not working the way you want them to, is having high self-esteem.

Pardon my language, but when you suffer from low self-esteem, YOU’RE COOKED IN LIFE.

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The meaning of low self-esteem is that you’ve made the conclusion that you don’t have what it takes to achieve the best for yourself, so, in your mind, you’re already defeated.

The person suffering from low self-esteem will always seek out how to be the lower version of everything around them because they don’t believe they are meant to be the higher version.

This is the second half of the year, and you will only go harder on your dreams and goals for the year if you believe you’re meant for the best, if you truly see and carry yourself with good esteem, and that is why my focus for the month is to help you get there.

The foundation of everything else that will happen in yourself would be for you to first know: knowledge is power because it opens your eyes – the same with building high self-esteem; you have to become aware, but how do you do that?

Paying Attention.

One of the most important ways to pay attention is to ask yourself WHY.

That is a very critical question that will help you see the deepest intentions behind what you seek to do. If you can pause and ask yourself WHY, you will become more aware of yourself and the implications of how you live your life.

Self-awareness is the first critical step in building high self-esteem and overcoming low self-esteem, and this is how you become self-aware and utilise it.

There are different reasons behind everything, and you need to own up to your reasons and be sure what they are if you don’t want to be the pawn in another person’s game.

Everyone has a context for action and an agenda they’re pushing based on their own experiences and expectations in life; once you find yourself doing things without any of this, you’re already in the wrong mental state of low self-esteem.

Only people with low self-esteem will say, you know, “I am just doing it; I don’t even know why I am doing it.” You can already see that is a dumb thing to say, and it’s because you’re not paying attention.

When you pay attention, you will see why you’re doing it, and it might be your reason or another person’s reason, but it is only when you become self-aware that you can decide whether to do it or not to do it based on what you know.

This is one of the most critical ways to build your self-esteem: by deciding whether you want it, you can gain the confidence to be your own person.

Admitting the Awareness.

Some people pay attention; they know, and then they play dead.

It is not enough to know; you must admit that you know for you to use knowing as leverage to build something.

People can be so far gone in their lack of confidence and trust in their own abilities that they will ignore what they know is true and ask someone else to dictate the course of their life.

This is one of the things: admitting that you’re now self-aware and can see something is critical to taking action based on what you now know.

It’s very critical to ensure that you’re not just gathering passive knowledge without action. So, this is what you should do.

Write down the things you now know, and write along these things what you need to do to become better.

This is one of the most critical ways to admit that you now know something and that you’re going to act on it.

If you want self-awareness to change you, it’s not enough to lip-sync; you must be ready to act on what you know.

Becoming Independent.

Dependence is not about relying on people for food, clothes and shelter alone. The biggest form of dependence in life is when you cannot see yourself and have to rely on others to show you. It’s a more brutal form of dependence.

It is one of the deepest abysses that low self-esteem takes a person because you’re now a tool that other people can use as they want because you don’t have a mind of your own.

Becoming aware of yourself gives you self-knowledge, which is one of the biggest levers for building yourself and boosting your self-esteem.

You cannot build what you do not know; if you keep avoiding the responsibility to become self-aware, you will continually lack the information you need to become a better person.

Independence of the mind, the true independence in life, can only happen when you have high self-esteem, and self-awareness is the foundation of that independence.

Seeing a Clear Path.

Becoming self-aware is like having your eyes opened to what you could not see before.

Before a doctor treats a patient, they will diagnose them to determine what is wrong; only after the diagnosis can they decide what treatment would be suitable.

When you’re not self-aware, it becomes impossible to find a solution because you lack proper diagnosis, and you will become rooted in the same spot in life.

It’s like in Dune: to see the way, you must first become the Madhi.

Self-awareness will allow you to see and understand what it will take to become the better person you seek to be.

To build your self-esteem, you must see a clear path to it and to the opportunities it will give you in life. This is what self-awareness will give you.

As you enter the second half of the year, you should know that nothing is impossible for the one who knows who they are and is ready to lead a life in which they believe they can get what they want.

Become aware, and you will see a clear path to greatness.

Remember that faith, hope, and love will give you all the strength you need.

We are entering the second half of the year, and I want you to see that the foundation of success or failure rests on only one thing: how you see and carry yourself in life.

The end point of everything you engage in life is to make you see yourself in a certain way, and the summary of that outlook is what is called self-esteem.

Today, you’re going to go out, make a decision, choose whether to talk or not, whether to be friends with a person or not, and whether to stand up and speak or remain seated and say nothing.

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Today, you will do a lot of things, and what you do will be determined by a single thing: the summary of how you see yourself in life.

Every human being will take some actions every day, and the actions will always indicate two things: it will show whether you’re acting or you’re being acted upon – this is always the way of a human.

We only have one single driver in life: who we think we are and what we think we deserve. All contributions to self and to others are guided by this single summary of ourselves.

The summary of your life and the proceeds of that summary all depend on how you think of yourself in your mind.

This summary is what is called self-esteem. When it is anchored on the right platform, we call it positive or high self-esteem; when it’s anchored on the wrong platform, we call it bad or low self-esteem.

The single driver to either failure or success in life is your self-esteem, and the level at which it is.

Knowing what it means is not complicated; building it, on the other hand, takes commitment to the work and the principles that uphold it.

High self-esteem means the fostering of the internal belief that you’re a competent and worthy person who believes that they can face and overcome challenges by way of continuous learning and application, and believes that they’re deserving of the best that life has to offer.

Here is an important question: Do you believe this of yourself, or do you even understand what it means?

You must also note that if your answer is no or not clear enough, it may mean you are suffering from low self-esteem or anchoring your self-esteem on the wrong foundation, which is destructive.

Think about the definition again and again, and you will learn as we proceed to the second half of the year.

Of all things, faith, hope and love abide forever, and the greatest of them all is love.

I will talk to you again soon.

Over the past week and in the last two months, I have been faced with situations that are not expected to happen, especially in my condition. Well, the condition is not mine alone, myself and 77 other people.

The point is, I am writing this at a point of enormous physical and mental stress for myself and these 77 other people without a defined timeline on when it’s going to come to an end.

Life will always come with stress, and most of it is going to come unexpectedly, and you’re expected to deal with it.

A lot of people shut down completely; they become so reactive that the only things they can do are dictated by the stress.

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In times of stress and stressful demands by life, you’re expected to leverage the level of your self-esteem to pull yourself up to where you want to be; and where you want to be is a place where you can still dictate the course of the actions you take every day.

We all go through stressful situations every day: there is traffic, you want to go out, but the rain is pouring, an annoying colleague who won’t stop making up false stories about you in the office, a boss that can’t see your effort or recognise you.

Family situations, looking for employment, starting a business and discovering it demands more than you think, relationship breakups, an annoying wife or husband, overactive kids who won’t stop messing up the whole house.

The point is, nobody is exempt; something or someone is going to stress you, and the way you deal with these things on a daily basis will determine the quality of your life and whether you’re able to live your own script or the scripts from these various situations.

The good news is, just like I didn’t fold my arms and complain endlessly about why these things shouldn’t be happening and curse the people responsible for the whole day like some other people will do, you can also manage your stress in a way that suits you.

Before we get to the three things you need to constantly do, there is the foundation for them: you have to admit you’re in a stressful situation. Once you can recognise and admit that, you can go ahead with these three.

Number One: What Can I Control in this Situation?

This is one of the simplest and most important questions you can ask yourself in various situations, all the time.

You can’t control a lot of things; you can’t control government policies, you can’t control what other people will think, say or do.

Your greatest power to remain the best of yourself in any stressful situation is to focus on what you can control, because that is the only way you can thrive.

But the trick is not just knowing what you can control, but actually controlling those things, because the more you control them, the more you can stay in charge of yourself and not let the situation get the best of you.

Many people want to focus on the things stressing them, but if you cannot change them, you will only make your situation more difficult by focusing on things you cannot control.

The real power and control come from focusing on the things within your circle of influence and controlling those things.

Number Two: Who is Responsible For me.

This is the second question that will open your eyes to the enormous responsibility you have as an adult to take care of yourself, no matter the situation.

You’re not just controlling what you can control; you’re ensuring that the things you can control go into you taking care of yourself, because this is how you will thrive.

You’re an adult, right? Your government is bad; they didn’t fix the road to your house. Your friends are wicked; they didn’t involve you. Your girlfriend lied to you, but at the end of the day, the question is: who is responsible for me?

If you believe you’re responsible for yourself, you will act like it; you will stop playing the blame game about anything and focus on giving yourself an advantage in every situation you find yourself in.

If I am responsible for myself, then what can I do to help myself?

It’s an important question you should ask all the time. Your focus can never be on what people didn’t do for you; it should be on what you are doing for yourself and even what you’re doing for other people, because that is how you can create real leverage.

When you wait for other people to do things for you, you’re in a position of disadvantage; when you do for others, you’re creating leverage that will pay off when you least expect it.

Again, controlling what you can control is meant to allow you to act in your own favour.

If you truly believe that as an adult in this life, that you’re responsible for yourself, you have to act like it, and do the things you can do for yourself instead of focusing on what other people are coming to give you.

Number Three: What is my Time Going Into?

This is the final seal, and it’s critical because it is how you can build a huge advantage for yourself over time, in whatever situation you find yourself in.

When others are complaining, your focus should be on what you can control and what you need to do for yourself. Complaining is a waste of your time; it won’t change anything.

A lot of people know what they can control in each situation, and they know what they have to do for themselves, but they’re always so indisciplined and swayed around by the things going on around them that they spend more time on commentary than action.

Your time should be going into the actions that create leverage for you every day.

If you take action, you get results; if you complain and turn yourself into the commentator, you compound problems. You have to constantly ask yourself, what is my time going into?

As you go out for another week and approach the middle of this year, I want you to know that stressful situations will never cease to exist, but it’s how you handle them that matters.

If you can handle them using these three steps, you will always come out on top, wherever you find yourself.

Have an amazing week ahead, and remember that faith, hope, and love will give you all the strength you need.

I will talk to you again soon.

One of the greatest challenges for many people, day in and day out, is that they don’t see their worth and, as a result, end up carrying themselves in ways that hurt them.

You can’t get more than you can see. If they give it to you, you will not be able to manage it, and you will end up losing it.

It means that the worth that you cannot see, even if someone else sees it and they give you the respect, as long as you cannot see it for yourself, you will not retain the respect.

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Who is Better than You?

I think this is one of the most important questions that you need to understand the answer to, because I see people who think my answer is pride, because they don’t understand the dynamics of the question and the answer to it.

The answer to the question: Who is better than you? Is NOBODY.

Nobody is better than you, and nobody can be better than you, and this is the level to which you’re worth in life, but only those who discover this truth get to live their best life.

God created the human kind in His image and likeness, THE WHOLE OF THE HUMANKIND, including you.

God didn’t create one humankind first that is worth this much and create another humankind that is worth that much. He created the whole of humankind at once with a uniform worth.

It means that in your pure, undiluted existence, you’re worth as much as you think you are; nobody is better than you.

People don’t understand this because they judge themselves not as humans God created, but as people the value chains of life created.

People judge themselves as teachers, doctors, businesspeople, engineers, lawyers, and all that. Of course, there can be someone who is better than you in all of these things.

Maybe they’re more gifted at it, maybe they’ve invested more into learning it, maybe they had more opportunities at it; people can be better than you at things, but everyone is worth just as much as God created them with, and it’s the same for everyone.

Your worth is there; it will always be there, because you’re not aware of it doesn’t make it disappear, and because others are aware of theirs doesn’t make them better than you.

This week, I want to show you four important things you should do to become more aware of your worth and express it more.

Number One: Become Aware of Your Own Needs.

When you pay attention to yourself and what you need in life, you will begin to see that you’re also deserving of the best things in life.

Your life is not about what your friends want you to do, not about what your parents and other families want you to do; this is your life, and your awareness of your worth will become central to you when you take yourself seriously every day.

You have to look at yourself every day and ask, “What do I need to be me today?” Then focus on that.

You’re not a stone; you need to become aware of your needs and focus on them if you want to recognise your worth and express it.

Number Two: Accept Responsibility for Your Life.

Awareness is the beginning of your transformation; becoming responsible for yourself is the next critical step you need to take for you to live and express your worth in life.

You will never become aware of what you’re worth when you refuse to take the front role in your life.

You can only know what you’re capable of doing when you agree to take responsibility and do something.

This is how you begin to see your worth and express it. If your mindset is to blame everybody and everything else for your life, you will never be able to see your true self.

You must be willing to take responsibility for yourself at all times to express your worth.

Number Three: Take Action.

Do you want to know how good you are? Take Action. Do you want to know how good you can become? Take action.

One of the biggest investments you can make in yourself is to go out every day and do what you need to do; the more you act, the better you become.

Remember that God created all humankind with the same worth; the reason some people seem to be worth more than others is that some choose to act, while others just fold their arms and do nothing.

When you do nothing, you will get nothing, and you will think you’re worth nothing.

But that is not true; if you want to see more of yourself, go out and take action.

Number Four: Don’t Beg.

If you see yourself as the poor one who always needs to beg for something, you will never be able to see your worth in life. Please, I beg you, don’t be a beggar.

Don’t beg for love, don’t beg for acceptance, don’t beg for anything in life. Let the people around you see your value and always show how valuable you are.

When people cannot see or accept your value, leave and pitch your tent somewhere else.

Let me quickly make an important distinction here: you can ask for help; life is not meant to be lived alone. One of the reasons why people are around you is so that they can help you when you need help.

There is a huge difference between asking for help and being a beggar. It all starts with the mindset.

A beggar is a person who believes that they don’t have any inherent value in themselves; they think their life depends on other people. The only way they see meaning in life is through the scope of what they can get from other people.

Once you start thinking that you get the essence of life through other people, and you refuse to put value first in everything you do. You are a beggar.

Don’t be a beggar; put value first. People will be happy to help you when they know you’re a person of value and not a beggar.

Four steps, coated in your understanding that God created you with great worth.

Go out there this week and be the best of yourself.

Remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

I will talk to you again soon.

Stephania, a young, beautiful Armenian girl from the village of Tsovinar with a promising life ahead of her, suddenly became pregnant in the late 70s with her boyfriend Narek. The pregnancy was unplanned.

Stephania was the fifth child of Davit and Arpi. They were both religious people who held unshaken beliefs in Christian values, values that included a high level of intolerance for pre-marital affairs.

Stephania faced many struggles and criticism from both her parents and the village, which eventually led her to abscond with Narek to another city to start a new life.

Narek and Stephania left Tsovinar and decided to start a life elsewhere. Young, unemployed, and inexperienced, they found life didn’t turn out the way they expected.

After a few months of leaving Tsovinar and struggling together, Narek got fed up with the struggle. If he couldn’t take care of just Stephania now, how was he going to take care of her and the baby they were expecting, he thought to himself.

After so much personal deliberation, Narek made the unfortunate decision to run and leave Stephania to herself with the pregnancy.

Life became more difficult for Stephania. Not being able to fend for herself, she struggled till it was time for her to deliver the baby, and when she did, she decided to give up the baby to the orphanage.

Maria Kelenov grew up without a father or mother, and without any explanation of the origin of her name, because there was none; it was just given for the sake of identity.

Growing up was tough for Maria, as expected, and nothing much was available to her, from education to opportunity for real exposure to life; all that she was given was work.

Some years later, Viktor, a psychologist, came to the orphanage to speak to the children and help them understand themselves, and one of the things he said while he was there stuck with Maria.

“No matter where you are, no matter your circumstance, at the end of your life, whatever you are is what you’ve chosen to be”

Maria wrestled with the words in her head for a long time; her dream was to become a physician, but in her environment it seemed impossible.

The children from the orphanage were eventually shipped out to different places around the world to work as maids, security personnel, or farmers. The ones that got lucky got adopted by families looking for children.

Maria wanted to become a physician, and she heard and held on to what Viktor told them, which changed her life.

Viktor also told them in his session that the circumstances of their birth and their current life don’t mean they are lesser than other people with better means than they have.

Maria read all the books she could lay her hands on at home, and even though her options were limited, she believed that one day she would become a physician.

After a few years, at the age of eighteen, a religious organisation from Italy visited the city and the orphanage. They held a debate competition among the children, and Maria was one of those who came out on top.

The organisation took Maria and some other kids to Italy and offered them the opportunity to receive a proper education. Maria enrolled at the University of Perugia, studied Medicine, and later became a physician.

Years later, she returned to Armenia and started her own practice in the City of Yerevan, and right in front of her office, the words of Viktor were boldly pasted.

“No matter where you are, no matter your circumstance, at the end of your life, whatever you are is what you’ve chosen to be”

The Same Source, the Same Make.

God created everyone in His image and likeness, no matter who you came through, no matter what those people think of you, and no matter who raised you and where you were raised.

The foundation of all humanity is God, and God does not discriminate; He made all alike, and gave all gifts.

No matter what your background says, if you can hold on to the true words about yourself, work every day while looking forward to the best, the best will always come.

There are two core things that God gave all humanity.

The first is that all humans God created are endowed with the ability to be competent, to learn, to overcome challenges, no matter what those challenges are, and to eventually achieve the kind of life they want.

The second is that all humans God created deserve the best that life has to offer. As long as you’re human, you deserve the best, and that is why God gave you the competence to be able to seek that best for yourself.

Maria believed that “No matter where you are, no matter your circumstance, at the end of your life, whatever you are is what you’ve chosen to be” She sought out what she wanted, and she got it.

I believe those words, too, so every day I put in the effort to show that I do.

This is how Maria changed her life: if you believe it too, and you go out every day with that belief and work towards what you want, there is no force in life that can stop you from getting it.

This is how Maria Kelenov changed her life; you can change yours too.

Remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

Have a great week ahead. I will talk to you again soon.

The first place to start is to be sure that you have a definition. Do you have a definition of what you want? If you don’t, then get one.

You cannot measure what is not defined; for you to have any sense of progress, you must first know what progress looks like.

The second thing you must know is that all things are created twice, and you will not move forward until you know this.

When you don’t know that all things are created twice, you will keep attempting to create your realities once, and you will continue to struggle.

This is why the manifestations in the lives of many people differ from what they wish for, because they don’t understand the concept of creation.

Even in the creation of man, the first step was reasoning: God called Himself and said, “Let us create man in a certain defined way,” before man was created.

All things are created in the mind first, and what is in the mind now gets created by physical action. What is in your mind is what you will create.

One of the biggest reasons why you’re not moving forward is because what you’re trying to create physically is different from what you already created in your mind.

You must harmonise; this is very critical. What is in your mind and your physical action must be the same; otherwise, you will only keep struggling without real results.

The fix is simple: take a pause and audit yourself first to see whether your mind is producing what you want to produce physically.

The second thing to do is define what you want.

The third thing to do is for you to systemise everything around you. From the places you go to, the people you mix with, systemise everything to ensure the wheel is rolling you towards your goals and that alone.

Finally, you have to iterate. Do what you have to do, over and over again, to ensure that you get the result you want; you can’t give up; you have to be fully in.

Happy new month. Remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

The biggest test for your self-esteem will always be the people around you, and the biggest defence you have for your self-esteem is your standards.

The human environment is the most powerful environment we have in life. From birth, you came out to your parents, on some occasions, to other siblings too.

Then you grow up in a community; you go to school with others; you go to church; you start life with another person; you work and do everything else in life with people.

People form the basis and progress of our environment and our growth in life; this makes them the most important factor in all of our lives.

For everyone who is going to be great in life, you have to be effective with people; you can be efficient with other things, but when it comes to dealing with other people, you can only think about how best you can be effective, because humans are the most dynamic creatures.

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Here is one of the most important truths that you must accept in life: you cannot escape dealing with people. If you cannot escape dealing with people, it means that you must have guidelines in place to deal with people in a way that will help you in life.

Everything you will learn in life, and every metric and standard you will establish, is first for yourself, and then to guide you in dealing with other people.

Today, we are summarising what we’ve learnt over the last three weeks in a way that it becomes the most profitable for you.

The environment that is most constant in your life is the one where you need guidelines and metrics the most.

The point of having standards is not to be susceptible to people’s ever-changing nature, and the point of building high self-esteem is to be able to uphold the standards that guide you away from that susceptibility.

Your Defense.

Once you don’t have any standards guiding you, you’re wide open to various attacks that are designed to exploit people like you.

People with no standards are prey to other people, and you shouldn’t live another day without having at least three to five things that guide your actions in different areas of life.

People get into a relationship without any standards, and they’re there, wondering why they’re being treated so badly, and they can’t leave.

Most of the time, the person exploiting them is pointing them to look at other people who don’t have it better on their end, and that they’re even enjoying some great perks here that other people are not enjoying, all while they keep exploiting them.

The person being exploited doesn’t know whether to leave or not because the truth be told, they’re looking at the examples around them, and they can see what their exploiter is saying, and they stay and keep suffering.

Your life should not be based on the examples around you but on the standards that you’ve set for yourself.

This is not restricted to relationships alone; it applies to career, business, and even how your parents and leaders treat you.

The only way to be sure whether to stay with something or leave it alone is to have your own standards to compare it against, and the only way to have the strength to leave when it doesn’t meet your standards is to have high self-esteem.

The Final Stage.

Your defence is in two lines, and the two lines are locked together; one must trigger the other, and neither can stand on its own.

High self-esteem will always demand that you set standards for yourself, and once you have those standards, it will keep demanding that you implement them.

This is very critical; if you don’t want to be used against your will or consent in life, you must set standards for yourself and build the self-esteem to uphold them.

People don’t respect the people who don’t respect themselves, and the only way to show people that you respect yourself is when you build standards, and they see you keeping those standards to yourself.

Let me close with the first thing I said in the beginning: The biggest test for your self-esteem will always be the people around you, and the biggest defence you have for your self-esteem is your standards.

The number of serious standards you have and the level you will go to in upholding them will tell your human environment whether you’re worth the best or not.

Go live your own life. I will see you in June.

Remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

Since the beginning of the month, we’ve been travelling from one particular point towards a definite destination, where you understand the impact of setting standards and how they affect you in life.

We’ve covered what it means to have standards, how it is tied to how you carry yourself in life, and what it means to set the ones that can help you grow.

This week, I want to show you 3 key ways to ensure that the standards you now have can always be kept and practised.

You Vs You.

The most important and self-defining competition in life is you against yourself. Most people are concerned about what people think of them, their Dad, Mum, the whole family, friends and all other people around them.

They go on living their lives with the weight of meeting the standards and the opinions of other people until they’re in the later part of their lives, and they discover that they haven’t done anything they would’ve loved to do.

Why does this happen? Because people forget that their lives belong to them first, and they are the ones who must choose how to give part of them and to whom.

Many people, in their bid to be useful, mistake service for selflessness, but true and useful service to others, without long-term regrets attached, comes from intentional, selfish growth.

Standards are for you; they must be tied to what you need to grow. How much intentional growth you’ve done will determine how much meaningful help you can render.

People think that what they think doesn’t matter, that they need to be in the good light of people, even if that means self-denial, but remember, Jesus didn’t deny Himself because people wanted Him to; He did it because it was His fate, and He knew it.

The competition is to know your fate and purpose, and to align everything else with them. The race, the competition is to get to where you want to be, not where people want you to be.

I want you to have this summary before we get to the three things. Standards that are not yours cannot be correctly kept without deep contempt. If it doesn’t point to what you want, it will lead to huge regret.

What are the three ways to ensure you keep the standards that you’ve set for yourself based on the things you want out of life and the requirements to meet them?

Number One: Self-awareness.

Only human beings have the ability to stand outside themselves and think about themselves. You can think about your own thinking, you can take your thought process apart and subject it to scrutiny; that is the superpower of a human being.

Every other species in life is reactive, but the human species can choose to be proactive, to examine itself and determine what it wants to do from that point forward.

Your first tool to keep your standard is to consistently step outside yourself to look at what you’re doing and how much of it belongs to you or helps you become the kind of person you want to be in life.

The choice not to continue to react, the choice not to continue to cry, to act out of emotion and “what I feel”, the choice to truly choose and become conscious of what you want, how to get it and where it will get you.

Because you set the standards doesn’t mean that your environment will stop seeking to control your actions, it doesn’t mean that inflation will drop or that your friends will automatically stop pestering you to do what you don’t want to do, it doesn’t mean that everything will now stop and align for you.

This is why people set standards and never keep any of them; this is why New Year’s resolutions are mostly a waste of paper and ink, because after the writing, there is no conscious effort to stop the unconscious force from operating your metrics.

The way to bring the conscious effort to bear is to become aware of yourself and the things that control you every day.

Take a moment to stand, look at yourself in your mind, and ask: Am I keeping the standards? Do this every day or as often as needed.

Number Two: Self-Responsibility.

In all cases, the practice of self-awareness is an eye-opener to what must be done, and this demand for action always brings self-responsibility to the table.

One of the most critical ingredients for maintaining your standards and for building and sustaining your self-esteem is to accept the demands of your standards and their consequences, too.

In practice, self-responsibility is saying:

This is my life.

I am not going to deflect.

I am not going to delegate.

I am not going to hide.

I am going to own the fact that this is my life, and I am responsible for ensuring it goes in the direction I want.

Self-awareness is the spotter, and self-responsibility is the shooter. We’ll get to the service of self-integrity, because that is how you ensure you don’t leave a scene behind.

To keep your standards, you must constantly accept responsibility for them and their demands.

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Number Three: Self-Integrity.

Remember where we started from today, it’s always you vs you, the core that holds all of life together is that you’re able to keep your words to yourself – even God, your creator, see His word like this, that he exalts it above His name.

“It’s not about what people would say, it’s about if this things support the values and the principles which I have set for myself to practice.”

You can scheme everyone, but you cannot beat yourself on your own life; you can be a hero to all but a fraud to the most important one, which is yourself.

You cannot win a war against yourself when what you’re fighting against are the things you know make you who you are and what you want to be.

First, there are basic principles and decency in life; other than those, what is left to live by is what you have to determine for yourself.

Where do you want to go?

Who do you want to associate with?

How do you want to talk?

What do you want to offer?

What is useful and what is not?

Ultimately, your actions must be guided by who you are and who you’ve chosen to be in life; once that is set, self-integrity is how you ensure you don’t leave an unwanted scene behind.

Once you set your standards, you have to stay consistently aware of how you’re keeping them, accept responsibility for what needs to be done, and, when you say you’ll do it, keep your word and do it.

This is how to keep your standards, and once you can do that, your self-esteem will grow, and you will see, carry and present yourself better in life.

We’ll continue from here next week, and remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

Last week, we started the month with standards, self-esteem, and the role they play in moving you forward in life. (Read it here.) This week, we are going to continue from there.

Standards are the necessity that gives you the leverage to say this is who I am; without them, you cannot say you have a life of your own.

Everyone has the potential to manifest the two kinds of life within them: the first is animal life, which is to eat, sleep, have sex, procreate, repeat, die, or be killed for food.

Or you can manifest the real human life that comes with waking up every day with a vision propelled by the standards you’ve created for yourself, bringing you closer to that vision.

It means that for anyone to truly live up to their human potential, they must first set guidelines that keep them from just waking up every day to do whatever they see.

The standards you practice will show whether you believe that there is something special about you that you want to build, or you believe you’re just another cog in the wheel of life.

The words you say are not the real definition of who you are and what you seek to be in life; the things you do, which will always be propelled by the standards that you live by, are what determine the kind of person you are and the kind of person that you want to be.

The kind of discipline that works to make you the best of yourself in life is the discipline that is based on imposing the standards that you’ve set for yourself, not just you exerting energy and thinking that will get you somewhere in life.

You cannot import standards from the air or from the sea; you can’t just lift them from your friends or even your mentors; there are things you must know first before you build standards for yourself that will help you grow into who you want to be in life.

What are the things you must know and put in place before you build a standard for yourself? This is our focus for the week.

Identify what you want.

If you don’t have an object of focus, the only standard you’ll have is the standard to help you survive life and die, and this is what many people do all the time, they just prioritise whatever they see because they want to marry, build a house, buy cars, have kids and die.

The first step is to identify what you want out of life. The standards I need to become a lawyer are not the same as those another person needs to be a winning politician; the diversity of life means we cannot live by the same standards.

If we cannot live by the same standards, it becomes critical for you to identify the standards that align with what you want and can help you on your journey to your destination.

To build a working standard for yourself, the first question to ask and answer is: What do I really want out of life?

What will it take?

The follow-up to knowing what you want is to ask what it will take to attain it.

These are the questions that shape what your standards in life should be. You cannot build a standard based on what your friends are doing; your standard must reflect that you’re serious about attaining your chief goal in life.

This is one of the core reasons why you need high self-esteem to become the best of yourself, because there are standards that you need to implement that other people will not be cool with, and you need to be confident enough to insist because you need to.

There cannot be a true standard without identifying what it will take to get what you want; this is how you will know what it will take to get things done.

Identify a role model.

You’re now getting close to the time to pen down something as the standards you will follow to get what you want, and you don’t want to do that blindly. This is the time to look at the people who have done what you want to do, or are on the same path as you’re taking.

What have they done right? What can you learn from what they’ve made a mess of? Having role models or mentors who can guide you will help you set the best standards for yourself.

There is nothing new under the sun; what will be is what has been, and what is crooked cannot be made straight. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that you’re the only one; people have been there before.

Having mentors and role models who align with what you want in life will help you avoid unnecessary mistakes that can set you back on your journey.

Find a mentor or role models, ensure they’re aligned with your focus, and learn from them.

Outline the actions.

Your level of seriousness will always be determined by the actions you take, not by what you say. Standards demand that you perform some actions every day to show you believe in what you’re saying.

This is where you determine what those actions are. What are the necessary actions needed to implement your standards?

Do you need to get new clothes? New friends, stop some media consumption, and start a new one. Do you need to work more hours in a day? You have to ask yourself: what actions are needed to implement my standards?

Once you decide what action you need, you get to work and do those things you need. This is how you stay true to your standards.

Keep your words to yourself.

This is what holds everything together for you. This is also one of the critical reasons why you need high self-esteem.

If you set a standard today and break it tomorrow, it’s not only that people will not take you seriously, but you will not take yourself seriously, and life also will not take you seriously.

I am not saying there won’t be days when you fall short of your own standards, but you’ll know you’re keeping your word to yourself when, on those days, your focus is on getting back to your best and not looking for excuses.

If you say you’re going to read a chapter today and you haven’t done it, your focus would not be that you read three chapters yesterday and that some people have even read anything in the last month; your focus would be admitting that you fell short today and making sure you get back to where you should be tomorrow.

The only competition you’re in is the one that ensures that you live up to your own standard, not getting stuck in destructive comparison.

When you say you will do something, do it, no matter how difficult it is, as long as it’s not outside of your reach. You should do it; this is how you build yourself into the strongest version of yourself and keep to your standards.

Standards are necessary for leading a great life, but, most importantly, knowing how to set the ones that will help shape the kind of life you’ll have is crucial.

We’ll continue from here next week, and remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

It’s a new month, the place to start is to ask yourself, what has changed?

The most deadly way to live is to constantly sleep and wake up without any form of review, any form of self-audit that provides scalable insight into your life. One day, you will discover that all that time is gone, and it was used for nothing meaningful to you.

It’s called the cruise.

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If I tell you that you’re living life on a cruise, just being carried by the wind, no plans, no vision, no guidance, you will never agree with me, but this is what most people do, and this is why it must be the first place to start the month.

Leave motivation for a minute and focus on direction; focus on the metrics that lead to the kind of life you want.

The mindset must be that you want to take a step further this month, do something new toward your goals this year, and make progress.

For you to make progress, you need to know where to focus, and this is why it’s very critical that you do a proper audit of yourself before you continue the year.

A new month is one of the best times to do that, a new month, a new week, a new day is always a new opportunity to start again, to look at what needs to be done and to do it.

The Biggest Question on Self-Audit.

What do I audit myself against? This is the biggest question to ask when you pause to analyse where you are and how you should proceed.

This is a critical part of everyone’s life. Is it your life or is it your friend’s life? Is it your life or is it social media, families and other people’s lives?

The only way to answer that question is by presenting the metrics and the standards that you follow, that shows that your life is your life, and you’re not just living based on what other people are telling you.

For you to have a proper audit of yourself, you must have standards and metrics that you judge yourself against, and the most important part of this is that those standards and metrics must be the ones you’ve chosen for yourself based on who you are.

What you build depends on the standards you hold yourself to; the mindset you develop is determined by those standards, and the best way to judge and guide yourself is to set the right standards that fit what you want out of life.

With Standard.

The only way to demonstrate high self-esteem in life is to be in charge of yourself and not be susceptible to the whims and caprices of your environment.

This is exactly what you’re going to achieve with high self-esteem; it takes positive self-esteem to stamp your feet and say, “This is what I am doing,” irrespective of what others are saying.

Everyone who has achieved great things in life has, at some point, come to a stage where they have to say this is what it is and keep to their words on that thing.

With standards, you can coordinate your efforts and focus on what matters most to you, and the more results you see here, the better your self-esteem will become.

Building your own standard for living your life is both an action that builds self-esteem and a way to demonstrate positive self-esteem.

With standards, you know what you’re doing, your actions are calculated, and those actions go directly into building you.

Without Standard.

The possibility of building positive self-esteem without standards that guide your daily actions doesn’t exist.

Setting standards for yourself is a necessity in life, and without it, you’re missing one of the most critical components of being in charge of yourself.

This is how life looks without your own standards: you’re following trends, chasing shadows in the bid to belong, not being sure of what you want and what you’re doing, constantly looking out for validation from other people.

Your efforts cannot be calculated when there are no standards guiding them into a consistent pattern that can produce great results.

Being able to build a consistent pattern is a critical attribute for doing well in life, and the way to ensure that is to have standards that guide you and support the kind of person you want to be.

Without a standard, you cannot be sure of what you’re doing; when you’re not sure of what you’re doing, your actions cannot build high self-esteem.

As you start a new month, I want you to understand that to build high self-esteem, be the kind of person you need to be, and lead a great life, you cannot do any of these without a guiding factor for whatever you want to do.

This is where having standards comes in. Look at yourself, determine what you want, identify the standards that support it, and ensure you keep your words to yourself; this is the only way standards help you.

Have an amazing month ahead, and remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

Kemi and Funmi both set out on a business venture, and after a few months, Kemi failed in her three attempts to scale, but she kept going. On the other hand, everything was well for Funmi until her first challenge after a year.

Before Funmi had her first challenge, she was on top of the world, but that status changed quickly with just one challenge, unlike Kemi.

Kemi kept going and kept iterating until she found something that worked for her after 9 months of trying and failing — Funmi, on the other hand, packed up her business after her first challenge within one year.

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Lessons From Funmi.

Funmi is like so many other people, and I want you to pay attention to these lessons if you’re like her.

The first lesson from Funmi is that Funmi couldn’t separate her results from herself.

Competence is not always about right now and right here; it is a mindset you wear that helps you live a great life.

If you make the mistake of thinking that, because you have a challenging time, you’re not a competent person, you will always give up, like Funmi.

It’s critical to know that the real meaning of competence is your ability to learn, apply the lessons, iterate, over and over again, until you get the result that you want.

To live this way, you must carry competence as a mindset, not as something you apply only once in a single situation.

The right knowledge sustains the right mindset; you have to understand what competence means in practice for it to guide your actions.

A competence mindset would’ve taught Funmi that a challenging time only places demand on you to become better at whatever you’re doing.

It would have taught her that being a competent person doesn’t mean just being good at a business or career, but knowing that you’re good enough for life and that you can learn whatever is required to overcome any challenges you face at any point in your life.

Lessons From Kemi.

The ability to separate yourself from results is key to living a great and fulfilling life.

Kemi knew one thing and acted on it: results should affect your plans, but not your belief in yourself.

The ability to separate yourself from the failure, knowing that you’re different from the plan and the challenging time, gives you the leverage to step aside, look at the failure, learn from it, plan again and act on your goals.

To achieve this, you must believe first that you’re a competent person and that you’re deserving of the best things that you’ve designed for yourself in life.

Kemi recognised that failure is temporary, and for you to know that failure is temporary, you must first have the innate belief that you’re inherently competent.

The ability to see failure as something temporary requires that you first see yourself as competent, irrespective of the most recent outcome.

Results are Results.

One of the major reasons why failure means self-destuct for most people is because their entire self-image was built on previous success.

The competence mindset is a mindset, not an outcome of a particular result. Results are results, and success in one situation only means that you’ve planned properly; on the other hand, failure in another situation only means you need a better plan.

Your ability to see results as results, not as a definition of who you are, is an invaluable asset in your persistence in growth and in getting what you want.

Finally, this week, I want you to know that going far in life doesn’t start with motivation, sustained by discipline or tenacity. If you don’t have a competent mindset, you will always mentally think you’re not good enough.

The foundation for going far and always staying motivated is to first know what competence means and carry the mindset of a competent person.

Knowing that you can step aside, learn, and do it again and again without personalising failure will help you come back to do a proper remontada.

I will talk to you again soon, and remember, faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

Last week, you learnt what competence means and what it means to be at the pinnacle of competence, and how everything needs to shift from a deficient to a competent mindset.

This week, the focus is on learning the key steps you must take to build a competent mindset.

There is an understanding you have of yourself when you wake up every day that makes you act in a certain way; you should know the actions that must flow from understanding that you’re a competent person.

These are things you must know and do to build a competent mindset.

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Number One.

Define a standard for yourself.

A competent person knows what they’re doing, and they know where they’re going.

If you want to build a competent mindset, you cannot be here and there at the same time; you cannot be flowing freely within every scope and standard. You must define something for yourself.

Knowing exactly what you want enhances not just your chances of getting those things done, compounding results that will help you carry yourself better in life, but also helps you conserve vital energy from waste.

Competence becomes hard to apply when there is no defined scope, which will usually lead to self-doubt, not because you’re not good enough to do what you need to do, but because you don’t actually know what you want to do.

The mindset must be applied to something defined; this is the only way to exercise it competently and in a useful way.

The definition of a definite pursuit that suits your goals and purpose in life is critical to building and sustaining the mindset, because when that is not done, you will eventually reach a place where self-doubt erodes every confidence you’ve built.

Number Two.

Identify the requirements necessary for your defined standards.

You build a competent mindset by doing the things necessary for you to live your life, not the things other people want you to do.

Your innate belief in competence will improve when your actions support the things that show that you’re a competent person, not just achievement for the sake of it.

You can do every other thing well, but if you don’t do the things that matter to you the most, you will become mentally fatigued, and you’ll believe you’re not good enough.

There are people with good jobs and earning well, but are filled with dissatisfaction every day because there is always a lingering feeling that they’re not doing what matters the most to them.

To build and sustain a competent mindset, you need to identify the things that support the standards and the kind of life you’ve set out to live, and do them.

The actions your mindset generates are meant to support and sustain it. When you constantly abandon the requirements of your standards for other things, it becomes a self-betrayer that hurts how you see and carry yourself in life.

Number Three.

Understand the demand on you and commit to learning.

If you want to build a house, you have to first count the cost, or you will eventually run into trouble.

Counting the cost is critical because there are demands on everything in life, and to build and sustain a competent mindset, you have to understand what the demands of your standard are and be sure you’re willing to accept them.

If you’re not willing to accept a particular demand and commit to learning what you have to do, you can simply change those standards and focus on something else.

The implication of having a standard you’re not willing to accept the demands to implement is that it will make you look like a fraud over time, and this will hurt your self-esteem.

You won’t see yourself as a competent person when you know what to do but refuse to do it.

It’s critical that you’re willing to commit to learning the demands and focusing on meeting them. Count the cost and be ready to pay it.

Number Four.

Consistent execution.

The more action you take on the things that matter to you, the more competent you’ll become as a person. There is no way around this one; you have to constantly do the things that you claim matter to you the most.

Just working is not going to help you become more competent and sustain a competent mindset; working on the things that matter is the ultimate hack to building and sustaining that mindset.

You can be doing a lot of things, but not doing the things that touch the depth of your soul and make you feel alive.

This level of competence transcends the competence to make money or do business; it’s the level of competence that reaffirms your fitness to life, and it can only come when you define who you are and do the things that support that definition.

You have to do something that goes into the core of who you are every day to build and sustain a competence mindset.

This will help you become better.

Number five.

Don’t live in comparison.

Finally, you have to draw your competence from the real source: God’s infinite intelligence. The reason why you can have a progressive competence mindset is that you’re from the source.

Because competence is progressive and not finite, the right source to draw all your inspiration from is your creator and not what other people are saying or doing.

Trying to compare yourself to others will only lead you to look down on yourself, and that is not an action that builds competence.

The focus for you every day should always be to find inspiration to be better than where you were yesterday, and the only way to source that inspiration without looking down on yourself is to understand that you came from competence.

Understanding your source is the most important key competence boosting action, and your only safe way to avoid destructive comparison.

Once you understand that you come from a competent source, you’ll avoid looking down on yourself and always seek inspiration from your source when the need arises.

Have an amazing week ahead, and remember that faith, hope, and love will bring you all the strength you need.

I will talk to you again soon.