I was asked a question in The Membership earlier today about the link between self belief and self esteem and anxiety and I wanted to share some of my thoughts with you here.

These words are talked about so much and thats usually because we are looking for an answer on how to improve ours!

If you look up what these actually mean you will find there are many different explanations and variations depending on who you follow or read about.

As you may already know about me I am a simple soul and like to take everything back to as simple an explanation as I can see with my own understanding and experience.

For me these words could be substituted for many things like confidence, self love, self image and so on, but it all ultimately leads to the same thing for me which I want to share with you below.

Imagine you have a graph and going up you have love and compassion and on the lower base level we have endless amounts of criticism and judgment.

As a human being we will always fall into the trap of judgement, particularly about ourselves and so its not about looking for the perfect finished article (which doesn’t exist, or does it?).

However, we always have the gift of perspective and constant change possible for each and every single one of us.

If you were to question your level of self esteem or belief in any given moment I would probably ask you to reflect by asking;

How much do you like yourself right now? 

How much do you value yourself right now?

How do you see yourself right now? 

What are your beliefs about yourself right now?

I am sure you get the picture, and the reason I add ‘right now’ onto it is because this will always change, it’s never static.

This is why I would never describe a person as having, or not having low self esteem or self belief as I accept and see human nature and one momentary experience after the other, no two moments the same.

This is good news as this means that by default there is always opportunity for a new experience, way to see ourselves and a different way to treat ourselves - with more compassion!

​If we all gave ourselves a daily dose of compassion as a general rule, the difference in our experience of life would instantly be uplifted, and filled with so much more contentment and peace of mind.

Often people don’t see the value in this and the power it has to show ourselves compassion, and yet when it comes to others we often instantly see the value in it?

In fact we will talk about it as though it’s a necessity for us to support others, see the good in them, reach out to them and be a shining light and yet it somehow seems alien, unnecessary or maybe even too indulgent to do it for ourselves?

We were not born this way!

If this is something you find challenging you have ‘learnt’ or ‘thought’ your way out of naturally seeing your core nature of love and compassion.

The reason I said above does the perfect finished article exist, is become in my eyes it does but maybe not in the way you initially think of perfection!

Part of my own experience of showing myself a tonne more love, compassion and understanding was that I could accept that I was not and did not need to be perfect, and in actual fact it is all of me that makes me perfect just the way I am.

Instead of always thinking I need to be better and do better, I am much more able to lower my expectations and the pressure on myself so that it is much easier to see myself as good enough just as I am, I change the goalposts not myself.

One more thing to mention is that I know some people will read this and say there are some things people do need to change and there are habits that I have that I don’t want to continue with, they are not good for me or my life.

That's OK so do I. These are my habits and they can change without me having to be a super human and in fact the irony is, if I lower my expectations, the pressure I put on myself and accept myself and that I am always doing the best I can given my thinking at the time, I just seem to make better choices in life anyway.

That is what happens when our mind gets quiet we make great choices!

A large part of getting a quieter mind starts with that daily dose of compassion so you can start NOW, right this very second!