Self Esteem

In order to germinate and grow a seed needs moisture heat and oxygen (my days as a science teacher come in handy at times ).
If any of these are missing the seed will not survive.

In order to thrive seeds need more than the basics they need space , sunshine and nutrients.

We are not much different to plants, we too need moisture , heat  oxygen and food ( as most of us cannot manufacture our own food yet,  that  story is for another day soon ) .
 Back to us as I said  we too need the basics to survive. And like plants we need more in order to thrive. To grow to our full potential to thrive we need large amounts of self esteem.
  If we are especially lucky we will have grown up in an environment which nourished this aspect of our development through copious ' sprinklings' of appropriate praise. We will have felt loved for being us , for our unique nature.  In my experience though this 'perfect' environment is rarely if ever attained.
 Most of us have limited self esteem some ( like me ) who grew up in environments where praise was actually feared ( in case you would get a swollen head ) find it difficult to even acknowledge that we need praise and even more difficult to accept it .
 It takes work for us  to begin to acknowledge our own worth , it takes a lot of work to undo the conditioning.
However we will never flourish until we do that work, we will never be able to make our true contribution to the world until we acknowledge our worth and establish good self esteem .
We need to learn to like and in time love ourselves as we are warts and all.
As we begin to love ourselves we feel more worthy of love from others. When we feel unlovable it doesn't matter how much someone tells us of their love we cannot accept it or believe it until we have begun to feel our own self love inside.
This has been my experience , until I began to work on my own self esteem ( on going process ) I just couldn't believe people when they complimented or praised me.
Until I could look at myself in the mirror and say I love you ( and mean it) I couldn't really believe anyone who said  "I love You ".
Now I believe that developing  self love is one of our most important tasks in life because when we learn true self love we put a value on ourselves. We acknowledge that we are individual and special , each one of us is a 'one off ' with unique gifts and talents . We all came into the world with a purpose and in order to fulfil that purpose we must believe in and love ourselves.
We must recognise our gifts and talents and honour them . To do that we must know our gifts and talents.
If you haven't done it before take the time to work on your own self esteem , start by writing yourself a love  letter in which you tell yourself what you love , admire, value and honour about yourself. Then read yourself the letter out loud and take it in. Bask in the positive aspects of yourself , soak up the warmth of your own worth. Then watch as your life begins to reflect your new self belief and love.
Ps  If you can bring yourself to read your letter out to someone else all the better you will really be on your way to true self esteem and worth.