Top 7 Ways to Boost Your Self-Esteem

Everyone needs to feel a sense of self-worth and healthy self-esteem in order to live a successful, contented life. While some people look to others and their material success to gauge their own self-worth, the most important assessment is how you feel about yourself.

There are many things you can do to boost your own self-esteem. By taking the steps to build your own self-worth and well-being, you're practicing the best form of preventative medicine possible.

Here are the top seven ways to boost your self-esteem:

1. Do things you love. The more time you spend doing things you love to do, the better it makes you feel. Doing the things you enjoy causes your brain to produce higher levels of endorphins, which are chemical in the brain that increase your sense of joy and well-being.

Engaging in activities we love also helps us recall other times we've done them, and those memories increase our self-esteem. Our favorite activities are often things we do well, which is a factor in increasing our self-esteem.

2. Strengthen your strengths. When you exercise your strengths, they become stronger and your self-esteem rises as well. We all like to feel proud of the things we excel at and those things cause us to feel better about ourselves.

Spend time working on, building, and renewing your strengths, and your inner approval rating will soar.

3. Surround yourself with positive people. Positive energy is like an electrical charge as it spreads from one person to the next. When you spend time in the company of positive people, your own attitude will lift to match theirs, and you'll be charged from their energy.

4. Measure your worth based on yourself, not on others. Everyone sees the world based on his or her own biases and circumstances. When someone pours negative thoughts on another person, it's a greater reflection on their own deficiencies than the person they're attacking.

Basing your self-esteem on another person's opinions is never a good idea. Instead, take your value from what you know to be the truth about yourself from the inside out, not the other way around.

5. Believe in yourself. Trust in your ability to achieve whatever you set your mind to accomplish. When you believe that you're capable of attaining your goals, you unleash the ability to do so from deep within you, so trust in the process.

6. Set your thoughts on the things you want to attract. Albert Einstein determined all things are made of energy and energy attracts more of the same energy. Focusing your thoughts on the things you desire in your life keeps the energy of those things moving toward you.

7. Speak affirming thoughts to yourself. We've all heard the phrase "act as if." Affirmations work on that principle. Instead of saying, "I want to be happy," say, "I am a happy person." Say it out loud everyday.

You'll begin to reprogram your subconscious to believe it as the truth, and soon you'll be feeling that truth every day.

These simple steps to boost your self-esteem are easy to put into practice in your day-to-day life. Start today and build your self-worth and self-esteem into the foundation of your character. Your life will never be the same.