Dear friends
I have always wondered why things happen to us in bad ways, now I understand that not everything turns out well does not mean that we will always go badly.
In life we are alone. None of the people who are at your side today will be with you forever. Children grow up and leave home, couples separate, and finally, everyone dies. You can not condition your happiness to others. You have to think of yourself first always. And I do not say it as a call to selfishness, but simply to say that the best way to help others is to feel good about yourself.
In addition, true happiness can only come from oneself. It means that you are not truly happy if your mood depends on third parties. And of course, it's the other way around: you can not make others happy either. It is something very personal, that comes from within.
It is very easy for anyone to live in permanent reaction to the environment. We react through our emotions. We receive news that is contrary to us and we feel angry, stressed, ashamed, or afraid. On the contrary, they give us positive information and we feel euphoric. All this comes from not thinking seriously about things. We just identify the emotions and put a quick explanation about the causes. For example, "I'm stressed because the bus is late, and I'm going to be late for work again."
Learning to know yourself better means trying to escape from emotion and stopping to think for a moment about what really worries or makes us happy. It is not an easy task, but if you try to do it for small emotions, you will understand what I am talking about, and little by little you can do it for more emotionally charged situations. If I fly to the previous example, you may be able to realize that stress will not make you arrive earlier at work, and that it is an emotional response that does not help you.
Through your emotional reactions, you will learn to know yourself better, beyond what you thought you knew about yourself (your personality, your faults, your tastes).
After knowing you better, the next step is to accept yourself as you are. And this time I mean all aspects of your life, both emotions, your personal situation, or even your own physical appearance. No one is perfect (or everyone is, depending on how you look at it). Above all, there are many aspects of your life that you can not change, so accept them and stop worrying about them.
Accept that you will never achieve perfection and conform are two very different things. One of the best ways to feel good is to try to improve the aspects that we do not like and that we can change. Do not you like your work? You can change. Is not your relationship good? You can try to improve it, and if not, you can end the relationship. Do you feel that you weigh too much? You can exercise more and eat better.
Do not fall into the trap of complaining, something unfortunately very common in our reflexes. If something is not going for you, you only have two alternatives: either learn to live with it or try to change it. The complaint serves absolutely nothing, it is a temporary relief that does not solve your long-term problems.
The fourth and last advice to get a better self-esteem, and as a consequence, feel good about yourself is to forget the opinion of others. We give a lot of importance to what other people say about us, whether they are distant or close. We even imagine what they may be thinking and we make films about how they see us (and it is usually a negative vision that we anticipate).
The good news is that the opinion of others does not matter at all. It's not that we really care about others (which is also true). Simply, the opinion they have about us is irrelevant, however close they may be. As we said before: in life we are alone. Nobody lives our feelings, nor suffers our sufferings. Therefore we should not let the opinions of others (positive and negative) have the least impact on our happiness.
It is worth adding here that we are talking about emotions. The rational arguments of others do not have to ignore them.
The bad news is that it is very difficult to learn not to take personally what others tell us, and not to get emotionally involved due to the opinions of others. To achieve this, perhaps the best first step is to learn to talk with others without judging or making things personal. If you succeed, you will help your interlocutors also to be more measured, and what is more important: you will keep a certain distance that will protect you from your lapses.
To conclude the article, I would like to summarize what I think the main idea is: your happiness depends only on you. Forget excuses, and external people. You are the one who has the power to change. The way is that you learn to know yourself better, to accept yourself, and to improve, ignoring what the rest of the world can say about you.
