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Accept yourself for who you are:
Your first step is to accept yourself. You are who you are and peace comes when you accept that. Some folk use this as an excuse to become lazy and give up on life because they accept a low pedigree as the reason not to be successful. Accepting yourself for who you are, does not mean you can’t improve on yourself. It simply means you don’t have to be someone else to be successful. You can make a success out of who you are.
The same way no two finger prints are exactly the same, no two people are the same. That makes you very special. You are one in over six billion people. If that’s not special, I don’t know what is. Beyond that, you have a quality that makes you, who you are, and once you discover what that is, work on it. Nobody holds the monopoly on ‘cool’. That’s just what they want us to think so we keep worshipping them. Find your own brand of cool and sell it. Stop trying to be someone else (don’t care how good they look). Add value to yourself so you can determine what the next phase of ‘cool’ will be.
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Go to where you are celebrated:
If you are short, dark and on the heavy side, don’t make a bunch of skinny light skinned models your only clique of friends just to be popular, you won’t feel good about yourself when you guys go clothe-shopping (not a rule, just to make a point). Find people that celebrate you, accept you and are happy to have you among them. Whenever you are the third wheel, it hurts your self-image and makes you feel that you are not good enough. Find out what makes you feel good about yourself and stay with it. There’s a difference between what makes you feel good and what makes you feel good about yourself. drinking a litre of coke or eating a 100g chocolate bar would make you feel good but will not make you feel good about yourself. While going to the gym might not make you feel good, but will definitely make you feel good about yourself.
Success makes us feel good about ourselves, so do everything to continue to have the feeling of success. Add daily to yourself. Make setting daily goals a priority, because in achieving them you scoop up the high of success. Simple things like giving yourself a target to finish a book in a certain time, taking a two-week course, being nice to a mean neighbor…. We were all made to be conquerors, the more things you conquer, the better you feel.
There are so many depressing things in the world, so much pressure that makes you just feel down about yourself. It helps to have the knowledge that there is a divine power that wants you to succeed and is willing to help you succeed. Some people argue that it’s a type of ‘head in the sand’ syndrome, but my argument (since this is not a theological treatise) is if my belief in a God will help me face more, handle more, and survive better, how are you helping me by telling me that there is not? If you chose not to work hard because you believe some divine presence will do it, that’s a problem. But if you take the ‘heaven helps those who work hard’ theory, then you’ll be ok. Believing that you have help enables you to deal with more, which makes you feel better about yourself and your situation.
Everyone deserves to feel good about who they are because we all are worth quite a lot. No human life is more worthy or important than any other. It is not what we possess that makes who we are, it is who we are that makes what we have worth anything. If anyone is trying to put you down for any reason, please realize that you are not what they say you are, you are what you believe you are, and you are ‘all that and a bag of chips’.
