Excerpt From the Revised & Updated Edition of
My Feet Aren’t Ugly
“So you want to be yourself and still be liked. Is this possible? What if you really liked yourself and if others liked you, great, and if they didn’t, would that be okay too? Wouldn’t that be a nice feeling not to care if everyone liked you? The way to do this is to develop self esteem.”
It’s exhausting to always be doing things to get the approval of others to feel good about yourself. You wake up in the morning and look in your closet and what you are going to wear depends on what your friends will think. You’re thinking of liking this guy in school, but your friends don’t think he’s cool. A lot of your decisions depend on what others think. What if one friend says one thing and another says something completely different. What are you going to do?
What if you just made decisions based on what you liked? How would that feel to you? A little scary? I’ve always noticed that when people do things and they are very confident about their decisions, no one questions what they have decided. When we look outside of ourself for approval, it means we are lacking in self esteem.
So, check it out, see if you are looking for the approval of others. If you are, try to move through your fear of your friends judging you or not liking you because you are you. Start showing up as you and see what happens. If you lose a few friends, are they friends you want to have around anyways? Probably not! We want to hang around people that like us for being us. Just realize that if you aren’t yourself around your friends it effects your self esteem. We always want to be able to do things that empower us, not take our power away.
