Your Self Esteem Will Thrive
On Zero-Based Strengths

Your self esteem is a feeling you have about yourself. It’s based on the ongoing self-appraisal you conduct regarding your worth and value as a person. In other words, it’s a current summary of all the pluses and minuses you believe to be true about yourself.

This also means that your self esteem is based on the many beliefs about yourself—whether true or false—that you hold in your rational mind.

Beliefs are self-invented

What most people fail to realize is that every single one of their beliefs is self-invented. This is made possible by fact that your rational mind cannot distinguish truth from fiction. In other words, your rational mind is completely incapable of distinguishing the difference between what is “real” and what is simply imagined.

What we’re saying here is that when you have thought a thought often enough, it simply transforms itself into a belief. Therefore, any one or more of your beliefs could have been created by you purely out of having a thought over and over again. Let’s take the way you view your strengths and weaknesses as an example.

At first blush the above statement might seem preposterous. But it can be validated quickly and easily by simply asking you to describe how you would measure the amount of “darkness” in a room. Having asked this question of several thousand people over the past 30 years, we can confidently predict your response. You will suggest some way of measuring “light,” such as with a light meter. But that wasn’t our question, was it.

To further illustrate our point, let’s see if you can tell us how to measure the amount of “cold” in a room. Guess what. It's the same story. It cannot be done. It’s possible to measure the amount of heat anywhere… on a scale upwards from absolute zero. But it’s not possible to have a temperature reading on the negative side of absolute zero.

Our next question, obviously, is how would you measure weakness? Just as with the above attempts to measure the amount of darkness or cold, there is simply no way for us to measure a weakness! In the end, only strengths exist… up from a base of zero. Now, what does that do to your self confidence!

As we pointed out above, your rational mind is completely deceivable… it cannot distinguish truth from fiction. Your intuitive mind, however, is quite the opposite. It cannot be deceived.

This means you may not want to trust what your head thinks are your strengths, but you can trust completely the answers you get from your inner self regarding your true strengths. You just have to know how to ask the right questions to discover what your intuitive mind knows to be your real strengths.

Here’s a simple exercise—a question, actually—that will allow your intuitive mind to immediately reveal to you a few of your most important and meaningful strengths.

Begin by bringing to mind an individual for whom you hold the utmost respect and admiration. This person can be living or dead and may or may not even know you exist. On a separate sheet of paper, take a moment right now to describe in writing at least six of the qualities you see in this person that you admire the most.

You might want to take a few more minutes right now to get to know the real you a bit better, because the list you have in front of you is actually a description of your own greatest strengths. The intuitive principle here is that you cannot recognize a strength in someone else that you, yourself, do not possess.