Do you like yourself? Do you love yourself? Are you happy with who you are?

These basic questions might dredge up lots of negative memories for you if you grew up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family.

When the focus is on the addiction in the family, everyone is swirling around trying just to stay afloat. Bad behaviors that we learned from those in our alcoholic family might have stayed with us through adulthood.

I’ve talked about the laundry list of Adult Children of Alcoholics, but it’s worth revisiting the list again. One of the items on the list is “we judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.”

When you think about your self-esteem, do you think it’s good?

Are you spending time in building up your self-esteem and learning new skills to help strengthen it?

Many of us are busy and running around doing through our busy days.

Strengthening your self-esteem is a daily activity that can be tied to eating healthy, exercising, meditating, reading, and making positive decisions on what’s healthy for you. This includes setting boundaries.

Where we end and another begins is critical to ensuring that we have good self-esteem. If we’re not careful, we can fall into codependent behavior where we spend more time on another person’s problems or well-being than our own.

The boundaries that we build are critical to our self-esteem. If we’re worried about our spouse and our children, what’s going to happen to us?

If we sacrifice our well-being for others, then we’re setting ourselves up for failure.

But if you don’t know where to begin building your self-esteem, I have two suggestions that will help.

Each day take the time to write in a journal. If you spend 10 minutes in the morning before your day starts, you can check-in on how you’re feeling and how you want to deal with any problems you’re struggling with.

A daily journal is easy to do. You can write on a computer, your phone, or in a physical book. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re taking the time for yourself every day.

I also recommend spending time to meditate each day. Guided meditation of only 10-15 minutes a day can help you in so many ways. Download the Calm app for your phone or listen to one of Deepak Chopra’s 21-day meditation sessions.

If you have no spent time building up your self-esteem, then my recommendations might seem overwhelming to you. But if you take a few minutes to check-in with yourself every day, then you’ll be helping yourself by building lifelong habits.

Taking the time to help yourself is hard. I do understand that.

For today, take one of my suggested ideas and see how it makes you feel. What do you have to lose?

Like what you’ve read? Be sure to check out my other posts in my Let Go and Be Free blog.