Customers are those people you depend on for your livelihood and fulfillment. They include the consumers who buy your products and services, your co-workers, your family members, your friends and the members of our community, just to name a few. The key is to bring value to them and in turn to bring value to yourself. Remember: value is anything that increases the chances that the other person will achieve what they want to achieve. In order to bring more value to others, you must continually see greater value within yourself. This refers to your self-esteem. Self-esteem is the worthiness you recognize within yourself. Alan Weiss, author of "Managing For Peak Performance" said, "Self-esteem is the strategy for greater success." Joseph Campbell, the author of many, many books, once said, "The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are." The key is to understand the enormous breadth and depth of value you bring to every person you interact with and to continually build your self-esteem. Here are six ways to strengthen your self-esteem:

1. Identify Your Strengths
2. Recall Your Successes
3. Accept Yourself
4. Accept Other People
5. Act With Integrity
6. Choose Your Comrades Carefully
7. Continually Improve

IDENTIFY YOUR STRENGTHS

It amazes me how many high-level executives are not intimately familiar with what they do well. They base their self-esteem on their title, income, position, level of authority or the organization they work for, but they do not see what is particularly unique about themselves. Consequently, when one of these external labels is threatened they begin to excessively worry. Many times an individual will say to me, "If I lose this job, I don't know what I will do. I can't just replicate this level of success in another company." This causes them to become hesitant in expressing their true opinion or doing what they think is the right thing to do.

I encourage you to base your self-esteem on your internal strengths. Here is a very simple exercise to do this. Take out a blank sheet of paper and write down your answers to these two questions:

1. What do I do well?
2. What are my strongest personal characteristics?

RECALL YOUR SUCCESSES

This is another relatively simple way to strengthen your self-esteem. Recall a time in your life when you overcame the odds, you did something that other people thought you could not do or that you thought you could not do. Then answer these questions:

1. What was the goal?
2. What obstacles stood in the way of achieving your goal?
3. How were you able to persevere?
4. What lessons did you learn along the way toward achieving this goal?
5. What emotions did you experience in achieving the final result?
6. How can you apply the lessons learned toward achieving better results?

ACCEPT YOURSELF

Some people never stop berating themselves. They find something that they are not good at and focus all of their attention on that weakness. As a result, they don't see the value they can bring to other people. This becomes a vicious cycle and continually lowers their self-esteem. Why not just accept yourself as you are right now? I have several faults that I could concentrate on all day, which is the way I used to behave. For example, I am terrible with directions. I get lost, miss an exit, go the wrong way, forget where I parked the car and do an endless number of other irritating things that waste time and energy. My friends have a field day with this characteristic of mine. I used to allow it to make me feel bad about myself to the point that I was not being as positive of a contributor to other people as I could be. Then several years I just decided to accept myself as I am. If I get lost, then I'm ok with that. Another weakness of mine is I forget details like leaving my cell phone or my briefcase or my Franklin Planner in a meeting room or a hotel room or forgetting where my car keys were placed. It used to drive me crazy, but I've learned to be comfortable with my weaknesses. Rather than getting enormously frustrated with myself, I simply accept that this is part of who I am. I encourage you to accept yourself as you are with all of your strengths and weaknesses.

ACCEPT OTHER PEOPLE

Another way we attack our self-esteem is to constantly find fault in other people. Constantly gossiping and talking badly about other people is an incredible waste of our time and energy. It is literally like eating chocolate all day long. The short-term rush we feel is the urge to make ourselves look better by making others look worse. However, in a very short period of time we realize that our behavior is just as negative and destructive as the one we are criticizing. Then like a person who is drunk we have only two choices: stop criticizing or continue gossiping. The first requires conscious effort and the admission that are behavior is not valuable and the second requires only that we continue to neglect that what we are really doing is destructive. Given these options it is always easier to just have another drink or give another criticism. The problem is that over the long-run these behaviors erode our self-esteem.

ACT WITH INTEGRITY

The fastest way to strengthen your self-esteem is to simply do what you believe is the right thing to do at any given moment. Conversely, the fastest way to weaken your self-esteem is to simply do what you believe is the wrong thing to do at any given moment. Self-esteem is a muscle like any other muscle in your body. If you understand the real power of strong self-esteem over the long run, then I encourage you to pull back before moving into action and to decide for yourself what you think is the right thing to do.

Sidney Poitier was offered an acting part that would have paid him $750 a week. This was back in the 1940s when he was only earning about a tenth of that by washing dishes in a restaurant. However, he turned the part down because he did not believe in the role that he was being asked to portray. His integrity was intact, but his finances were in a shambles. This decision so impressed the agent that he went on to represent Sidney for the next fifty years. It led to an incredible career. But even if it had not turned out so well, Sidney would still have his strong sense of self-esteem and would always be in a position to offer value to other people.

CHOOSE YOUR COMRADES CAREFULLY

When I was in high school and college I used to hang out with some people who took great delight in making fun of me. For some reasons that I still don't fully understand, I allowed them to do it. Sometimes I even encouraged it. Then I realized that after every event with them I felt a little worse about myself. I was literally letting them take a piece of my self-esteem with them after every get together. At that point I just stopped being with them. It was a sudden and quick break. Maybe I could have explained to them why I was stepping out of the relationship, but nonetheless I immediately enhanced my self-esteem by deciding to no longer let them take it from me. Is there anybody in your life who is stealing the value that you see within yourself? I suggest you either confront them or abandon them depending on the level of your relationship with them. Whatever you do, stop letting them take your self-esteem away.

CONTINUALLY IMPROVE

While I think it is important for you to accept yourself as you are right now, I also encourage to continually look for ways to improve. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can have strong self-esteem and accept yourself while searching for subtle ways to be more effective. In my opinion, the stronger your self-esteem, the faster you will be able to grow and become more effective. As you develop a new skillset or characteristic, you will see even more value within yourself.

As your self-esteem grows stronger and stronger, you will continually improve your ability to add value to your customers and increase their chances of achieving what they want to achieve.

About Dan Coughlin

Visit Dan Coughlin's Free Resource Center on Business Acceleration

Dan Coughlin teaches practical ideas on how to improve business performance. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, executive coach, and author of four books on leadership, sales, branding, and innovation. His books including Accelerate, Corporate Catalysts, The Management 500, and Find a Way to Win. His clients include GE Capital, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Marriott, Boeing, Abbott, Toyota, Subway, Kiewit, Prudential, Denny's, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

P.O. Box 1245 Fenton, Missouri 63026
Phone 636.825.6611 Fax 636.825.9831
E-mail info@thecoughlincompany.com