Having a healthy self-esteem is one of the keys to success. I have often wondered how people with less ability and less knowledge can often achieve more than others who have more of both. I think one of the reasons is their sense of self-worthiness.

Although self-esteem is directly related to self-worthiness, I am defining them differently here. Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. Whether or not you feel like you are a worthwhile person, or your thoughts about what you offer others around you can be found in your self-esteem.

Self-worthiness is a little different. This is what you believe you are capable of doing,achieving or obtaining.

Let me use my experience in building a house. My wife and I have built two homes. The first one we used a contractor and had built for us based on plans we came up with. It was a small house, but appropriate for our needs at the time.

As our family grew we needed more space. We sold that house and began to look for land to have another one built. Our plan was to build it, live in it for two years and use the profits from it to build another house. Eventually we would own our house outright, and have a nicer one than the one we started in. It was a good plan, but it never came to fruition.

Why didn’t it happen? It wasn’t because we weren’t able to do it; we had already proved to ourselves that we could. Eight years later I began to ponder why we still lived in that second house. I finally realized why I had never built a larger one: it was because I had built one that was equal to the one I had grown up in.

It wasn’t a conscious decision not to continue building homes, but somewhere in my mind I had “arrived” and had no need to go further. In my experiences in counseling and law enforcement I have observed that most people will rise to the standard of living they have been accustomed to and go no further. We are typically products of our environments.

There are exceptions to this rule, and you can become one of them; however, you have to make a conscious decision to do so. You have to stop listening to people around you who say you can’t succeed at something and strive to achieve more. You also have to recognize your own internal messages that tell you there isn’t a need to go any further and ignore them.

To start you need to write down what it is you want to achieve and then develop an action plan. This plan involves specific steps you can take to achieve your goal. The small steps need to be separated into “doable bites.” By achieving these short term goals you will fuel your desire to achieve more, because you are proving to yourself that you can do it!

Scripture tells us that we can “do all things through Christ who gives us strength.” (Philippians 4:13) Start living that abundant life the Jesus promised you. Sit down, think about what you want to achieve, come up with an action plan and get started.









– Johnny Walker is a Christian Counselor and the founder of Family Works Counseling.