You worry about what others will say, think, or feel about you.You overlook your talents, skills and abilities.You find it difficult to accept compliments.You compare yourself to others often.You are judgmental towards yourself.You don't like the way you look.You bottle up your emotions.Self-esteem begins to take shape and form as early as childhood. More common than not, women who were raised in a violent environment almost always grow into adulthood with little or no self-esteem.

The good news is that your self-esteem can be built from nothing! You have the ability and power within yourself to do it. It takes a lot of hard work and effort on your part, but you can do it. Here are a few ways to start working on your self-esteem now:

Practice loving yourself. All too often, women with low self-esteem turn to someone else to make them feel better. This does not work. Instead, what frequently happens is that you end up in another abusive relationship. Learn to love yourself. Practice loving yourself and being kind to yourself. Reparent yourself. As stated earlier, most women suffering from low self-esteem come from broken homes, or homes in which abuse and violence were prevalent. Thus, it is often necessary to reparent yourself. The term "reparent" refers to the act of giving back to yourself what was never given to you as a child. If your parent was critical, for example, you will likely want to reparent yourself by paying yourself many compliments throughout the day. When reparenting yourself, you give to yourself all the things that you wish your parents had given you as a child.Accept a compliment. If you have low self-esteem, you know that accepting compliments is downright difficult. When learning to accept compliments, you must be consistent in your response. If someone says, "You look nice today," don't snarl and walk away. As a replacement for negative behavior, smile brightly and say, "Thank you!" That's all you have to do. The first few times you will still feel uncomfortable. Learn to accept those compliments anyway-you deserve them!Stop criticizing yourself. Next to not being able to accept positive feedback, self criticism is one of the hardest habits to break. It is too easy for you to look in the mirror and name all the things that you loathe about yourself, but you have to stop. Instead of being critical about yourself, pick one thing that you secretly like about yourself and focus on that. Maybe you possess a solid strength. Focus on that inner strength. When you recognize that you feel disapproving of yourself, shift your thoughts back to your inner strength. No more judging yourself or others. Judging yourself and others is nothing but detrimental to your self esteem. You can never build yourself up, or feel better about yourself, by being negative about someone else. Pointing out the flaws of others, you actually point out your own flaws. This is nothing but negative behavior, stemming from your low self-esteem. Recognize it and nip it in the bud. The next time you want to say something judgmental about others, stop and reverse it immediately. Find something nice to say about them instead.

Building your self-esteem will take some time. You should not expect an overnight change. Instead, it is something that you will work on every day for the rest of your life. Even when you start feeling better and more confident about yourself, you will still practice good self-esteem habits, as a maintenance program.