Having a low self-esteem can be absolutely paralyzing in life, I should know. I used to have a very bad image of myself and never thought that I could do anything of any significance in my life. The problem was that I wanted to have significance in my life but had no idea how to get past what I thought about myself.

One day I realized that it was up to me to do something about this. No one else could make me change even though they may have tried. I got to a point where I had had enough of having a low self-esteem so I decided to do what Ralph Waldo Emerson once said which was, 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'

This was, as you can imagine, not an easy task for me. There were more things that I was afraid to do than the other way around because of what I thought about myself. But, I had made the decision that I was going to change so I just did it.

One of the things that I hated to do was talk to people who I didn't know. So when I was in an environment that I was comfortable in, such as in church or at a friend's house, I would force myself to introduce myself to at least one person and try to hold some sort of conversation. The first few times were an absolute disaster but I began to discover that people thought much more of me than I thought of myself. As a matter of fact, people actually enjoyed talking with me.

I applied this to other areas of my life because I began to realize that action removes fear. Most often, I was so busy being afraid about something that I would never even attempt doing it. So I just began to do it, which didn't give me the opportunity to think about it as much.

If you have a low self-esteem, I encourage you to find something small that you hate to do and just start to do it. You will be amazed, over time, how you will begin to break past those insecurities and become the person that you only dare dream about.