Recently I came across Tina Fey’s 2008 Emmy Award acceptance speech.  She said,

“I want to thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities”.

It caught my attention because right there is parenting at its best.  It can build a type of self-esteem or confidence that isn’t linked to external performance or external attributes.

Now whilst the  majority of us didn’t get that kind of ideal parenting, the good news is that we can actually re-parent ourselves and get the kind of self esteem that may have been painfully absent in our past. How to do that? Watch this video to see how we usually go about building self esteem and why it doesn’t work (or doesn’t work for long) and what’s a far more powerful approach: