Steven Covey, author of "7 habits of highly effective people" and many other best-sellers, rightly points out that "love" is a verb, not only a noun. He writes that people often complain that "there is no longer any love" in their relationships. In response to this Covey writes that we can't just expect love to "be there" without doing anything to make it grow. In order to feel more love, people need to actively engage in loving the dear ones.

Luckily the word "love" is already both a noun and a verb in our dictionaries, and so it is not that much of a stretch for us to understand what Stephen Covey wants to get across. So far, the word "self-esteem" is only listed as a noun in the dictionary. This makes us think that self-esteem is something that we have, not something we do.

What if self-esteem was a verb? Would that make us care more about it?

Most people probably wouldn't do any physical exercise if "exercise" was a noun rather than a verb. If you would say that somebody "has exercise" or "has a low exercise" there would be no incentive to exercise because it would seem like your "level of exercise"/fitness is set in stone and cannot be altered.

In the same way as we need to do physical exercise in order to be fit, we need to exercise our self-esteem in order to have a high self-esteem. Self-esteem doesn't come automatically. During our upbringing we may learn good habits of doing physical exercise, habits that we keep as we grow up. As a result we stay fit. In the same way we learn good or bad habits for our self-esteem as we grow up, and these influence what our level of self-esteem will be as adults. If we learn healthy self-esteem habits such as receiving compliments in the right way, respecting our personal boundaries or not pushing ourselves too hard we will become good at "doing self-esteem" and we will therefore have a high self-esteem.

As we all know, it is possible to start exercising and get fit even if you're not young anymore and have never done any physical exercise before. It will of course be more difficult than for someone who runs 10 kilometers every morning, but it is possible. The same is true for self-esteem. It is possible to train your self-esteem even if you've experienced lots of bad things throughout your life and have a very low self-esteem to start with. By starting to do self-esteem you will get self-esteem.

If self-esteem was a verb, perhaps more people would realise that you need to actively work for it and stop expecting it to come by itself.

Do self-esteem if you want to get self-esteem.

Liv Miyagawa, The Self-Esteem Coach, helps people all over the world to raise their self-esteem and to reach their personal goals. She opens people's eyes to their own strengths and helps them to figure out what it really is that they want to get out of life. Liv helps people to find out exactly what steps they need to take to reach their goals, and she supports them and motivates them on their journey towards a more fulfilling future. www.livmiyagawa.com