Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Humility vs Self Esteem {Episode 187}
603 Plays2 years ago
Stop beating yourself up and calling it "humility!" Listen to Episode 187 to learn the TRUE meaning of humility, how it's different from self esteem, and how to harness the power of each.
If you struggle with low self esteem, this episode is for you.
Go to magicspoon.com/OUTNUMBERED to grab a variety pack and try it today! Use our
promo code OUTNUMBERED at checkout to save $5 off your order!
Have you grabbed one of our FREE episode guides yet?
Mentioned in this episode:
Episode 182: Teaching Confidence
Confronting the Myth of Self Esteem book
Want to watch this episode? Find us on YouTube
We're having fun on Instagram
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Outnumbered the Podcast. I'm Audrey. And I'm Bonnie. We are experienced moms to a combined total of 19 children. In our weekly episodes, we explore relatable topics using our perspectives of humor and chaos. Tune in for advice and encouragement to gain more joy in your parenting journey.
Sponsor Spotlight: Magic Spoon Cereal
00:00:33
Speaker
Hey everybody, this episode is sponsored by Magic Spoon. You know, our family has been trying to cut down on carbs, sugar, and unhealthy food. And there's some stuff that we really just can't eat anymore. So enter Magic Spoon cereal. This cereal is amazing. It comes in a variety pack of four flavors. The flavors are fruity, cocoa, frosted, and peanut butter. Don't they sound delicious? But it has zero grams of sugar in the entire pack.
00:00:58
Speaker
13 to 14 grams of protein and only four net grams of carbs. And that equals out to about 140 calories a serving. It's gluten-free, keto-friendly, grain-free, soy-free, and low carb. Pretty awesome. Yeah, it tastes exactly like the regular cereal from your childhood, but it is super nutritious. It's also delicious and super healthy cereal that brings joy to your mornings or afternoons or bedtime snacks. My kid's favorite flavor is the fruity. Yeah, so good.
00:01:26
Speaker
Okay, so go to magicspoon.com slash outnumbered to grab a variety pack of four and try it today. And be sure to use our promo code which is outnumbered at checkout to save $5 off your order. Magic Spoon is actually so confident in their product that it's backed with 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember, get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magicspoon.com slash outnumbered and use our code outnumbered to save $5.
00:01:51
Speaker
Hey,
Main Topic Introduction: Humility vs Low Self-Esteem
00:01:52
Speaker
you guys, we're back. And today we're gonna talk about a topic that is special to both of us. And we've learned, well, we wish we had learned a lot sooner in life, but we're gonna be talking about the difference between humility and low self-esteem.
00:02:06
Speaker
Yes, yes, yes. If I could somehow transport any podcast episode to my earlier younger self, maybe 25 years ago, it would be this one,
Audrey's Humorous Parenting Story
00:02:16
Speaker
you guys. This is a huge one. And it's kind of a strange concept if you've never struggled with it. But if you have struggled with it, then just this title will have you going, yes, yes, I need to hear this. So hopefully we've got some great insights for you today. But as usual, we want to start with a little bit of a humor segment.
00:02:30
Speaker
My three-year-old is in a hilarious stage right now. He repeats everything that everyone says. Well, hilarious until the teenagers start saying naughty words. But his latest favorite word that he picked up and has been using against my teenagers when they're watching him is hypocrip. His older brother was putting him to bed and he says, leave me alone, Liam. You're such a hypocrip.
00:02:53
Speaker
At one point, a brother asked, do you know what hypocrite means? What is hypocrite? Yeah, it means there's a mountain on top of a sausage and... Nonsense. He has no clue. But my other children use it as an insult. And so it's his new favorite insult, you giant hypocrite. Yes. Yes. Slash, you beat each other over the head with, you're such a hypocrite.
00:03:21
Speaker
I
Defining Humility and Self-Esteem
00:03:22
Speaker
was thinking of beating yourself over the head with things. In episode 182, Unconfidence, we kind of touched on this, today's episode, a little bit on the idea of humility and how we can use it wrongly against ourselves. And we promised to dive deeper into that topic because we did like four sentences on it.
00:03:44
Speaker
in another episode. And so we feel like it's so important that we bumped it up in the queue to today's episode. We wanted to teach you guys and hopefully help somebody a lot sooner than we feel like we got through clarity on these two things ourselves.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, this was a hard lesson for me to learn and I'll talk a little bit about how it came to a head for me. But honestly, if you haven't listened to confidence yet, that's okay. Listen to this one first because you're going to need to nail down this before you can actually feel some real confidence. So to start off, we wanted to define, right? We love our definitions. Define these two terms, both self-esteem and humility, right?
00:04:21
Speaker
Two things that most of us want to have, especially good Christian women, right? We think those are both good character traits, but sometimes they can be used against each other, right? What humility is, is it is a modest opinion of one's own importance or worth, right? Freedom from pride or arrogance. We know what that looks like, right? Somebody who doesn't build themselves up just to look better than others, but it has a modest opinion of himself or herself.
00:04:47
Speaker
And then self-esteem is the level of confidence in one's own worth or abilities, also known as self-respect. So those are some really great definitions to keep in mind as we're talking about these things.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah. So on the surface, they sound pretty similar. And I think that's probably why we confuse them or we get confused or we use them against ourselves. But because Bonnie and I have both been negatively impacted by confusing the two for a huge number of years of our life, we want to share some lessons we learned by studying these two concepts in depth and how, well, like Bonnie said, we wish we'd learned these things a long time ago because there's really
00:05:25
Speaker
some blessing and some benefits that can come to your life by knowing the difference and some really negative impacts that can happen to you when you have the two confused.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, and
Recognizing Self-Worth as God's Creation
00:05:39
Speaker
I think before we start, it's important to realize that every character trait or personality trait can be placed on a spectrum, right? Kind of like the pendulum swings. Sometimes at certain times of life, we might be more humble and other times we're less. And at either extreme, it's very unhealthy, right? And there are other terms to describe either extreme of both of these things, both self-esteem and humility. So that's kind of when we want to be aware of when a,
00:06:06
Speaker
specific, good character trait is no longer serving us when we've swung way to one side. Okay, so our first lesson is we have inherent value not because of anything we've done, but because of God, because He created us. That is absolutely the most important thing to remember. We talked a little bit about this in confidence as well, because you can't create your own self-worth.
00:06:28
Speaker
You can recognize it, but we all have inherent self-worth and it's nothing that we did. It's because we are our God's gracious. And here's an interesting tidbit. If we have low self-esteem, then technically we are devaluing something that God highly values. So think about that for a second. It's pretty, pretty humbling. Yeah. Hit like the back 15 seconds button and listen to that again.
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's that important. So like, think about it. We value things in nature. You look at a flower. I've got some, if you're watching us on YouTube, I've got these gorgeous orchids here behind me. We look at things in nature. We are just awed by their beauty, by their value, how meaningful they are. But then we can do this thing where we look at ourselves and we're like, oh my goodness, what a terrible, ugly, nasty, you know, fill in the blank. And we just start picking at ourselves, right?
00:07:20
Speaker
And we start saying, this part isn't good about me and that part isn't good about me. But why? Why don't we look at ourselves as something that God created? It is valuable. It is beautiful. It has meaning.
00:07:37
Speaker
Also, you know, I always talk so much about the 20-year vision, but I do not want my children, my daughters, especially, it seems to be a thing, a greater problem with women, looking at themselves, valuing or devaluing themselves the way that I did much of my life. Like, I would never look at one of my daughters and say, ew, you know, your stomach isn't flat enough. Or, you know, like, oh, come on. And I don't want them doing that to themselves either.
00:08:05
Speaker
If we look at ourselves as something that God values because He created it, that holds so much content there that we need to respect.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yes, and if you struggle with this and you need a place to start, start with your physical body, which is often a very difficult one for us women to wrap our heads around because we're told day in and day out that our physical body is not enough if it doesn't look perfect, according to society quotes around that one. But the human body is literally the most magnificent creation ever to exist. Humans have been trying for thousands of years to recreate portions of it and we cannot.
00:08:46
Speaker
because it is a pure and utter miracle, every aspect of us. I remember watching some superhero movie once when the character had healing properties, someone could stab him or something and he could heal back over immediately. And I remember saying out loud,
00:09:03
Speaker
Isn't that amazing? Wouldn't it be cool if we had that ability? And all of a sudden I was like, we do, you're dummy. Our bodies literally heal themselves. I mean, obviously you can get to a certain point where it's too far and your body has too much damage and can't do that.
00:09:19
Speaker
We do. Our bodies heal themselves. It's an absolute miracle. So if you're struggling with your own concept of self-confidence inside, just start with the outside. Just start with the utter miracle that is your physical body. And we did nothing to get it. We just came to be, right? Total and utter miracle.
00:09:35
Speaker
If you would like to start a study of separating these two terms, the humility versus the self-esteem, and really dive deep, you can start with Psalms 139. It is an amazing chapter. It's the one where he talks about being
Focus: Inward vs Outward
00:09:50
Speaker
beautifully and wonderfully made. And I just love that quote because if you read that, you will come back with some real truth about how valuable you are, and that will set you on the right path for a really great study about your worth.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. When I started studying Psalm 129 in the context of trying to build my own sense of self-worth, I came up with this question, do I know myself as well as God knows me? Like we think we know ourselves better than anybody else. But in reading that Psalm, I was just struck by this thought that I do not know myself as well as God knows me because I am devaluing. I am thinking such negative things about myself.
00:10:34
Speaker
And God doesn't. So I obviously don't know myself as well as God knows me. So that, that song was like,
00:10:43
Speaker
Like medicine for me when I started down the road on studying these two. I love that concept because absolutely we do not know ourselves as well as God does. And when we learn a little bit more about ourselves and about why God made us the way we are, and we can gain a little bit of insight, that will just explode your whole paradigm and really help you value yourself the way you should.
00:11:05
Speaker
Finally, I was going to say, if you struggle with this first lesson, this intrinsic value from God, we would challenge you just to ask Him. Take it to God in prayer and just say, how do you feel about me? And you will get an answer. And that is all we need to say about that. Just go try that one out. Yeah, that one brings tears to my eyes.
00:11:29
Speaker
All right, so moving on to lesson two, when I really started to see the difference between humility and self-esteem or low self-esteem, I noticed, I learned this lesson number two, it's all about our focus. So humility happens when we're focusing on something
00:11:47
Speaker
other than ourselves, something outside of ourselves. Low self-esteem or high self-esteem or whatever happens when we focus on ourself. So what is the focus? We'll help you really discover the difference between humility and self-esteem.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yes, there's a pretty famous sermon given by one of our church leaders years ago. He was a missionary for our church when he was young and he was really struggling. He was in a foreign country and was home sick, didn't feel like he was doing any good. And he wrote home to his father and basically said, I think I wanna come home. This is not what I signed up for and I'm having a terrible time. And he said, his dad wrote him back just one line and it said, forget yourself and get to work.
00:12:32
Speaker
And I thought, oh, mic drop, right? That is why we spiral in these downwards brows because our focus is all inside. And it's like, oh, I'm not worthy. I'm not doing enough. I'm not this and that. When you forget yourself and you focus on those around you and the work that you've been called to do, all of a sudden, your self-esteem goes up too because you're not nitpicking on what you're doing wrong. You're just focusing on others. I love that, putting your focus outside of yourself.
00:12:57
Speaker
If you find yourself in one of these negative thought loops, just ask yourself that one question, what's my focus today? And for moms, I would say that it's actually kind of hard to get super focused on ourselves because we have so much service to do. We're always changing diapers and feeding someone or whatever. But sometimes we can even catch ourselves in a self-pity thought loop, right? Oh, I don't get to do anything for myself and life is so hard, whatever. Focus on someone else and that will pull you out.
00:13:24
Speaker
Yes. You can even be in such, okay, so speaking from experience, you can be even in such a negative thought loop that you say, what am I focusing on? I'm focusing on myself. And then you can turn that and say, oh yes, I'm such a terrible person. All I ever do is focus on myself. But that is kind of like the bottom. And then you're like, okay, come on, knock it off. And you just- There's only one way to go from there.
00:13:49
Speaker
For further study on this concept about your focus, I like to read Philippians 4 and especially those verses that it says, there's a list of things and it says, think on these things. So the verses of things to think about. And that just goes right back to something Bonnie and I talk about all the time is our thoughts and the importance of thoughts.
00:14:10
Speaker
So if we're wanting help with our focus, we can go, like, I even have a list that I printed out and hung next to our laptop computer downstairs. And it's those things. So when you think of thought, the little printout I have says, when you think of thought, run it through these filters.
00:14:36
Speaker
good? Is it just? Is it pure? Is it holy? Is it, you know, and you run it through those filters. And then if it's not, then, then change your thoughts. So thoughts and their importance is less than two. What a great place to put it to next to a computer. Should probably be my lock screen on my phone too.
00:14:58
Speaker
Okay, so lesson three, I talked briefly about a book that I read years ago in our episode on confidence and it's called Confronting the Myth of Self-Esteem. I highly recommend
Is Low Self-Esteem a Form of Pride?
00:15:07
Speaker
it. It is written from a Christian perspective and it's addressing exactly what we're talking about here today. And a few of the things that I learned from there, well, the first main lesson that I learned from this book was that
00:15:19
Speaker
self-deprecating thoughts or low self-esteem is actually just the flip side of a coin named pride. And that was really a wake-up call to me because for most of my life, I thought that those self-deprecating thoughts were humility. It was just, well, you know, I'm just thinking so poorly of myself that I'm going to inspire myself to do better because we all know that works, right?
00:15:43
Speaker
When's the last time you tore down a child and they improved their behavior? No, we know that doesn't work for ourselves, not for our children, not for anyone. And so when I read that line that this is actually just the other side of pride, it's still focusing on yourself just in a poor way instead of an elevating way. That just snapped me out of it. I realized, wow, I am being...
00:16:07
Speaker
um, tempted and I am succumbing to this temptation of feeling awful about myself. And it's not improving my life one bit. It's not inspiring me to be better. It's not inspiring other people to follow me. Nobody wants to be like that either. Just miserable. Um, and that was probably the main lesson that I took from that is that, um,
00:16:27
Speaker
that's focus on self again. Turn your focus outwards and move on. Yes, yes. Like my story is exactly the same. Once I heard it, someone mentioned it when they were speaking in our religious services and they said the same thing that if you have low self-esteem is a negative character trait and it needs to be worked on. It's just another form of pride, pride in disguise. And I was like, what? Hang on.
00:16:55
Speaker
And I was like, oh, because, you know, it's easy to think you're being humble when you're devaluing yourself. You're like, oh, I'm just being modest or at least I'm being arrogant. It's still the same thing. And for me, the meter or the check, the temperature gauge, you know, thermometer here is at the end of the day, how does it make you feel?
00:17:14
Speaker
So humility leaves you feeling humbled, purposeful, empowered, like you wanna go on, you wanna feel better. Low self-esteem makes you feel worse. It makes you feel dirty. It makes you feel unattractive. It makes you feel unloved, unlovable. So the difference is the temperature, the temperature gauge for me. How does it make you feel at the end of the day? And then you know if you're engaging in humility or low self-esteem.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yep, yep, absolutely.
00:17:47
Speaker
Okay, so a little bit further study. I was reading a few talks and sermons from some of my church leaders and I came across this one quote that I wanted to share really quickly. It was pretty great. And the quote is this, there is something of divinity within each of you. You have such a tremendous potential with that quality as a part of your inherited nature. So when we think of ourselves as children of God, we have to remember that we have divine nature, right? He says, some of you may feel that you are not as attractive or beautiful or glamorous as you would like to be.
00:18:15
Speaker
Rise above such feelings, cultivate the light you have within you, and it will shine through as a radiant expression that will be seen by others." I love that. The other quote I wanted to share was, well, insight, was that there are three tools to combat this low self-esteem or negative self-talk. One of them is comparison. It often starts with comparison, right? You're comparing yourself with other people. Do you start to feel these feelings after you get off Instagram?
00:18:41
Speaker
Or after you go to your friend's beautiful house or whatever it is, stop those feelings of comparison. The second thing is evaluate your attitude towards God's will. Are you trying to put your life in line with God's will? And then finally, try to cultivate a perfect love. That is what we are taught, to have a perfect love as Christ did. And if we have a perfect love for others, guess what?
00:19:04
Speaker
we will develop a perfect love for ourselves as well, because it's impossible to hate yourself and love others. It just doesn't happen. So if you want to love others, you got to start right here. Right, right. You know, one thing, another thing that I heard recently was that there's a verse in John that says, God is love. And that means that God loves himself. And so like, he's setting that kind of example for us. So why would we
00:19:31
Speaker
do this self-hate thing or this self-loathing thing like that is just a lack in us that we're not following his example. Right. And the second commandment, love your neighbor as yourself. And I think we just kind of skip over that part from loving my neighbor. But are you loving yourself? Because that has to be the example of how you would love another person, right? Right. Right. And I want to put out there that you can love others better when you love yourself. If you hate yourself, how do you love others?
00:20:00
Speaker
All right, lesson four, we put some study into the thought of the purpose of humility. Why
Humility and Spiritual Connection
00:20:08
Speaker
is there humility out there? Like what is the purpose of this thing? So the purpose of humility is to guide us to a greater power, something outside ourselves.
00:20:17
Speaker
So built into the core of our very being, of every person, there's an empty spot that can only be filled by, it's a void. It refers to it in the Bible as a void. It can only be filled by something greater, something spiritual, by a heavenly being, by God. And it's there, that lack is there to make us seek and search and to find
00:20:40
Speaker
our creator? Yes. And I would say that the reason people are just desperate to find some source of identity these days, you know, this group or that organization or whatever, is because there's a whole, because they haven't connected with that divine nature and understood that there is something bigger than themselves.
00:21:01
Speaker
And it's actually a huge relief to believe in something larger than yourself. You are not the end all be all. In fact, that's a very narcissistic way of living. If you live that way, it's probably very stressful. We've talked about this before too in teaching our children.
00:21:14
Speaker
how to believe in something larger than themselves. It brings a lot of comfort to know that mom and dad aren't the end all be all of the universe either. There's something larger to believe in. And then we don't have to go out and seek justice for ourselves. We can just have faith that it will be served eventually. When we understand and believe that there's someone larger than us in control, we can actually let control go, right? And we don't have to micromanage everything. We can let things go and trust that God will make it all right.
00:21:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that is such a relief for us because we have enough on our hands as it is, moms with lots of kids. And even if you have one kid, that one kid, that is a lot on your hands, a lot to do to try to help raise another human. And so, yeah, just being able to let go. So back to this thought of humility being there to teach us about our creator. And so like, if you, like, I love to think about how,
00:22:11
Speaker
at any point in history, a human could have gone out and spent time in nature and been led to God. And it would have been through humility. By the way, you see this amazing creation. You see all these trees, these plants, these animals, and it starts
00:22:24
Speaker
making you feel humble, like, wow, I could never make a leaf. I could never make a tree. I could never make a plant. So then the humility starts. And then you start to think about, well, who did create a leaf and a tree and a plant and the whole process of life and everything. So I just love that. I'm like thinking back to the very root of creativity. Why are humility? Why is it there? And that's to lead us to God.
00:22:49
Speaker
So some further study on the purpose of humility, there's three verses in Proverbs about humility, and two of them say, before honor is humility. And the last one says, by humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, honor, and life. So there's this idea introduced in the Bible that humility is a way to
00:23:12
Speaker
gain honor and to enrich your life. And Jesus talked about this in the Bible. You know what? Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Like a way to attract
00:23:29
Speaker
greater to ourselves is to humble ourselves and to acknowledge that there is greater out there. And so this greater force that we believe in God can make us greater than we can ever be ourselves. So the purpose of humility when we're led to God and all that, it can be to make us greater than we could ever be ourselves. And if we
00:23:55
Speaker
Think about it, you know, if we're relying on self-esteem, like we'll never be enriched by self-esteem, we'll never be honorable, we'll never be able to make ourselves great by doing this constant debasing, devaluing, self-loathing thing.
00:24:09
Speaker
Yeah, I love that a great place to start when you're struggling with this is just a set of humility. And you will, if you can define it very specifically, you will know that self-esteem is not humility, not in the least, right? I will also say that I personally kind of shy away from using the term self-esteem because I kind of prefer to look at it as godly esteem, right? That I esteem myself as God would. And when myself can figure out how to do that, right? I could use the self-esteem term a little bit better, but that one,
00:24:37
Speaker
I think sometimes tempts us to think that we are these wonderful beings just in and of ourselves because we're so, all the wonderful things we do, and we do do wonderful things, but our inherent worth comes from God. I love that.
00:24:50
Speaker
Lesson five, a wonderful antidote. We
Practicing Gratitude for Positive Self-View
00:24:54
Speaker
talked about changing our focus. We talked about a bunch of different things, but a wonderful surefire antidote for low self-esteem is gratitude. I talked about starting with your body or something that's maybe a little bit more obvious to be grateful for. Start with the fact that you can walk every day and that will bring both humility and
00:25:13
Speaker
this godly esteem for your amazing body, the way your brain works, all these wonderful things that we're capable of. Start with some of these scriptures we've offered you, but gratitude is a great place to start.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yes, yes, I love this because it was a way that I physically changed the way that I think. And my thoughts are, you know, like it's so hard or it's so easy just to let your thoughts take you where they would want to. And oftentimes, because we have this leftover pray, P-R-E-Y, a pray line of thought that
00:25:50
Speaker
We need to be looking for the tiger. Right. So so the negative actually preserves our life. There's a tiger in that bush. There's a tiger around this rock, you know, and that is like preservation mode for us. So it's very easy. It comes very natural to us. But the way that I physically changed, actually changed the way that I think is through a gratitude practice.
00:26:11
Speaker
using nightly journaling, write down five things that I'm thankful for, that made me smile, that made me think something positive about myself, that brought warm fuzzies, whatever. And we can improve our self-esteem and build up humility.
00:26:26
Speaker
both using a gratitude practice. They can both be built through just thankfulness. And it's such a powerful tool, like it just sounds so simple. Just writing down things about what, I know I shared this before on the podcast, but the way that, the first way that this gratitude practice started to change the way that I thought was that I knew that at the end of the day, when I was at the side of my bed before I prayed at night,
00:26:54
Speaker
that I needed to write down five things in that journal. So then I began looking for things through the day that I could be thankful for that made me feel good, that made me smile, that made me think something positive about myself and actually even changing the course of my thoughts and my actions and my words through the day so that I would have five things to write down at the end of the day. And gratitude practices, nightly journaling was such a powerful tool for me to begin to change
00:27:20
Speaker
from a completely negative brain to on my journey toward more positivity. Isn't that fascinating that two things that we feel are polar opposites have the same solution? Both humility and this low self-esteem are solved by the same thing and its gratitude. I love that. I love that. You know, I will mention here that
00:27:46
Speaker
I've had women tell me this before too is, well, I'm afraid if I work on my self-esteem, then I'll just end up proud. I'll end up with humility as the problem instead. And I just want to go back to what I was saying about the pendulum of human characteristics, right? Most of us lean towards one side of every characteristic. I lean towards a little bit more towards low self-esteem rather than humility. I lean a little bit more towards maybe being an introvert versus an outrovert. Outrovert, extrovert, that's the word.
00:28:15
Speaker
I can pretty much guarantee that if you lean this direction, that pride over here is probably never going to be an issue with you. It's going to be this over and over and over. But again, if you're worried about that, just keep the gratitude practice. But keep paying attention to where your thoughts are taking you. If they continue to take you back to this.
00:28:32
Speaker
low self-esteem died, start using some of these tips because you really can beat it. I honestly, you guys, I honest to goodness thought this was gonna plague me for the rest of my life. And I knew that something was wrong. I knew that these thoughts were harming me and I didn't know how to fix them. And I am so grateful for the church leader that offered this book to me and this changed perspective because it totally changed my life. I am so much happier and more content and more loving with others.
00:28:59
Speaker
now that I
Overcoming Low Self-Esteem Through God's Perspective
00:29:00
Speaker
have changed this perspective inside me. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to offer like a gratitude or a nightly journaling isn't a way that you can find your way to thankfulness or gratitude. Another option is serving others who have much
00:29:22
Speaker
less than you or helping someone who is in a terrible position compared to yours because it brings gratitude to you for your situation in your life. Like at least I have a home, at least I have a body, you know, right? One thing that our family talks about is a little, a girl that is the same age as some of my kids who lost one of her legs from the knee down in
00:29:52
Speaker
hiking accident, freak hiking accident. And so that is something that we talk about often in our family. Well, at least we're not this sweet little girl because we have both legs. And like just starting my kids out young with this gratitude practice, like I have two legs, I have two arms, or I have a home, or you know, all these things. So that is another example, another path that you can come to gratitude through is service, serving others who have or are less than you.
00:30:20
Speaker
And it's too bad that it takes serious disability or other issues for us to be so aware of all the blessings we have, right? How often do you wake up and think, gee, I'm so glad for these legs, but I am super glad for my legs. And I only know that because I've done gratitude practice about my body, right? To wrap up, we've given you guys lots of study resources.
00:30:40
Speaker
We're going to include them all in the show notes, but another great place to go. Like we mentioned, Psalms before, all of Psalms, fantastic. Psalm 92 is another great place to read and continue this learning about these two different characteristics that we want to have, right? Self-esteem and humility. And we're going to include everything we've listed today in the show notes.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yes, Psalms 92 talks about starting the day with thankfulness and moving through the whole day with thankfulness and ending the day with thankfulness. It's a beautiful psalm. So you guys, my final thoughts here on humility versus low self-esteem is studying this, thinking about this, hopefully even just listening to this.
00:31:19
Speaker
30 minute episode, it's only going to improve your life for the better. Like if you are stuck in a thought position of low self-esteem, we love you. We've been there and we totally encourage you to take a tiny baby step toward humility and away from that low self-esteem.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, and I would say here that you might not even know if this is something you struggle with, but by the end of the episode, you probably do. No. But I would say that if you constantly look outwards for reassurance that you are doing good or are a good person, then that could be a clue that you struggle with this. I remember I used to be kind of a compliment
00:32:03
Speaker
seeker all the time, a fisher of compliments, I was always looking for someone to tell me that I was doing something right. Because I did not have enough knowledge of my own intrinsic worth that I was looking for it everywhere around me. And that did not bring me any joy. Because if I listened to others' compliments, then I also had to listen to their criticisms. And I didn't want to be subject to other people's opinions of me.
00:32:27
Speaker
So instead, I got real with myself, discovered, did a great study about my own self-worth, dove deep on that, and now I'm able to be happy no matter what people say about me. I mean, sure, it hurts my feelings sometimes, or I like a compliment. I'm not going to say that. That's not true. But I no longer look outside myself for my own worth, and I'm able to push aside any of those self-deprecating thoughts because I know, nope, my value is much deeper than that, and it doesn't come from anything around me.
00:32:54
Speaker
It also doesn't come from what I do or don't do, because I'm an imperfect person. Sometimes I do great things, sometimes I do terrible things, and I try to be better each day, but my worth will always come from God. Oh, man, Bonnie, why'd you have to bring that one up? Now I've got something else to work on. Maybe that'll be another episode. Oh, no. Okay, the journey continues.
00:33:18
Speaker
We hope you guys have found meaning, purpose, help in this episode and we encourage you to try studying one of these five lessons that we mentioned in depth yourself and it's helped us. We hope it helps you too. I'm Audrey. I'm Bonnie and we're Outnumbered. Thanks for listening, friends. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to our email and never miss another episode.
00:33:42
Speaker
show us some love by leaving a review on iTunes or sharing the podcast with a friend. Thanks for all your support. We'll talk to you next week.