Firstly, you will never know who you truely are because you are not qualified to make that judgement because you have been wrong before. The good news though is that nobody else is qualified to judge you either. You can however and they can however judge your intentions and actions. Your intentions refer to what you want to do and why you want to do it. Your actions refer to what you do and how you do it.

Your intentions must be good. You must intend to treat yourself well and be good to yourself and be good to others and make a positive and good difference to the world. You must intend this because it will make this life experience more wonderful for you and for other people.

Your actions must be good. I saw Richard Bandler recently and he reminded me that the secret to high self esteem was doing good things. You have to give yourself a good reason to feel good about yourself. Your actions must be performed in a good way so that you enjoy them as much as possible and that they help everyone else as much as possible.

You see for a while I believed that I had potential to be a great person but I needed to change so many things about my life. Every new year I would vow to change so many things so that I would become a better person. Now what I realise is that I always was that 'great person' but I wasn't being them as much as I could. We have this expression in english 'He's just being cranky', 'she's just being bitchy'. When people say this it refers to how we are being in a short period of time. If you are 'Being at your best' more of the time, it begins to make it so that you really become your best. It is all about consistency.

Quite often in the field of personal development and even NLP, there are people that come along and create models after models with big complicated names. They make simple ideas seem complicated and make good money off them. What myself and Brian have learned from Richard is to make everything as simple as it really is. Our main job then becomes convincing people how easy everything really is and how powerful simple ideas can be.

So, simply put, in order to begin to lead a more wonderful life you must learn to feel great about yourself, great about the future and plan to have a wonderful life. That means you do more of what you want to do, overcome the problems you currently have had, manifest the things you want in your life and live life with a brilliant attitude. It also means that you make better connections and more connections with wonderful people and appreciate the world more.

You feel great about yourself by accepting that that you are everything you can become at your best and the question is 'Are you BEING that person consistently?'. If you are not then you begin to make images of how you would be at your best and you start acting that way. You ask yourself how would you be talking to yourself at your best. You do good things for others and feel good about them. You do good things for yourself.

You must feel great about the future by realising that there are few limits that can prevent you for making your life wonderful. You can realise that all it takes is for you to learn to run your brain better and learn some valuable skills that will help you do more of what you want to do. You can plan to have a wonderful life by setting goals in a well formed way so that they are well thought out and that you plan a direction for your life so that you are excited by the future and all the opportunities that lie ahead for you as you are at your best.

You do more of what you want to do by becoming aware of what you enjoy doing and what you don't enjoy doing and designing ways in which you are doing more of what you love and what is good for you. You overcome the problems you have had by being aware of the resources you have and getting the resources you need to deal with these problems. You manifest the things you want in your life by planning, acting, learning from your mistakes and acting until you achieve what you want. You connect more and more with wonderful people and appreicate the world more by having more experiences, meeting more people and treating your loved ones better than ever.

All of these things are actions... things that we do. The reason myself and Brian love doing what we do is because we get to teach and share ideas that we've learned through NLP from the creator himself ' Richard'... ideas which allow us to do those things, those actions which I'm talking about. From running your brain, to designing futures, to communicating brilliantly, to enhancing relationships, to developing the best attitude towards life, all of these are things that you can do... once you learn certain skills.

So it's really simple: YOU ARE WAY MORE THAN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE... because who you thought you were didn't include all those things you haven't done or learned yet. You have so much information available to you through the internet, books, cds, dvds, seminars and the people you meet. Every single experience you have makes a difference to you. You have so much potential that you haven't truely explored yet. Maybe you haven't learned it yet... or maybe... far worse... you have learned it but something till now has stopped you from using the ideas. If so... there is only one solution... ACT. ACT NOW. DO NOT STOP UNTIL YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED.

I've noticed that I seem a pretty different person to who I was a few years ago. Really, however, I'm not that different. I was always who I am now, it's just I wasn't BEING that person that much. I thought I had potential but I wasn't living it. I had felt insecure, overly sensitive and I sometimes lacked control over my actions. Now, I feel so secure in myself and so in control of my responses and actions. I am now BEING the kind of person I always wanted to be and it means that I simply care less what others think of me. My actions have good intentions for good intentions and I do them in a good way that makes a good impact on the world too. Also I've realised that who I thought I was at my best isn't even close and who I can be is even more brilliant than I thought. Occasionally I falter... but it gets less and less every day.

You simply need to recognise that change and success take time. They require you to take bold actions but to do so consistently. To become the best you can be it means living as well as possible... as healthy as possible, as motivated as possible, as happy as possible, as confident as possible, as excited as possible and wonderful as possible. Then instead of judging yourself, you can raise above labels like self image, self esteem and self concept and simply, truly like who you are, feel lots of love for yourself and be in complete love with your life and your world.