I recently celebrated my 41^st birthday and every year, in the days leading up to my birthday I take a piece of paper and write a list of things I believe to be true about myself that are good. One for each year. It’s an exercise I’ve been doing since I was 34. I do this to see how far I’ve come, to see the person I have become, and to stay on track with my self-esteem.

I also write my goals down for the coming year and evaluate where I am in my 1 year, and 5 year goals, to make sure that I am where I want to be, or if I need any course corrections either because I haven’t met my goals or because during the year I find that those goals no longer fit me. It’s my way of seeing progression of breaking those boulders that were before me into pebbles and sand.

I learned these exercises from my therapist back when my self-esteem was non-existent, and I had no clue who I was. I was aimless, depressed, confused about what I wanted out of life and where I was supposed to be. “Who was I?”

My therapist told me to write a list of things I liked about myself as homework for the next time we met. For a week I struggled with it like she asked me to invent a way to time travel. I called my friend to help me put thing about myself on a piece of paper. I went to an external source to tell me who “I” was. When I went back the next week I had a small list of 5-10 things that I really didn’t believe. She knew, threw it out and told me to try again. “This time, look at yourself, for yourself, by yourself.” That was all the instructions I got, and I took it quite literally. I went home and for an hour each day for a week I did something I never did, I looked at myself in a mirror. I found features I liked about myself first: The color of my eyes, the symmetry of my face, the fact that my hair was soft and that I had it still. Then I went deeper: I like my laugh, my eyes are warm and kind, I was empathetic…. Wait! I found something, a real trait! Something I that wasn’t superficial, something I believed. After a week that was about all I came up, but it was a start.

My therapist was proud of me as she crumpled the paper and threw it away. She told me to do it again. I did it 3 more times, 2 of them were basically repeats of what I had written, but by the third time I observed what others saw in me based on how they reacted to my presence, how they listened to me. I was taking a personal inventory of who I was.

When I realized what I was doing I became more aware of myself just a little but enough to know I had worth to others and I had worth to myself. I knew because I made a list, and I believed it. When I got to 34 things I stopped it took a long time to get there, the last list didn’t have a time limit and she never asked to see it, and I figured that this time the list was just for me.

The coincidence was that I didn’t know I got to 34 things till I pulled the list out of some pile of papers 7 months later (about 3 weeks from my birthday), when I counted the amount of things I had on it. I decided that I was going to start a new list and I was going to make it 35 positive things I knew about myself. I also decided that I was going to start making goals, so I did it all around my birthday. I’ve never stopped.

It’s gotten easier and easier as I learn more about who I am, and before I knew it, I had created tools that help my self-esteem and keep me in sight of accomplishments. I’ve found these tools VERY helpful in molding me and organizing myself. This method works for me, for about an hour a year I get my house in order on paper, then I get myself to manifest the goals and reaffirm what I already know about myself. I’m happier today because of it. This is one of the many things I do. I look forward to it, it makes getting older that much more enjoyable.