Self-Esteem

This blog post is a week late but I had to comment on one of my favorite commercials from the Superbowl on self-esteem for girls. I'm a guy who had to find out through my two daughters how tough the world of girls can be. Unfortunately, a girl's understanding of what brings happiness is not yet fully mature. It's easy to be led astray. Their really cool self, the girl on the inside, gets easily pressured by the fog of peers and what is popular. My eldest, whose stunning Eurasian features has won her a number of modeling jobs, wanted to dye her hair blonde, looking like all of her close friends. (How come there are so many blondes in Utah's schools?)

If you don't know what I'm talking about, rent a copy of the movie Mean Girls to see what happens to a cool American girl who's been abroad when she trys to integrate into life in an American High School.

The great meme that we LDS have to be true to our higher selves, the source of real happiness and self-esteem, is that "we are in the world but not of it." The world and its pressures confuses us. Being in the world but not of it reminds us to rise above its corruptions and scoffs. Bad grades, a game that didn't quite go so well, or not quite fitting in can make us feel down. And peer expectations are so fleeting. No matter how hard we try, we are inately different so might as well feel comfortable about it.

Here's counsel from someone who knows and loves us best to remember in times of low self-esteem.

1 Corinthians 2:9. But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

Proverbs 17: 22. A merry heart doeth good like medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.