Low self-esteem isn't strictly a feeling or confidence issue: It's a self-love issue.

Self-love is the unconditional radiant acceptance of who one is and the desire to spread it to others. It includes not only an ability to grow and navigate towards life's challenges with confidence, skill, and purpose, but the acceptance of who we are and the belief we deserve success, happiness, and love. The reason I prefer to promote self-love as the root of low self-esteem is because it highlights its internal nature.

Trying to build self-esteem primarily through chasing external achievements, belonging, and career success will never work.

If it did work, LinkedIn would be a monastery. Externally focused pursuit is pseudo self-esteem, and it pervades all college life constellations from health to classes to relationships:

• In health, it leads students on rigid diets and exercise plans where breakfast is 3 egg whites and a bagel. Or the opposite, a complete neglecting of health.
• In classes, it keeps students from answering questions or genuinely learning because they use grades as a marker of success.
• In relationships, it keeps students relying on others to fulfill their needs, often creating manipulation, toxicity, and loneliness.

Thankfully, there is a way out. I’m intimately aware of how because when I was a Cornell University freshman, I had the self-esteem of a neglected piece of firewood.

The solution is to grow our self-love—not as a feeling but as an identity we have with ourselves and college as a whole.

In other words, rooting our self-esteem internally, not externally. This doesn’t mean external things aren’t important to building our self-esteem. It means we pursue those external things with an internal rootedness.

Over the last six years, I've dove deep into the science of doing this through:

• Creating 700+ YT videos, articles, and podcasts partially on the psychology of human development and self-esteem
• Teaching 100s of college students and adults through Cornell Outdoor Education, workshops, and six self-made courses
• Working for the worlds #1 Gamification Consultancy, The Octalysis Group, where I've learned to understand motivation and its roots in self-esteem
• Reading 100s of books including The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden, The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk, and An Introduction To Integral Theory by Ken Wilber

This article is the culmination of all of my discoveries. We'll start by understanding why it's so hard to grow self-esteem (It's not your fault), and then we'll dive into what I call the Three A's of Self-Esteem and how you can build them right now.

Why The Hell Is Self-Esteem So Hard To Build?

If self-esteem were simply a matter of “trying harder,” elite college campuses would be glowing sanctuaries of inner peace. They are not. They are glowing sanctuaries of resume updates.

So before we go any further, let’s say something that most high-achieving freshmen rarely let themselves say out loud: This is not your fault.

Low self-esteem doesn’t appear out of nowhere in August of freshman year like a bad roommate. It has deep roots that stretch back into childhood kitchens, report cards slid across tables, the subtle tone in a parent’s voice when you succeeded… and when you didn’t.

Most of us were loved. But very few of us were loved unconditionally.

Love often came braided with performance. Not because our parents were villains twirling mustaches, but because they too inherited models of worth that were never examined. If they were anxious, self-critical, achievement-obsessed, or emotionally avoidant, you didn’t just observe it. You absorbed it. Children do not debate the emotional climate of their homes; they internalize it. No four-year-old is saying, “Mother, I detect unprocessed generational trauma.”

So of course your nervous system learned something like: I am safe when I perform.

That belief is not weakness. It is adaptation.

And then you arrive at college—an environment exquisitely designed to evaluate you. If your early wiring linked love with achievement, college does not gently untangle that knot. It tightens it.

But it’s not just your family story. It’s the culture breathing around you.

Modern U.S. culture is not particularly conscious. It does not prioritize deep self-understanding or shadow integration but rather visibility, productivity, and accumulation. We are trained to build a self—optimize it, brand it, polish it—far more than we are taught to understand or love it. You can start a personal brand before you have created a stable inner life, cough cough. Even when we are told to go deeper into our internal world, it rarely comes from a stand point of self-actualization or spirituality but rather making us feel better, just relax, or focus more (see my article on why success never fulfills you to learn more).

There is another layer, subtler and more uncomfortable.

The “self” you've been taught to build is false—a story composed of memories, comparisons, expectations, and fears. You survive this false self when that identity becomes fused with your sense of being, making every rejection, every B+, every awkward silence in discussion section feels like a referendum on your existence rather than a data point about your growth.

Of course, then, self-esteem feels fragile. You’ve attached it to a performance-based identity inside a performance-based system.

And we never talk about how dimensional this whole thing is.

Self-esteem is reduced to confidence, as if it were one sliding scale you can raise by doing more impressive things. Rarely do we talk about how you can be highly agentic in one domain and deeply insecure in another, aligned intellectually but harsh toward yourself emotionally, purpose-driven yet quietly ashamed. Without a map, it all collapses into one vague verdict: something must be wrong with me.

Nothing is wrong with you. You were conditioned into conditional love. You were raised in a culture that equates worth with productivity. You were handed no real framework for building self-esteem consciously, only a suggestion to accumulate more evidence of your value.

The miracle is not that you doubt yourself. The miracle is that you still want to grow, to understand, to love more deeply. That desire itself is evidence that something in you knows there is another way to relate to yourself—one not built on constant evaluation, but on integration.

And that is exactly where we turn next.

The Three A's Of Self-Esteem And How To Build Them

Integrating all the research together, I summarize self-esteem or self-love in three A’s: Alignment, Agency, and Acceptance.

• Alignment involves building our purpose and integrity
• Agency is about building our confidence in our ability to navigate challenge and taking total responsibility for our life
• Acceptance is about having compassion for who we are right now and respecting ourselves enough to do that hard things for building a life of success, happiness, and love

Let’s explore each of the three As more in depth and how to build them.

Alignment

Alignment is made of purpose and integrity. It's the why behind what you're doing and the trust built from actionalizing it on a day to day.

Purpose is your sense of what you’re doing both short and long term and why you’re doing it.

It’s how consciously you’re living. You’re going to classes, but why? You’re hanging out with X friend, but why? You’re reading this post, but why?

Without purpose, college feels dead as a doornail.

It’s hard to feel radiant in spreading our influence onto others if we don’t even know what we want to be spreading. Many college students I’ve talked to about purpose say the same thing: “I have no idea what I want to do. I can figure it out later.”

No. Don’t figure it out later. If you don’t define your own purpose you will spend your whole life working on someone else’s. This IS the time to be figuring out your purpose because it’s the time of your life you can most explore with capitalisms working chains holding you to the floor. Sorry, little dramatic.

If you don’t know what your purpose is, then your purpose is finding out your purpose. It doesn’t have to be career only. It can involve relationships, clubs, and defining your values.

Questions for developing your purpose are:

• What would your 85 year old self be proud of looking back on your life?
• What sits at the unique intersection between what you’re naturally good at, passionate about, helps the world, and is profitable.
• What can you not not do?

All of these are questions, are things I handle in my free Cosmic Journaling Kit, a gamified journaling system for developing your emotional intelligence, self-understanding, and purpose in just 15 minutes a day.

The second part of alignment is integrity: how well you follow your purpose in the short and long term through your words and especially actions.

Without integrity it’s very hard to have self-esteem because you simply don’t trust yourself. You don’t trust you will follow your word, commitments, or values.

This tends to comes across in your college life constellations in two polarities. Either you retreat back from commitments, or you over commit fearing any shuddering will reveal the house is made of tooth picks. One missed workout and suddenly your identity crashes like it's 2008.

Why does this happen?

Because we are made of many parts, all trying to help us in their own ways. The issue is that most of these parts battle each other like its the hunger games. Integrity comes from learning to integrate them together so they collaborate rather than compete (something I discuss more in this article on Internal Family Systems).

Questions for developing integrity are:

• What do you value?
• How can you embody those values more in your day to day life?
• If you lived life with more integrity, you would..

Agency

Agency is made up of self-efficacy and self-responsibility.

If alignment answers why you’re doing something, agency answers whether you actually believe you can do it—and whether you’re willing to own the consequences when you don’t. You can have a beautiful purpose and zero agency and end up spiritually enlightened… and still miss every deadline.

Self-efficacy is your ability to grow and navigate life's challenges.

Self-efficacy is deeply contextual. You can feel wildly confident socially and completely helpless academically. Or competent in the gym and terrified in relationships. That’s normal.

What matters is whether you know how to build self-efficacy when you don’t have it.

It grows through experience + reflection, not just experience. It shows up as calm assertion, not arrogance. And it lets you say “I don’t know yet” without your soul leaving your body.

Questions to develop self-efficacy:

• How can you build your skills in X context?
• How can you gain experience in X context?
• How can you grow your meta-skills for building self-efficacy?

Self-responsibility is the degree to which you take ownership of your life—externally and internally.

Without it, life feels like it’s happening to you. With it, life feels like something you’re participating in—even when it’s messy, unfair, or deeply inconvenient.

Externally, self-responsibility is taking ownership over:

• Your time
• Your commitments
• Your grades
• Your health
• Your relationships

Basically: “I am responsible for the visible shape of my life.”

This is where a lot of college students stop. They become hyper-responsible externally—schedules color-coded, Notion dashboards pristine—while remaining completely irresponsible internally.

Internal responsibility means taking responsibility for:

• Your emotional reactions
• Your thought patterns
• Your attachments
• Your resentment
• In essence, your shadows

This does not mean self-blame. It means self-love as we'll get to in the last A, Acceptance.

Questions to develop self-responsibility:

• What do you still not take responsibility for in your external or internal life?
• What would it look like to take responsibility for those things?
• If you lived life with more self-responsibility, you would...

Acceptance

Acceptance is made up of self-compassion and self-respect. Where alignment is the orientation toward what matters and why, and agency is the belief you can actually do it, acceptance is the compassion of not being there and having the self-respect to do the hard things necessary for growth.

Self-compassion is becoming our own best friend by loving who we are right now, without any changes.

That's right, exactly as you are right now, insecurities and all. I often here students remark when I say this: "But there are things I want to change!" Self-compassion doesn’t mean you won’t change—it means you change without hating yourself along the way. You can fail, stall, spiral, and still belong to yourself. It means loving your resistance when you resist not being there.

That means loving the part of you that procrastinates, that has imposter syndrome, even the part of you that you might consider "evil."

Self-compassion is seeing yourself as building a castle out of life, not filling a hole. There isn't some fundamental lack in you to make perfect. There is an inner glory you are revealing. And if you experience resistance while loving yourself as you are now, then you love that resistance, until it learns to let go.

Questions to develop self-compassion:

• Where are you being cruel to yourself for not being further along?
• What would it look like to speak to yourself the way you would a close friend?
• If you treated yourself with more compassion, you would...

Self-respect is loving your self enough to do the hard things you need to for success, happiness, and love.

This is where acceptance gets teeth. Most students are fine thinking about self-esteem in theory. But as soon as it starts to actually hurt—as soon as change costs something—they pull back.

Self-respect means breaking off that relationship that is hurting you, switching majors because you're parents have been forcing you to do it, and setting clear boundaries for what you are willing to do and not.

Questions to develop self-respect:

• Where are you betraying yourself to avoid discomfort or conflict?
• What hard conversation or decision are you avoiding?
• If you respected yourself more, you would…

Looping Back To Self-Love (Conclusion)

And this is where the whole thing folds back in on itself.

Alignment. Agency. Acceptance. They are not milestones you unlock and move past. They are movements you return to as college stretches you, disappoints you, and quietly asks more of you than you thought you had. You orient toward what matters. You try to act in integrity. You gather small evidence that you can respond to life instead of collapsing under it. You practice staying on your own side while you are still unfinished.

And then you lose it.

You forget your why. You shrink when things get hard. You compare your middle to someone else’s highlight reel and decide you are behind. Not because you failed, but because this is what being human looks like under pressure. Growth loops. It doubles back. It asks you to relearn the same lesson from a slightly wider place.

So you return.

You realign — sometimes for the tenth time this semester. You rebuild agency in small, unglamorous ways. You soften into compassion and then stand back up into self-respect. Not all at once. Just enough to keep the relationship intact.

Because that’s what this is.

Self-love isn’t a destination you arrive at once you’ve optimized yourself enough. It’s a relationship you keep renewing with the person you already are.

College doesn’t pull you away from that relationship; it tests it. In classes. In friendships. In the quiet moments when no one is watching. And each time you choose not to abandon yourself, something subtle strengthens.

From the inside out.

So the story doesn’t end. It deepens. Each loop asks the same quiet question in slightly sharper form: can you love yourself here too? And every time you answer yes —imperfectly, without certainty — the foundation settles a little more firmly beneath you.

If you found this post interesting you would love my free College Freshman Cosmic Journaling Kit (CJK). ✨📚

It's a gamified journaling system that helps you grow your emotional intelligence, self-understanding, and purpose with over 1,000+ journaling questions and 5+ templates in just 15 minutes a day.