I am learning a big lesson lately and it all seems to go back to humility. I thought I was very humble until I took a closer look at my words. What I noticed was that my insecurities were being masked as confidence, which really restricted me from being as humble as I could. I did a bit of reading and drafted this post on humility, I have a lot to learn from the things below, and I hope to slowly introduce these practices into my life to become a more humble person. Everyone needs a piece of humble pie at times.  Take a look below on some ways you can bring a bit more humility into your life.

What does it mean to be humble? To me being humble means being open to learning from others, through this we become better listeners and have more valuable relationships. It also allows us to take a closer look at ourselves and our personal traits without judgment or shame. It allows us to get to know ourselves like we haven’t before. In order to make any changes in our lives, we must first begin by being humble, as without being humble we will never notice that we need to improve and make changes in certain areas.

What is humility? The dictionary defines humility as “modest or low view of one’s own importance”. Being humble doesn’t mean to have low self- esteem, it actually means the opposite. When you are humble, your self-esteem is not attached to your personal traits, physical appearance, wealth, shortcomings, assets or your past.  When you are humble you view yourself as equal with other human beings.

Someone who is humble rarely feels insecure or self-conscious. They know how to accept credit for what they are responsible for and they know how to give credit for what they aren’t responsible for. They are stable in their self-esteem and secure in who they are. They are in no way concerned with competition, they learn from others opinion, but are not shaken by them.

Take responsibility for your actions as actions, not as a definition of who you are. This allows you to make objective, non-judgmental observations of yourself that lead to motivated activities rather than paralysis from shame.

How to be humble?

• Always be grateful for what you have – when you are humble you recognize what you have but you do not boast about it, instead you are grateful for them as gifts you have been privileged to receive. When you express gratitude and you will find humility.

• Always be grateful for your challenges and weaknesses- When you are presented with  a challenge or a weakness be grateful that you are presented with this opportunity to learn and grow. Life is all about growing and changing, all of the challenges we are presented with help us grow and build our character. When we are grateful for these things, they lose power over our perception of ourselves and they suddenly become building blocks we can now grow on.

• Never compare yourself to others No one else is created like you, we are all different. When you compare yourself to someone else you are not allowing yourself to learn and grow from one another.

• Be eager to learn One of the main lessons in wisdom is to be teachable, to realize that you don’t know everything, that there are many things you know that are false, and that you can learn a lot more from others.

• Practice kindness anonymously Most often when we do acts of kindness, we can easily become selfish and want to tell everyone about it. Practicing kindness anonymously allows you to put your pride aside and self-importance which can result when you share your kindness publicly.

• Don’t be so uptight with your expectation It doesn’t matter how good you are at making plans, keeping plans or how much you believe that something should and will be done a certain way… LIFE DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY ! Life will give you tons of what you did not expect, or did not want. When we are certain on our expectations we become easily frustrated, disappointed, angry and humiliated.  Taking ourselves and our expectations a little less seriously will prepare us to handle whatever life has to give us.