You can invest time, money and effort to create the perfect life and wake up one day only to realize you are emotionally bankrupt and have made the most expensive mistake of your life.

Amazingly, and as simple as it may seem, the most expensive mistake people make is not found in their stock market portfolio; it's not the high interest rate found on their credit cards; the most expensive mistake people make is to neglect investing in themselves. Psychologists, therapists and life coaches may tell you in order to be successful in life you must create a strategy and make goals. The next crucial step according to some experts is to write those goals down, establish a time frame for them to happen and methodically follow through.

I assert, however, before a goal can be clearly thought of, before it can ever be written, an individual must make the firm determination to believe in self. Believing in self is the nucleus of authentic self esteem.

In my writings I often reflect on lyrics from songs because intertwined in their bereft statements, I find that many lyrics are profound; conveying thought, attitude and admission. It's the reason we hum the tunes, and mouth the words; because they resonate with our individual psyches and most often sound deep in our souls.

In 1996, Grammy Award Winner, R. Kelly sang "I Believe I Can Fly," which he recorded for the Michael Jordan movie Space Jam. This song resonated in the hearts and minds of people the world over reaching number two on the pop charts and won him the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, Best R&B Song, and Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture or for Television.

What was the key to this artful song? In my opinion, hope. Aside from the wonderful orchestration of the music, R. Kelly offered people an opportunity to believe in themselves. To know that in spite of their individual oppositions or challenges they too could soar just like him if they "believed." I concur with his implication.

The logical question is, how can "I" believe in "me"? The truth is, "it begins with how you feel about "you". Ask yourself; Do I value myself as a worthy individual? Do I value myself as a human being? Do I value my breath of life that allows me to wake up each day to make decisions, assumptions, assertions and plans? Value of self. I'm not talking about the feelings that people experience from day to day because those can fluctuate depending on what you're experiencing in your life.

I'm referring to the rightful esteem you should assign yourself. Healthy self-esteem is based on our ability to assess ourselves accurately (to know ourselves) and still be able to accept and value ourselves unconditionally in spite of what we may discover. Authentic self-esteem will allow you to acknowledge your strengths and limitations (which is a part of being human) and at the same time, a healthy self esteem will help you to accept yourself as worthy without conditions or reservations.

Our self-esteem develops and evolves throughout our lives as we build an image of ourselves. A great portion of our self-esteem originates during our childhood and leaves a lasting impression on our minds and in our hearts. Don't ever believe that experiences in our youth such as ridicule, the type of discipline you received, the lack of discipline; the praise or the lack of praise will be quickly forgotten and not affect you in the long run. It becomes a lasting, silent expression of who we think we are. When we were growing up, our successes (and failures) and how we were treated by the members of our immediate family, by our teachers, coaches, religious authorities, and by our peers, all contributed to the creation of our basic self-esteem.

If you were praised, listened to, received attention, had success in sports or school and were spoken to respectfully as a child, you will be more inclined to have good self-esteem. On the other hand, if you were unduly criticized, yelled at, ridiculed and expected to be perfect, you will be more inclined to have poor self-esteem. People with poor or low self-esteem were often made to feel that failed experiences were a failure of them as an individual. Left unchecked, those feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness will follow a person throughout their life course and manifest itself in a number of negative ways. It can create anxiety, stress, loneliness and increased likelihood for depression. It can cause problems with friends, co-workers and intimates. It can lead to underachievement and leave the door open to drug and alcohol abuse.

Worst of all, the negative consequences of poor self-esteem reinforce the negative self-image and can send a person into a downward spiral of lower and lower self-esteem and increasingly cause them to become non-productive or even actively exhibit self-destructive behavior. Which I believe is the root of most unsuccessful people. All the goals in the world will not create the path to success the individual desires because they don't believe it will work in the first place and as a result of their lack of belief, they lack the desire and fortitude to follow through.

However, there is hope! As R. Kelley intimated in his song, "I Believe", individuals with low self-esteem must take the first step to recovery and that step is to believe they can and deserve better. When a person believes, they allow room for possibilities. One way to start on the road to recovery is to challenge your past negative experiences or messages by nurturing and caring for yourself in ways that show that you are valuable, competent, deserving and lovable. Since an individual's self-esteem is due in part to how others have treated them in the past, the second step to a more healthy self-esteem is to begin by treating yourself as a worthwhile person.

There are several components to self-nurturing: One way is to make a list of things you like about yourself. Two, keep a 'success' file of awards, certificates and positive letters or citations. Keep mementos of accomplishments you are proud of where you can see them. Put them in a frame, hang them on the wall. This may even sound childish; however, when an individual has spent years listening to negative voices in their head from their childhood and perhaps may still be living with negativism as an adult, they need to break down the wall of negative repetition by thinking of self first without feeling guilty.

Self-nurturing and building your self-esteem can be surprisingly hard if you are not used to doing it. Don't be critical of yourself and remember that inner voice; it will condemn you when you make a mistake. When that happens, look around at the positive environment you have created with your "success" file or the list of things you have written about yourself. Allow yourself to have failures in life; just don't repeat them over and over again. Always remember, failure is success if you learn from it. The ups and downs in life can be a wonderful teaching and growing tool if we allow it.

Don't allow low self-esteem to keep you from asking for help. Often, people with low self-esteem feel like they don't deserve good things. Since low self-esteem is almost always caused by how other people have treated you in the past, you may need the help of a professional or other people in the present to challenge the critical messages that come from negative past experiences.

When you start feeling better about yourself and who you really are, you can then start thinking about what you would like to do with your life and begin creating the goals for the powerful life that you want and deserve.

Amie Jo can be heard every Monday–Friday, 11:00 a.m.–12:00 noon on KLAV 1230 AM. If you'd like to listen to her on your computer during those hours go to www.klav1230am.com and click on the "Streaming by WarpRadio" button, once there type in the call letters "KLAV" in the top-rightmost search box ("call letters") and click "GO."