Improving Your Self-Esteem
Self esteem can be defined as a person’s ability to judge their own identity and attach a value to it. The value that a person puts to their identity will determine the persons self esteem and self worth.
As a human being we all have the capacity to be judgmental. Usually the harshest form of judgment is aimed towards ourselves. This self judgment is usually distorted in its ability to fairly critique our own self worth and self value.
This allows a person to accept or reject parts of their personality rather than appreciate and accept themselves for who they are as a whole person – faults and all. Rejecting parts of you can lead to many complications in life including relationships, friendships, health and career.
Self-Esteem can be impacted by many different influencing factors.
When a person’s self esteem is low it can change a person’s behaviour by creating a self protection barrier of defence, including anger, depression, illness, perfectionism, lying or addictions.
It also severely impacts everyday thoughts. One sure way to improve self esteem is to address your self talk. Self talk can either be positive or negative and it will be determined by your self value and self worth.
The critical voice inside your head can take over your thought processes and translate any ordinary event into a negative and self defeating behaviour, feeling or trauma.
How To Increase Your Self Esteem
Most people would admit to wanting more self esteem and self confidence but really don’t know where to start. There’s a good reason for this because self esteem is not something you can have in one second. How can someone go from being self conscious to self confident in one second?
Self esteem is a process of building good feelings and good thoughts about you which takes time. It takes time because you need to believe it. You need to feel it and you need to live it. Even if you can say positive things to yourself the question is how many times do you need to hear it or feel it before you believe it?
There are certainly ways you can increase your self esteem instantly but it’s holding onto it that becomes difficult. It’s something that you must keep working on. Treat it like a bank account. The more you keep putting in you will build up a nest egg to draw on when you need it.
So let me help you out here and give you some ideas on how you increase your self-esteem.
10 Tips To Increase Your Self-Esteem
1. Stop Criticising Yourself
Find the strength to stop criticising yourself so much. You cannot expect yourself to be perfect any more than anyone else can.
If you don’t like other people criticising your then you need to stop doing it to yourself. It doesn’t feel good so you need to stop.
2. Write a List
Make an actual pro’s and con’s list and write down what you do and do not like about yourself. Be specific and resist the impulse to just write about your physical appearance. Take into account your person as a whole.
When you’re specific you might find that you have less to dislike than you think which is awesome. Once you have the list you can do one of two things.
1. You can focus on your strengths and the things you like about yourself or
2. You can create a personal development plan to improve the things you don’t like.
Either way you will feel so much better. You can accept yourself for who you are or you can take action to make improvements.
Looking for Help To Improve Your
Self-Esteem?
The Self-Esteem Planner is perfect if you’re looking to boost your self-esteem and self-confidence.
This planner is filled with templates and exercises to help you work through your thought processes, experiences, emotions and how you’re planning for your future.
You will also find templates designed to breakthrough the self-doubt and limiting beliefs so you can be genuinely happy within.
This is an instant download so you can get started straight away.
You can print the pages and use them over and over again.
3. Set Realistic Goals For Yourself
Set personal goals for yourself so you have something to aim for. Make sure they are things that have meaning to you. Give yourself a time frame and reward yourself when you’ve achieved it.
When you achieve something it’s a feeling you create that money can’t buy and no one can give to you. It’s a measurement of your commitment and effort towards something.
Start of with small goals and then build on your successes. You can always reassess your goals as you continue on but getting started is the most important thing. Then next important thing is to assess if this is the right goal for you and lastly, keep going until you finish it.
4. Self Care
A lot of people thing self-care is a hippy word or it means some kind of guilty luxury. It’s not the case at all. It’s all about having a balanced life and having the ability to tune into your body and recognise what you need.
Start off by eating clean and healthy, be active every day, and get plenty of sleep. This goes a long way towards good mental health.
Of course you can add in massages and spa days but even taking time out of a busy day to listen to some music or call a friend when you need to offload is still self-care and is beneficial in so many ways.
Don’t look at self-care as a treat look at it as part of your mental health plan.
5. Change Your Self Talk
Try to avoid thinking negative thoughts, especially when it comes to yourself. Catch yourself when you’re saying negative things about yourself and switch it for something positive.
Even if all you can come up with is “No, that’s not true.” Negative self-talk can become a bad habit so catch it and replace it. As much as possible.
You have to consider if you would talk to anyone that you cared about in the same way and start treating yourself with a little more respect.
6. Stop Comparing Yourself To Others
You are a unique person and you should take pride in what sets you apart from others. You don’t need to be like anyone else you just need to be the best You, that you can be.
Everyone can improve themselves so if there’s something you want to do better then focus on that but only for the purpose of self-improvement not to be like someone else or to impress someone else.
When you look at someone’s life or achievements you have to realise that you are only looking at a result. You didn’t look at the journey. You don’t know the sacrifices a person makes to look a certain way, to have a specific career or to be in a loving relationship.
It’s easy to see where someone is at in life right now and think “they’re lucky” but luck usually comes in the form of hard work. So don’t be fooled in what you think you know about someone else. Run your own race and stay in your own lane. You’ll be glad you did.
7. Treat Yourself
Treat yourself to something special. Even small things like going for a hike in a beautiful place, eating out at a favourite restaurant, going for a swim at the beach can do wonders for your self-esteem. You can call it a recharge for your batteries.
You might want to lash out and do some online shopping, update your wardrobe, join a gym or get your hair done. Or go on that fishing trip.
Treating yourself with rewards is like giving yourself a prize for coming so far in your day, week or year. Why shouldn’t you invest in yourself?
8. Meditate
Meditation isn’t about sitting cross-legged and humming. It’s about taking the time to release your mind and body from all of the stress, closing your eyes, and focusing on centering yourself. It’s a great stress reliever, and could help you connect with your inner self.
All you need to do is acknowledge your thoughts one at a time and let them go. This process slows down your thinking and that’s the whole point. Slow your thinking down so you can acknowledge your thoughts instead of being overwhelmed by them.
Don’t aim to quiet the mind. No one can do that. Our minds are not designed to be quiet. Just focus on slowing down the pace and connecting your mind and body as one.
9. Make Good Decisions
Good self-esteem is also about having self-respect. Making good decisions in your life will help you maintain that self-respect.
A decision gives you a direction in life. Should you move towns, should you buy the house, should you enrol in that course, should you say yes to that date?
Every decision is an opportunity to change your life so make sure you’re choosing well. Ask for help when you need to make life decisions. You don’t need to do it all on your own. A series of good decisions leads to great outcomes.
10. Let go of Perfectionism
The truth about perfection is that it doesn’t exist. No one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and those mistakes are a part of life.
Don’t get hung up on getting everything right. You can learn and do better. Life is all about learning. It’s applying what you’ve learnt that builds your confidence and self-esteem.
If you expect everything to be perfect you’re going to feel very disappointed in life. Nothing is perfect. If you can change your mindset to near enough is good enough you can take the pressure off yourself.
The less pressure you have the more present you can be. When you are present in the moment you have the ability to use all your senses and get the most out of life.
Conclusion
The key to happiness is improving your self-esteem. Happiness is an inside job just as make as self-esteem is. You have the ability to feel good about yourself and to make better choices in your life from this moment forward.
Someone may have influenced yourself self-esteem in the past by criticising you or putting you down but you don’t need to carry it with you any longer. No one gets to dictate how you feel about yourself.
Don’t dwell on mistakes. Learn and move forward. If you see someone else living a better life there’s no need to feel jealous or envious you just need to find out how they have what you want and model it.
Improving your self-esteem creates a ripple effect of self-confidence and self worth so it’s worth investing the time and energy into it.
Healthy self esteem is essential for your life. It determines how well you treat yourself and how well you treat others.
It effects how you view your world, how you view your place in the world, how you act in your world and how you take care of your basic needs.
