By Nabitali Victoria Bbosa
Improve your self-esteem involves knowing your opinion of yourself and your abilities in order to feel positive about yourself and life. It very well may be high, low or some place in the middle. While everybody at times has questions about themselves low self-esteem can leave you feeling insecure and unmotivated. You may have the option to distinguish a couple of things that are influencing your assessment of yourself (possibly you’re being harassed, or you may be feeling desolate), or it could be a mystery.
Individuals with great self-esteem for the most part feel positive about themselves, and about life. This makes them significantly more strong and better ready to adapt to life’s ups and downs.
Those with poor self-esteem however, are often much more critical of themselves. They find it harder to bounce back from challenges and setbacks. This may lead them to avoid difficult situations. That can, however, actually decrease their self-esteem still further, because they feel even worse about themselves as a result.
Forgiveness
Is there someone in your life you haven’t forgiven? An ex-partner? A family member? Yourself? By holding on to feelings of bitterness or resentment, we keep ourselves stuck in a cycle of negativity. If we haven’t forgiven ourselves, shame will keep us in this same loop.
Forgiving yourself and others has been found to improve self-esteem, perhaps because it connects us with our innately loving nature and promotes an acceptance of people, despite our flaws.
A 2014 study published in Social Psychological & Personality Science discovered that; it takes effort to understand and empathize with someone who has hurt you. The study suggests asking yourself a few questions:
What was life like for this person while growing up? What psychological wounds might he or she be nursing? What extra pressures or stresses was the person experiencing at the time he or she offended you? Then think of a small gift you could offer this person. It might be a smile, a handshake, a returned phone call or simply more tolerance the next time you are with him or her.
Remember that you are not your circumstances.
Finally, learning to differentiate between your circumstances and who you are is key to self-worth. A recent research, as detailed in a book; Principles of Psychology by William James recommends that self-esteem would vary in two ways. First, it would behave rather like an emotion; it would fluctuate, if not from hour to hour then certainly from day to day and perhaps from week to week.
For instance, one person might experience higher self-esteem than another, one week but their positions could be reversed the following week. This view takes self-esteem to be reactive, the reactions being to the variable or changeable conditions of a person’s daily life. So, just as an insult might provoke anger or unexpected difficulties with some project might induce a mood of gloom, warm praise or a significant success could temporarily elevate self-esteem while a humiliating failure might have the opposite effect.
Do what satisfies you
If you spend time doing the things you enjoy, you’re more likely to think positively. Try to schedule in a little you-time every day. Whether that’s time spent reading, cooking, if it makes you happy, make time for it.
Comparing yourself to other people is a certain fire approach to begin feeling messy. Try to focus on your own goals and achievements, rather than measuring them against someone else’s. Nobody needs that kind of pressure.
“Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.”
Louise L. Hay
Concentrate on what you can change
It’s easy to get hung up on all the things that are out of your control, but it won’t achieve much. Instead, try to focus your energy on identifying the things that are within your control and seeing what you can do about them.
For example, There are many things in life we can’t control everything from tiny annoyances to tragedies. We can’t control what others think, say or do. We can’t control what others think of us. We can’t control who our loved ones hang out with. We can’t control who we work with or who’s in charge. We can’t control Mother Nature, or today’s traffic. But, of course, we can control our reactions to all the things we can’t control.
Build positive relationships
You will probably find that there are certain people and certain relationships that make you feel better than others. If there are people who make you feel bad about yourself, try to avoid them. Build relationships with people who make you feel good about yourself and avoid the relationships that drag you down.
Here is an example; if a partner begins an exchange by threatening, putting you down, or otherwise forcing you to do something for them, then they either have nothing to offer you in return for what they want, or they don’t intend to offer it. In either case, it isn’t going to lead to a satisfying interaction and you are likely better off avoiding it. In general, positive internal dialogue is a big part of improving your self-esteem.
Recall that everybody commits errors
It’s a typical reaction to be difficult for yourself when you’ve failed. In any case, in the event that you can move your intuition to comprehend that failure is a chance to realize, that it assumes a fundamental job in learning and development, it can assist you with keeping point of view. Recall too that failure implies you’re putting forth an attempt.
Related posts
When you are too cautious, you do not allow yourself to take any risks. If you are safe all the time, then you are not giving yourself the opportunity to learn from failure. Give yourself the freedom to fail and see how the lessons of success open up for you.
Nobody is perfect
Continuously endeavor to be the best version of yourself, but it’s also important to accept that perfection is an unrealistic goal. It is additionally a smart thought to record constructive things about yourself, for example, being acceptable at a game, or decent things that individuals have said about you.
When you start to feel low, look back at these things, and remind yourself that there is plenty of good about you.You don’t have to be perfect every hour of every day. You don’t even have to feel good about yourself all the time.
Some people feel relaxed and positive with friends and colleagues, but uneasy and shy with strangers. Others may feel totally in command of themselves at work but struggle socially (or vice versa). Give yourself a break. We all have times when we feel a bit down or find it harder to maintain our self-belief.
Be kind to yourself
Avoid criticizing yourself to others, because this can reinforce your negative views and also give other people a (possibly false) negative opinion of you. You can help in improving your self-esteem, that is; give yourself a treat whenever you succeed in doing something hard, or just for managing a particularly bad day.
If you catch yourself saying things like ” I am not good enough” or “I am a failure”, you can start to turn things around by saying ” I can beat this” and I can become more confident by viewing myself in a more positive way.”
To begin with you will catch yourself falling back into old negative habits, but with regular effort you can start to feel more positive and build your self-esteem as well.
Identify and challenge your negative beliefs
Try to challenge any negative thoughts. A good rule of thumb is to speak to yourself in the same way that you’d speak to your friends. This can be really hard at first, but practice makes perfect. Notice your thoughts about yourself. For example, you might find yourself thinking ; Taking an isolated event and assuming that all other events will follow the same pattern.
For example, a friend has reacted badly to a piece of news, so everyone else will react the same way. Or making irrational rather than rational assumptions. If an expected email doesn’t arrive, you believe the sender hates you, rather than stopping to consider whether they are busy, or having problems with their internet connection.
When you do, look for evidence that contradicts those statements. Write down both statement and evidence, and keep looking back at it to remind yourself that your negative beliefs about yourself are not true.
The Importance of Small Steps
It is very unlikely that you will go from poor to good self-esteem overnight. Instead, you will probably find yourself make small improvements over a period of time. The key is to look over the long term, rather than day-to-day, and focus on the big picture, not the detail of how you felt at a particular moment yesterday.
When you feel good, or you do something good, celebrate it but don’t beat yourself up if you occasionally slip back into negative patterns of thinking. Just pick yourself up again and try to think more positively. Eventually, this will become a habit and you will find that your self-esteem has quietly got better.