What is Self-Esteem?
Self-esteem is a person’s overall self-worth and personal value and can involve a variety of beliefs about yourself such as your appearance, emotions, and behaviours. It can play a significant role in your motivation and success throughout your life. Low self-esteem can hold you back because you may not believe you’re capable of success, whereas having a healthy self-esteem can help you have a positive, assertive attitude to achieve your goals.
Tips for Developing Healthy Self-Esteem:
- Use Positive Affirmations
Affirmations are positive statements you can tell yourself (or others) to challenge self-sabotaging/ negative thoughts. When you use them often you start to believe them and can then start making positive changes. The trick is to use realistic, believable statements rather than ‘over-the-top’ ones as these may be too contrary to your existing beliefs.
- Identify your Skills and Develop Them
Healthy self-esteem comes from demonstrating achievement in areas of your life that matter to you. Build on your existing strengths/abilities and find opportunities to accentuate them.
- Learning to Accept Compliments
Learning to tolerate compliments can help develop your self-esteem. One way is to have set phrases like “thank you” or “that is very nice” and practice using them when you receive compliments. With practice the impulse to feel uncomfortable and reject compliments with fade, meaning your self-esteem is improving!
- Throw Out Self-Criticism and Bring in Self-Compassion
People struggling with self-esteem tend to be more self-critical. The goal here is to replace the self-critical thoughts with self-compassionate ones. It can be useful to ask yourself what you might say to a close friend if they were in your situation, as it can be difficult to be compassionate to yourself with low self-esteem.
Further Assistance and Support:
Our team at Minding Family Townsville would be happy to provide support to help you improve your self-esteem. Please contact us on 47238 221 or JavaScript needs to be enabled to view email address.