Pathways to Self-esteem
Having high self-esteem is essential to maintaining positive mental and emotional health. With a healthy level of self-esteem, you more actively pursue goals, celebrate your achievements, properly assert yourself, feel secure and confident in your abilities, and view adversity as a learning opportunity rather than a failure.
It’s completely normal to have periods of time where your self-esteem wanes. Stressful life events such as the loss of a loved one, divorce, unemployment, or trauma and abuse can contribute to lowering our self-esteem.
If you grew up in an environment where your parents were unsupportive, demanded perfection, or were neglectful, the adversity inevitably faced in life has an even more profound effect on your self-esteem.
Fortunately, there are many ways in which you may increase your sense of value regardless of what you’re currently experiencing. Here’s a list of my top ten ways to increase self-esteem:
10 Ways to Increase Your Self-Esteem
Surround Yourself With Supportive and Loving People: Having a solid support system with safe and loving individuals is always important, but it’s imperative when our worthiness has waned. These individuals are a safe place to discuss your feelings, provide good perspective, and most importantly, they remind you of how amazing you are! Distancing or eliminating any negative individuals from your life is the greatest way to begin seeing yourself more clearly and positively.
Validate Your Own Worth: Remind yourself that you’re amazing and have so much to offer everyone in your life. A great exercise is to write down everything intrinsic that you love about yourself, so you have a visual reminder of what makes you uniquely you.
Set Achievable Life Goals: Measurable and achievable goals provide you with a sense of direction and purpose. By setting and achieving small goals, you’ll soon build confidence in yourself and your abilities which will increase your self-esteem. As your confidence increases, you can set even larger life goals and afford to take bigger risks.
Don’t Compare Yourself To Others: Comparison is the thief of joy, worthiness, and self-esteem. It’s unfair to measure yourself against anyone else because you don’t possess their same skills set, perspectives, life experience, and so on. To properly measure your growth, you only need to measure against who you were before compared to today. It’s also important to note that your life experience isn’t linear; we may repeat certain life experiences to gain a deeper understanding of a particular lesson.
Be More Assertive about Your Needs: Speaking up for what you want and how you want it may be uncomfortable at first, but it’s the only way to ensure that your desired outcome is heard. Stop agreeing to things that aren’t in alignment with what you desire. If it feels uncomfortable at first, try asserting yourself in small ways like where to dine or what movie to watch. It’s perfectly acceptable to build up your confidence and test the waters before asserting yourself against more difficult individuals.
Learn To Set Healthy Boundaries: Learning the art of setting boundaries (and yes this is a skill) is one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself. By exploring what's acceptable and unacceptable when interacting with others you can more clearly identify when a firmer boundary is needing to be established.
Identify and Challenge Negative Beliefs or Thought Patterns: Your mindset will either help you move forward in life or hold you back from the life that you want to live. By clearly defining all the negative beliefs or thought patterns present you may begin working on changing them to new ones that better serve you.
Replace Self-Criticism With Self-Compassion: Above all else, love yourself! Give yourself room to breathe and to be perfectly you. Replace judgments and negative self-talk with acceptance, grace, and unconditional love. No one is perfect nor is that ever the goal. Love all parts of your being equally because every part of you is completely lovable and deserving of love.
Celebrate The Small Wins: Even small growth is worth recognizing and celebrating. This is even more important while building your self-esteem and is one of the best ways to catapult you forward. Did you stick to your budget goal today by NOT buying that latte or eating out? Great work! Be sure to give yourself a pat on the back for forgoing a short-term pleasure for a longer life-goal.
Follow Your Own Joy: By fully exploring what brings you joy, you’re no longer living life on someone else’s terms. This allows you to be more authentic and not persuaded by the wills and desires of others.
— Cyndi
