5 Top tips self-esteem building where to start 2022

5 Top tips self-esteem building & where to start 2022

Let me start by saying one thing, your time is extremely valuable. Whenever you give some of your time to someone, you are in effect giving them a little part of yourself, a small portion of your life. It is something you can’t ever get back, so spend it wisely. I hope you will find this five-minute read worth the time it takes from your day, so I will crack on with it.

Value your time – Value yourself

If you have just read the paragraph above and absorbed it, you have already had your first tip in self-esteem building. Value yourself and value your time, it is essential that you acknowledge your value as a human being, your value to yourself and your value to others. Recognition of self-worth is the very foundation stone for building  self-esteem. I’m not talking vanity here, I am talking about a person realising that no matter who they are, no matter what they have to say or offer, they have a value as a person, as a contributor to society, to their family or to their workplace. Each and every one of us should recognise this fact about ourselves and acknowledge it in others. It can do great things for our own self-esteem and for those with whom we interact. The factual definition of self-esteem is a person's overall subjective emotional evaluation of their own worth, so value your time and value yourself.

Switch off the negative self-talk

This single biggest thing many of us can do when it comes to self-esteem building and improvement is to switch off that negative voice in the back of our mind. The one that constantly makes us doubt ourselves or looks at things from the worst possible perspective. OK so some of us are more risk averse than others. Some of us are methodical and some do things at a pace without particularly planning ahead and weighing up all the consequences. This is not the type of negative self-talk I am referring to. I am talking about the voice that will pop up with constant negativity at the most annoying of times. The one that tells you that you are not good enough, that you are not enough, that you shouldn’t even bother to try something because you are bound to mess up. That voice of self-doubt and negativity can go into overdrive and far from it being something to safeguard us, it can actually be really harmful and badly affect our self-esteem. It may well be the same negative voice that keeps you awake at night.

Apart from telling this voice to shut the f*** up the next time you hear it, there are other less combative ways to deal with it!

A very simple thing that you can do more or less anywhere anytime, the moment that voice appears is a very simple 7-11 breathing technique. Breathe in to the count of 7, hold it and breathe out to the count of 11. Repeat this 10 times.

Now, if you have read any of my work before you will know I am all about evidence-based explanations, I don’t do ‘mumbo-jumbo’, and I like to quantify all my recommendations. Firstly, doing this when you start to hear negative self-talk will of course distract your mind from it, but what it actually does to the body is activate the parasympathetic nervous system to help calm the mind down. This in turn enables us to refocus and can put us back on a pathway of positive thinking which in turn will help how we see ourselves, yes back to our own self-esteem building again.

Practice gratitude

Don’t get me wrong, I am not going all preachy on you here, and I am not going to lecture anyone on the fact that there are always people worse off than yourself. I am talking about merely acknowledging things we should be grateful for on a daily basis. The thing is, if you take some time out of your day, even just five minutes, for some positive contemplation it can do wonderful things for your mindset and in turn, your self-esteem.

Quite simply, if you can try to clear your mind of negativity and just start to think, slowly, about some of the good things that have happened in your day today. Really think about some positive things that you are grateful for, whether that be something as simple as the fact that the weather was warmer than expected and you felt the warmth of the sun on your skin, or your train was on time in both directions, or the fact that someone brought some home-made muffins into work to share out. Whatever, anything at all that makes you feel good and feel grateful.

OK, when you start to do this you are actually activating the left pre-frontal cortex in your brain, this again allows you to put things in perspective and alter your outlook, which again is a boost to your self-esteem. To get a bit more scientific, it is helping to create new neuropathways, and the more you use these positive pathways the better things get, the more you start to be a positive person with a healthier self-esteem.

Try this little experiment over the next month. Just before you go to bed each night, write down 3 things that have been positive about the day that is just ending. Now, before you shout out it was a bad day, that is not the issue. We all have bad days, but no matter what has happened if you really think about it, if you put your mind to it and activate the intellectual side of your mind you are actually going on a little search which is immensely beneficial to your mental wellbeing.

If you do this each night for the next month, you will have well on the way to 100 positive things that have happened to you listed in your diary/journal. Now just imagine for a moment, how browsing through that list at the end of the month will boost your sense of wellbeing and self-esteem!

Impart knowledge

Not only do any acts of kindness prove to be a boost to our sense of wellbeing, something I have covered in previous blogs, but there is a more definite link to our sense of self-esteem. Quite simply if we pass on our knowledge to others in a kind and helpful way, if we impart our knowledge on to others, and especially if we begin to do this out of habit. Not only have we helped establish some of those positive neuropathways, but we are sub-consciously boosting our sense of self-worth.

Quite simply we are feeling more useful, more helpful and therefore more worthy and valuable as a person, which is of course what self-esteem is about. When we interact in positive ways, especially when we are doing something that makes us feel particularly helpful, such as imparting our knowledge onto others we begin to motivate ourselves as well as those we are helping. When we feel motivated we get all the happy hormones flowing around in our body and we feel good. Our self-esteem improves.

It is actually one of our basic survival instincts and part of the evolutionary processes which we can trace right back to the days of the caveman and woman. Back in those days when we did something that helped with the evolutionary process we were rewarded. We were rewarded when we hunted and gathered, when we successfully supported ourselves and our families, and when we interacted with others. The reward we got, and there have been many scientific papers on this, was that we felt motivated. We thrive better as a tribe than as individuals, it is how we are programmed.

Put simply, when we feel useful we feel motivated, and when we are in this state of mind our self-worth and self-esteem increases.

Final point – Don’t name call

What? Just veering back onto the negative self-talk for a moment. Don’t name-call – EVER.

Ok, so this is quite a simple one to explain. Calling names, even in banter is far more harmful than you may think. Even in jest, do not refer to yourself as ‘stupid’ ‘dumb’ ‘forgetful’ or anything else you may care to call yourself. Equally important, don’t refer to others in that way either. Many of us have done this without even realising it. It’s a habit many people pick up from a very young age.

The long-term effects of inward or outward name calling are not healthy for you or other people. We are back on the neuropathways again. Just as I explained earlier about making new positive neuropathways in the brain, repeated negativity in all its’ forms does the same thing – but in a bad way. When we are repeatedly called bad names either by ourselves or others, we are further engraining these things in our mind. The long term effects are – you guessed it – bad for our self-esteem. We are in effect grinding ourselves down in the long term. In just the same way that repeated positive affirmations are good for us, repeated negative ones have an equal and opposite effect.

That’s it for this blog, again thanks for your time, remember it is valuable.

To find out more about the solution-focused therapy I offer worldwide via zoom and how it could help you to be your best self,  please take a look around my website. If you would like a free, no-obligation consultation via zoom then please choose a day and time that suits you from the calendar below. I look forward to meeting you.

BONUS POINT!

As you’ve got this far then here’s a little bonus point for you.

Smile! It does wonders for your self-esteem. When we smile automatically, it is because we feel good about something, we get a little surge of happiness, and it makes us grin – we can’t help it. It happens quite naturally. There are quite a few studies that all say we can in effect reverse engineer this. In other words if you make yourself smile, if you force a smile, you can evoke the same inner feelings of happiness. As you know by now, this all helps with your self-esteem. Go on, try it now, go to the mirror and give yourself a lovely big smile – you deserve it!

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