How to improve your Self Esteem

Self esteem is a funny and strange thing. Every one knows it's very necessary in order to be successful. To live a good life. But very few understand, much less can define it. It's not solid or physical like a house or rain. It's not even like easily identifiable virtues like courage or humility. It is very intangible, ephemeral, mysterious, or even fog like.

self esteem is often like fog

If you can't define it. If you can't capture it. If you can't see it, touch it, smell it, taste it. How can it be so important?

But we know it's important. I know how important it is. I've had so little of it most of my life. I know I could use much more self esteem than I have, even now. As I've gained self esteem, I've gained an understanding of how important it is. Without it I was almost paralyzed. Incapable of doing some things most people wouldn't think twice about. Things like ordering a pizza. Saying that I'd like Burger King instead of McDonalds. Asking a question of a teacher or someone at an information desk.

I read an essay by Joan Didion "On Self Respect" and thought "WOW, she's got it right". Here's a small excerpt that really caught me.

"To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night you came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness."

Without self esteem and it's components: Self Confidence and Self Respect , we endlessly run our failings through our minds. Over and over again. Platitudes and the opinions of others don't make a dent. Or if they do, our ruminations quickly fix that. We can, after all, recall so many more failures than successes. And what successes we can recall are all flawed. There was always something better we should have said or done.

Every fault. Every failing. Every mistake is another rope that ties us to a bad self concept. Another piece of mud that clings to us. Millions of clumps of mud we heap on ourselves then pat into place. We water them like plants with our ruminations so they don't dry and flake off. We can't see our real selves through this muck. Others telling us something good about us or congratulating us doesn't do any good. The image is from inside. One we created. And one only we, the creators, can destroy.

This destruction of the negative self concept and improvement of self esteem can occur. But it occurs slowly. From the inside. with subtle, piece by piece changes in how we interpret events in our lives. Past, present and future. The self concept was created with millions of negative thoughts. It might take millions of revised thoughts to change it.

Few people can change quickly. That change is usually due to a major dramatic event that happens. Like a near death experience that causes a revolution inside their mind. Such an experience cannot be artificially created. So the rest of us must struggle the slow way. By voting daily to think of things differently. By changing our mind's government, one congressman at a time. One judge at a time. We change how our minds govern our responses. We change our internal government and our internal country. We improve our self esteem.

judge and sentence negative thoughts to oblivion

When you encounter the corruption of negative thoughts, you must stop and report the corruption. Have your thought detective investigate the thought. Uncover it's false assumptions. Have your prosecuting attorney challenge the bad thoughts. Have your internal judge condemn the thought and suggest an alternative way of looking at the event. If you need to, you can call on a jury of friends or family to issue the guilty verdict and help you with alternative thoughts.

You cannot let negative thoughts go unrestrained. You cannot let them roam free to destroy you from the inside. You must fight against them every day. Your self esteem is too important to allow to remain low and destructive.

Improving your self esteem will enable you to try things, risk things, achieve things you can not imagine now. You can achieve things few contemplate, fewer try and even fewer achieve. Sometimes the best step is to do something drastic. Something that really challenges you to change the way you look at things.

My daughter, who also suffered from low self esteem, took a job at great personal emotional risk and came out of it a better, stronger person. She was a camp consoler for disruptive, troubled teenagers. Those teenagers were experts at finding and exploiting someone's weakness. And they were very tenacious in their efforts. My daughter took the job because she loves being at camp and she was desperate for a job. She didn't last as long as she had planned, but she did last longer than most expected her to, including one of those who did her initial training.

Somehow watching those girls fight over such small things, such as how many green beans were put on their plate, made my daughter realize something about herself. Maybe it was a realization of how well off she was, how bad things could be. Maybe it was that she shouldn't focus on small problems. That there will always be problems. That nothing ever goes the way you plan so you might as well roll with the punches. I don't know just what it is, but she is different, more mature and considerate and willing to risk being wrong.

Self esteem is too important to life to neglect or leave to chance. Work to improve it every day. Keep looking for positive ways to describe or explain what happens in your life. But there are other Self Esteem Problems than it being too low. To read about them Click here.

Boost your self esteem with

Free Self Esteem Worksheets

10 pages of questions and prompts

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