Today, most people can choose their own path – for example, their values, their job, their environment, their place of residence. But along with this freedom came new challenges: we need to constantly adapt to change and compete in almost every sphere. In such conditions it is easy to spoil the relationship with oneself, falling into dependence on other people’s opinions and assessments. How to strengthen your self-esteem? Let’s find out together with a psychologist.
WHAT IS SELF-ESTEEM
Self-esteem, simply put, is the attitude towards oneself:
- Do I consider myself a worthy person?
- How do I view myself – with acceptance or with criticism and dissatisfaction?
- Do I know my wants, needs, feelings, or am I a stranger to myself? Do I make an effort to know myself?
- Do I trust my decisions? Or do I consider myself incapable of doing anything sensible and avoid making decisions? Or do I constantly criticise myself for the decisions I make?
- Do I consider myself entitled to take care of my comfort and boundaries or do I allow others to violate them?
- Do I consider my needs worthy of putting them first in my life? Or do I see them as insignificant to the needs of others?
It is this filter through which we look at ourselves that determines our behaviour. And our self-satisfaction and quality of life depends on the actions we take.
WHY WE LOOK BACK ON OTHER PEOPLE’S OPINIONS
The fact is that we lack our own clear criteria for evaluating ourselves: we are used to thinking that someone else can see what we are like from the outside, so someone else’s opinion is more valuable than our own. This is a great tragedy, because we find ourselves forced to focus on the expectations and needs of others in order to earn a good judgement. This is often at odds with our own needs and desires, which only makes our own situation worse.
The fear of not being able to defend our opinions to others also causes us to betray our own principles and needs and consequently undermines our self-esteem. We often feel that it is not safe to be different from others, because most of us have experienced that ‘dissent’ and disobedience to an authority figure (be it a parent, teacher, or anyone else) will be followed at the very least by disapproval, and at the most by punishment and rejection.
HOW TO STOP DEPENDING ON OTHER PEOPLE’S OPINIONS
The trick is that all of the above is both a cause and a consequence of low self-esteem: lack of strong self-esteem makes us subject to the opinions of others, which in turn prevents us from building self-esteem!
The good news is that building self-esteem is more than realistic! The bad news is that it’s not a quick process that will require effort on your part, because self-esteem is only strengthened through action. Exercises from the series of ‘just tell yourself that you are good, that you are a beautiful, confident, successful person’ can not only not strengthen self-esteem, but even undermine it. Let’s leave this spectacular trick for the cinema and analyse the ways that work.
Exercise #1: learn self-acceptance
The first task to improve self-esteem is to learn to look honestly at your strengths and weaknesses, to evaluate your achievements and defeats. I will make a footnote that accepting your ‘bad’ traits and qualities does not mean agreeing with them. The main task at this stage is to notice that there are things you like about yourself and things you don’t like.
Answer the following questions
- What kind of person am I? What do I like about myself? What do I not like?
- In what areas of my life, in what relationships am I successful? And in what areas am I not, but I would like to be?
- Am I happy with myself and the way my life is organised?
- Do I have global or short-term goals? Do I like them and the way I go about them?
- Am I happy with my discipline? And with my commitment to a goal?
Your task here is not to evaluate yourself, not to criticise, but to look at these as some facts of life that in no way characterise your personality.
Self-esteem cannot be nurtured in isolation from our own reality. It grows when we see what we are unhappy with in our lives and make an effort to change. We begin to see ourselves as strong and capable of dealing with life’s challenges, we begin to respect ourselves and our self-esteem strengthens.
Exercise #2: Learning Self Support
If answering the questions from the previous exercise, you may find that you are too critical of yourself, too focused on the negative. Try to imagine your child or your closest and best friend saying that about yourself. Has your attitude to the person who wrote this critical essay about yourself changed? What would you say to him in response to such ‘selfies’? What words of encouragement would you find for him? Now try turning that encouragement to yourself! Surprisingly, we are often much kinder, warmer and more loyal to others than we are to ourselves. Learn to look at yourself as a friend, through kind eyes.
Exercise #3: learn to praise yourself
Here it is important to be extremely careful, because, as already mentioned, praise without reference to specific facts harms self-esteem no less than inappropriate rude criticism. It is important for our psyche to realise on what basis such conclusions are made, how they are supported in reality. Without this, taking and appropriating praise will be impossible.
Take the following as a rule: every evening, notice, or better yet, write down what you have done during the day, what obstacles you encountered and how you overcame them. Perhaps you solved a problem that was difficult for you. Perhaps you contained your anger and didn’t yell at your child. Or maybe you had a hard time starting an important conversation, but you made up your mind. Or maybe you showed your will and went to your workout even though you had trouble getting yourself to leave the house.
But don’t be too quick to say to yourself ‘I’m doing great’! Just observe yourself in this way for a few weeks and allow this feeling to emerge within you. The more specific your praise, i.e. the more clearly you understand why you are good, the more it will mean to you.
Exercise #4: learn to form your own opinion
To reduce your dependence on other people’s opinions, it’s important to start by forming your own. Start asking yourself the following questions on a regular basis:
- What do I think about this?
- Why do I think this way?
- What is my attitude about it?
- Why can’t I agree with something or someone?
You don’t have to get into battles and defend your opinion right away, let it first form and strengthen within you. The main task at this stage is to explore yourself, your values, your ideas. To become clearer to yourself first and foremost.
Exercise #5: learning to commit to your decisions
Write down one or two goals that you would like to achieve, for example, in a month’s time. This could be about health, relationships, self-realisation, developing inner qualities. Do not write a huge list of things that cannot be achieved in this time – let them be small, but understandable for you and, most importantly, realisable!
The point of the assignment is not to prove to yourself what you are worth by achieving these goals, but that through achieving the goals you have developed a sense of deep self-satisfaction.
When you have written down what you would like to achieve during the month, create an intention for the day that would bring you closer to your goal:
- take a walk or walk from work to home,
- read a book instead of your social media feed,
- rest when you feel tired,
- go to bed on time.
At the end of the day you can safely add a praise exercise and after a while you will start to notice how your satisfaction with yourself grows, how you are more consciously managing your actions, how you increasingly look at yourself with respect.
Working on your self-esteem will certainly take effort, attention and time, but it will be worth it. As you change the way you view yourself and strengthen your inner pillar, you will see the quality of your life and relationships with others change. You will begin to spend less emotional energy and resources on self-digging and self-defeating, you will be able to direct the freed up energy to interesting things and new achievements. Don’t try to change the people around you or the circumstances around you, but start with yourself – I’m sure it will be your best decision in life.