Improving Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is central your health, happiness, ability to pursue and achieve goals, and your overall quality of life. When you have a positive opinion of yourself and your abilities, you can cope with stressors, bounce back from setbacks and failures, and maintain better relationships with others. Self-esteem is truly the foundation of your emotional health and wellbeing.
It is normal and human to struggle with your self-esteem at times. Developing and strengthening it should be an ongoing pursuit! Below we will discuss some effective ways you can build a healthy and stable sense of self.
Identify your personal strengths.
Your personal strengths are the characteristics you have that make you unique. These are the traits about your personality that you like about yourself, your talents or the skills you’re good at, and even the qualities that other people like about you. In developing your self-esteem, it is critical to know your strengths, identify them, and continuously remind yourself of these qualities and abilities. You will come across many circumstances in your life where you are reminded of your flaws and the qualities you lack. You will experience failure, rejection, and loss—situations that can negatively impact your self-esteem. For this reason, you must remind yourself of who you are—of your value and of the many characteristics that you do possess.
Challenge yourself.
Oftentimes, we try to avoid the unknown or we shy away from taking risks in order to prevent the sting of disappointment that comes from failure. But, if you don’t put yourself out there, try new things, and test your limits, you miss out on opportunities to build your self-esteem. Challenging yourself—whether you succeed at the challenge or not—helps you prove to yourself what you are capable of trying new things. Even if you embark on a challenge and fail, the learning experience you can gain is invaluable. Plus, you have already taken the big step forward to pursue a challenge, which takes courage. Either way, it’s a win-win situation to step out of your comfort zone.
Celebrate your achievements . . . all of them!
Sometimes, your goals might be so ambitious or you may set the bar so high for yourself that you might forget to celebrate small accomplishments. It is very important, in improving self-esteem, to give yourself credit for all of your achievements. Pause and take time to acknowledge how far you’ve come and the hard work it took to achieve the progress you have attained. Consider everything you are grateful for and you will discover how acknowledging and being glad for your successes in life will fuel you to continue on in pursuit of the bigger leaps.
You can find more information about anxiety, life transitions, and relationship issues here.
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