How to transform your self esteem

Growing into a balanced personality requires a deliberate effort to improve your self esteem. This is more of how you view, feel and measure your self-worth or value in relation with the people or society around you. Self-esteem is a mirror of what you think and feel of yourself; and when they are positive/ healthy, they amount to self-confidence and self-respect. It helps you to be content with yourself, your abilities and your competence. Healthy self-esteem makes you resilient and hopeful about life. Nonetheless, self-esteem is relatively stable and enduring though it can fluctuate depending on circumstance you find yourself.  

Though self-esteem refers to the feelings you have about yourself, it is largely determined by your self-concept which is about your picture or perception of yourself; it is also about your self-ideal which is about the way you would like to be. These influences determine your mental health condition resulting to either healthy or unhealthy self-esteem.         

                                                  

Type\ Forms of Self Esteem

• Healthy Self Esteem
• Impaired Self Esteem

Causes of Impaired Self Esteem

• Problem at school
• Bulling
• Abuse /neglect
• Issues with relationships/ friendships
• Work or Exam stress
• Health problems
• Pressure from friends/ family
• Experiencing discrimination
• Financial worries
• Negative body image

How to overcome Impaired self-esteem and improve healthy self-esteem

Conclusion

Frequently asked questions                                                       

Type\ Forms of Self Esteem

I prefer to use the terms healthy and impaired self-esteem, rather than high and low self-esteem for the purposes of objectivity, non-judgmental or labelling, bearing in mind that narcissists and conceited (excessively proud of oneself) individuals who appear to have high self-esteem actually do not. Boasting for instance indicates that the persons are dependent on others’ opinion of them and reveals impaired rather than healthy self-esteem. Thus, healthy self-esteem requires that you can honestly and realistically assess your strengths and weaknesses. When you are not too concerned about others’ opinions of you, it helps you accept your flaws without judgment, allowing your self-acceptance to contribute to your self-esteem.

 Healthy Self Esteem

This could also be referred to as Positive self-esteem; it is about having a balanced and realistic view about yourself and to believe in your ability to learn, achieve and contribute to the world around you. It means that your ideas, feelings and opinions are just as important as those of others. This self-esteem is a frame of mind that allows your strength to challenge your weakness and feel good about yourself and your life. It allows a healthy self-concept and self-respect that could enable you to see the positive aspect in a potentially difficult situation. Indeed, the importance of self-esteem is quite enormous.

With healthy self-esteem and supportive relationships, you can adapt better to changes including accepting a new job or moving to a new place. It also allows you to cope with setbacks while knowing you did your best. You would also accept that others will not always agree with you. Disagreements will happen, but with healthy self-esteem, you accept, you disagree and walk away with you honor intact.

Healthy self-esteem would help you speak up for yourself and express your opinions without feeling challenged or flustered. By valuing your worth and opinion you can express yourself without the need to win or the fear of disapproval. You may be proven wrong but you expressed your view objectively because you can accept correction as well as handle your rejection and failure as part of growth and never a personal disaster.

Difficulties, weaknesses and challenges are parts of life, but how you handle them can depend on your self-esteem. Believing in your self can help you pass through any situation. Your healthy self-esteem would increase your commitment to meeting and beating the situations, even if it means working harder and being more committed and by so doing, difficulties turn to opportunities.

High sense of self-worth improves your efficiency, productivity and the quality of your work. Strong trust in yourself motivates you to achieve your desired goals. It also helps you advance in your career by allowing you to trust your judgment and make better decisions, which are important leadership qualities. These can help you secure a new job, promotion or pay raise.

Realizing your worth helps you trust value, which helps you maintain and improve your overall confidence as well as improve your occupational and nonoccupational relationships.

Impaired Self Esteem

This is when you have a negative, unbalanced and unrealistic views and feelings about yourself. The negative impacts of impaired self esteem includes your inability to manage adversity and life’s disappointment. All of your relationships could be affected, including your relationship with yourself. When your self-esteem is impaired, you would feel insecure, compare yourself to others, doubt and criticize yourself.

In this state of mind, you could neither recognize your worth, nor honor as well as express your needs and wants. It could as well make you deny responsibility for your actions which would consequently affect honest and fruitful relationship with others. This level of frustration could ignite the desire to control others and or their feelings towards you to feel better about yourself. For example, this situation could snowball to jealousy, manipulating or devaluing people, as well as restrict association with others.

Impaired self esteem could consciously or unconsciously make you devalue yourself including your positive skills and attributes, making you hyper-sensitive to criticism. Consequently, could make you afraid to try new things because you always think that you might fail. Impaired self-esteem can be caused by many factors.

Causes of Impaired Self Esteem

Many factors are responsible for causing impaired self esteem and a few of them are as follows:

Problem at school: Many individuals struggling with impaired self-esteem started with poor grades in school because it is very demeaning to be singled out among peers as the person who is always performing sub-optimally especially by a tutor who is not proficient in managing the dynamic of grow and development in children. The tutor could end up making the child an escape goat which will make other pupils/ students to pick on the child.

Bulling: When peers pick on the material, academic or physical inadequacies of a child. They bully the child through threat and harm to discourage the good qualities in the child. Sometimes exceptionally bright pupils/ students are bullied out of jealousy which leads to impaired self-esteem.

Abuse /neglect: There could be emotional, verbal or physical abuse/ neglect which contribute greatly to impaired self-esteem and this cuts across all gender and age. It is often perpetuated by confidants, which makes timely identification and intervention a bit difficult. Consequently, the abuse/ neglect develops impaired self-esteem.

Issues with relationships/ friendships: Inability to have and or sustained the choice/desired relationship could lead to impaired self-esteem as the individual could focus on personal inadequacies as the reasons behind the relationship problems.

Work or Exam stress: This could put undue pressure on self-esteem especially when the individual has performed sub-optimally repeatedly while others are scaling through at once and go home with their rewards.

Health problems: This challenge often generate multi-dimensional negative effects on self-esteem. The patient could deeply be concerned with the physical changes, stigma and discrimination, loss of time, activities and support, financial pressure and self-stigma; thereby resulting to impaired self-esteem.

Pressure from friends/ family: Most forms of undue pressure especially from family and friends could in many subheads like pressuring an individual to get married, provide for family and friends, meet up with tasks and deliverables within a time frame could result to impaired self-esteem.

Experiencing Discrimination: All forms of discrimination due to race, creed, gender, health, age or social status give room for impaired self-esteem.

Financial worries: “Money makes the world go round” they say, but when you do not have the finances to provide the basic necessities of life for yourself and your dependants, it could become a recipe for possible impaired self-esteem.

Negative body image: This is a situation where you feel dissatisfied with your physical appearance. It is also referred to as impaired/unhealthy body image; which is a mental health condition, as well as a one of the factors responsible for impaired self esteem.

How to overcome Impaired self esteem and improve healthy self esteem

Impaired self esteem is a form of mental health condition often developed as a reaction to unpleasant life experiences. As such would be difficult to overcome especially when the triggers are still around. Therefore, overcoming it would start with acknowledging those unpleasant life experiences, then responding to them positively and adequately. Achieving a healthy level of self-esteem can make a difference to your wellbeing and confidence. I trust that this practical guide can help.

• Be aware of yourself by outlining your strengths and your weaknesses. Self-awareness will help you to know who you are and who you want to be. The goal is to change or challenge your negative beliefs about yourself. It can be challenging to sit down and think about your admirable traits, even the awkward. Acknowledging your capabilities would help you know where and how to start.
• Another way to achieve healthy self-esteem is to focus less on your esteem and more on practicing self-compassion. Be nice to yourself and handle yourself with dignity and respect; as you would treat a beloved friend. Develop an unconditional love for yourself. 
• Keep a record of the things you have done that you enjoyed or admired. This makes you appreciate yourself the more. Do not just write down any vague affirmation you come across. Instead look for relevant positive affirmations.
• Another important step to achieving a positive self-outlook is to stop comparing yourself with others. Focus on your journey because your life situation is not exactly the same with others. More so, you can never know everything about others. Thus, they cannot be your yardstick.
• Work within your means; you can only work with what you have. It is good to learn good deeds from others but you should work it out within what you have, so as to get your own peculiar results. Identify your opportunities and maximize them.
• Be open to change and do not be rigid with your views and reliefs. Explore, learn and evaluate new opportunities before you and make positive adjustment where necessary.
• Do not give up; turn your fears or reservations into motivation and be strong to put in all it takes to make remarkable achievement for a great cause.
• Set realistic and achievable goals because change is not something that happens overnight and perfection dose not really matter. So, celebrate your achievements no matter how small they are. You are working to be the best version of yourself and the person who identifies the best version is you.
• Also consider that everyone makes mistake. If you experience any setback, do not beat yourself up about it; rather, learn from it, encourage yourself with positive self-talk and move on.
• Surround yourself with a formidable support squad always. The people who love and care about you will be your biggest support system in your journey to positive self-worth. Surround yourself with people who invigorate and energize you and make you feel positive about reaching your goals. You can achieve this through cultivating friendships and family connections where you feel valued and accepted for who you are.
• Be strong enough to set boundaries and learn to stay “No” as well as prioritize your needs to maintain healthy relationship.
• Keep it positive always because, positive affirmation and positive self-talk are key to building your self-esteem. You are your own worst critic, so when you use negative self-talk, you may eventually begin to believe it. So be your own cheer leader and focus on telling yourself how great you are or that you can and will achieve your goals to maintain a positive focus.
• Take an internet/ social media detox because in today’s digital world we see and consume information rapidly and constantly too.
• Do what you love because when you are doing something you enjoy, your brains naturally release endorphins that makes you happy and overcome stress and it consequent challenges.
• Take care of body because a sound mind works better in a sound body. So, exercise, eat and sleep adequately. Then, maintain some good personal hygiene because your body is your valuable asset.
• Live in the present because you cannot change the past and the only way of predicting the future is by making the best use of the present. So, it is important that you focus on the present so as to establish a positive outlook because worrying about what is to come could cause you more stress. If you focus on the here and now you can prepare for anything that comes your way.
• Seek professional help by seeing a therapist or counsellor to have a confidential dialogue on the underlying issues effecting your self-esteem. You can also join Support Groups to connect with others who share similar experiences or challenges.
• Communicate openly so as to share your feelings and needs with trusted individuals and be open to receiving support.
• Volunteer and help others through engaging in acts of service because it can boost your self-esteem and sense of purpose.

Conclusion

Self esteem is about your views and feelings of yourself worth; it could either be positive or negative which amounts to healthy or impaired self esteem respectively. You could develop either healthy or impaired self-esteem as a result of life experiences that come in form of either positive or negative reinforcements. The merits of healthy self-esteem are enormously pleasurable for you and those around you unlike the impaired self esteem. However, a lot can be done to an impaired self-esteem as you have seen in this article to improve and achieve a healthy self esteem. Remember that self-esteem is a mental health issue; so, be kind to support others by sharing this article.

                         

 Related Posts:                       

How to Achieve Positive Body Image/Neutrality https://buchiadimorah.com/how-to-achieve-positive-body-image-neutrality/

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