What Is Self-esteem?
Your self-esteem is how well you think about yourself compared to other people, such as your friends or work mates. Positive self esteem means that you approach things with confidence, thinking you are a good person and deserve to succeed. Low self-esteem means that you think you are a lesser person than others. It can often be traced back to early childhood experiences, such as heavy criticism, being abandoned, and feeling unloved or being ridiculed or abused.
Signs of Low Self-esteem
- Feeling not good enough – even if you are
- Putting yourself down all the time
- Unsure of your good qualities
- Making no effort because you expect to mess things up
- Being timid, not asserting yourself
- Losing your temper
- Picking fights
- Worrying about getting even
- Blaming others for your problem
- Constantly bickering about petty issues
Improving Your Self-esteem
You can begin by accepting that you are certainly not alone, masses of people have the same problem. Secondly, remember that you are a wonderful individual, and a special person. There is no one quite like you.
Remember that as an individual you have rights, one of these rights is to be able to make mistakes. Most of us do our learning through getting things wrong before we get them right.
We have the right to respect ourselves and to be respected by others and also have the right to say yes or no for ourselves.
Stay Positive
Don’t be negative when people take an interest in you, if someone asks you how you are doing, instead of answering by saying ‘not great’ or ‘could be better’ reply with ‘fine thank you’ or ‘very well’.
If you reply more positively then you will notice a difference in how people respond to you.
Learn from mistakes
If you don’t think much of yourself it’s easy to be your own critic. Things can get worse when others have a go at you, which is why it is important to take criticism positively. If you make a mess of some thing, ask what you can learn from it, what you could have done differently. Learn from the experience and don’t use it as an excuse to feel bad about yourself.
