Improve Your Self Esteem with These Easy Steps

Welcome everyone, to today's presentation about self esteem. Over the next few minutes, we're going to define self esteem, explore why it's important and ways to improve it. So the first question people ask is, why do we care about self esteem? We've heard about it, and we don't even really know what it is. Well, self esteem is basically how you feel about yourself compared with how you think you should be. So if you think you should be a lot of things that you're not, you may not have a very good self esteem. In order to form healthy relationships, it's important to first be okay with yourself. People with strong self esteem don't need others to validate them or tell them they're good enough. People with low self esteem, people with abandonment issues, tend to always be seeking input from other people to tell them that they're okay. And if they don't get that, they get really anxious or really depressed. So a strong self esteem is one of the best ways to guard against depression and anxiety. Self esteem basically means recognizing your worth as a person for all your flaws and foibles, but also all your strengths. So, like I said, self esteem is how you feel about yourself. It's your evaluation of your real self compared with your ideal self. And one of the things I tell clients to do is on one piece of paper, write down as many adjectives as they can think of that describe themselves right now. Who are you? Who is this person that's sitting before me? And then on another sheet of paper, write down a whole list of adjectives about who they think they should be or who they want to be. Now, we can all strive to improve. So there are going to be some things on the ideal self list that aren't on the real self list. But what we want to do is look at the difference between the two and identify anything on the ideal self list that's really adding extra stress. Whether you're trying to say you should be perfect. Well, nobody's perfect. So this is one place we can start with identifying things that are tripping up your self esteem because you're setting the bar too high. But we can also look at your real self adjectives and identify where you may not be giving yourself enough credit. A lot of times people forget a lot of their good qualities. Your ideal self is again, who you believe you should be or who you want to be. And your real self is that person who has strengths, who has weaknesses, but who is not perfect. So where does self esteem come from? Are we just born with it? And the answer is no. Unfortunately, children form their concept of the ideal self at an early age based on conditions of worth. When they do something right and get praised, they feel proud. So that's awesome. But too often we forget to praise children for who they are and not just what they do. When they are young and they do something wrong and get in trouble, they remember that as well. Due to children's immature reasoning, many things are overgeneralized and made into global, stable and internal attributions, creating an unrealistic ideal self. So what does that mean? Global means it's all about me. It's not that I am not good at math or it's not that I am not good at karate, it's that I am stupid or I am completely clumsy. So global means it applies to everything in your life. Stable means that it can't be changed so you're stupid or you're clumsy and you're going to be that way forever. And internal means it has to do with you. It's not some factor on the outside like you had a bad math teacher or a bad karate coach. It has to do with you and your goodness and your strengths and or inherent weaknesses. Unfortunately, as parents, a lot of times we use the term bad boy or bad girl, which the child hears as whatever this behavior I did that you don't approve of reflects upon me as a person. In general, I'm a bad person instead of I made a bad choice. So it's important to really watch our language around children, but it's also really important to watch our language with ourselves. So if something happens and you know, it doesn't turn out the way you wanted, you can either say, well, I'm a failure or I didn't do so good at this task. What can I learn from it and how can I move on? So one of the things that I talked about earlier was describing your ideal self. Once you get all those adjectives on the paper, I want you to review those qualities and mark out any of those that aren't important to you. You know, in my ideal self I'd probably be 5 11, blue eyed, blond hair, and you know, would have the metabolism of a cheetah, but I don't. And so I can mark those out because I'm never going to be able to have those particular qualities. Those are stable. You want to highlight the characteristics in your ideal self that you already have because most people have a lot of characteristics that they can be proud of. Everything that's left, anything that's not Marked out or highlighted are the ones that you want to develop to the best of your ability. So you really want to define it. What does, for example, if you say I want to be successful, what does that mean to you? What does that look like? How will you know when you're successful? You want to examine why it's important to you. So if you were successful by your definition, what would be different? And why is it so important to pursue this particular goal? Once you've done that, you've defined your goal, you've identified your motivation, then make a plan and do it. When you're working on improving your self esteem, small steps improve one thing at a time. You don't have to focus on seven things at one time to improve. And in fact if you do, you're probably not going to do any of them well. So pick one thing, improve it, achieve your goal and move on and pick another thing. To improve your self esteem. You must change the way you feel about yourself. That is change your feelings about your self evaluation or change yourself. So, so how do you change the way you feel about yourself? One of the first things to do is to focus on your strengths. We all have strengths. We all have weaknesses. If you think of relationships as a Yin and a Yang, you may be the Yin in a relationship. You're going to bring some stuff to a relationship, whether it's a business relationship or a romantic relationship or a parent child relationship. And that other person is going to bring different qualities. And if you balance each other out, that's awesome. Now sometimes you can form relationships with people who have similar strengths. That's, you know, you're going to share a lot of the same ideals and that's good too. However, what I want you to focus on is the fact that even if you don't have the same skills as someone else, that doesn't mean you're better or worse. It just means you're different and you're going to balance out the Yin and the Yang. Aim for effort, not perfection. When you do something. If you hold yourself to a standard of perfection, for example, you decide to train for your first marathon and you're going to accept nothing less except for finishing in the top three. That's setting a goal. That's setting yourself up for failure, likely. So you want to aim for effort. The first marathon, let's try to finish it or even finish in the top 50%. But finishing in the top three is setting yourself up for failure. And then decide if some of these ideal characteristics are still important to you. Once you start improving, once you start accepting yourself, then you can go back and look at those things that you thought you should be, that you highlighted or that you really wanted to work on. And you can decide, you know, do I really want to invest all my energy in achieving this particular goal? If you do, then you've got to change yourself. So since there are one or more ways that you want to improve, identify them, make a plan, and tackle them one at a time to improve self esteem. Make a list of positive affirmations and add a new one each day. What are you good at? If it's hard to do for yourself, pretend it is you are talking to your child and you know your role. Reversing what would you tell your child? You know, you're smart, you are pretty, you are fit. Whatever the characteristics are, Write down a positive affirmation each day. When you find a fault in yourself, remind yourself of three positive qualities. We all have faults, but we also have positives. And it's important to not minimize positives. And a lot of people who have low self esteem or depression or anxiety or all of the above tend to minimize the positive. So don't minimize them. Take credit where credit is due. If you did something, say yes, I did it. Don't try to say, well, anybody could have done that. Likely that's not true. Surround yourself with people who are positive and encouraging. Well, that's always a better place to be than around a bunch of people who are negative nellies. And instead of complaining about faults and using energy to nitpick yourself and beat yourself up, why don't you use that energy to take some positive action and either fix the fault, decide the fault isn't worth worrying about, and even add some strength. That may not be related to that fault, but you can add a positive to balance out a negative. If there's something you feel bad about that's impossible to change, add a new positive quality. Do a good deed each and every day. Random acts of kindness. It's not that hard. That can be picking up some trash off the sidewalk as you walk. It can be throwing out a peanut to a squirrel. Whatever it is, even holding a door for somebody will increase your positive feelings about yourself. Make changeable specific attributions for negative events so if something happens, figure out what you can learn from it or what you can do differently so it doesn't happen again, and focus it on that particular event. But you're going to have to be patient because changes don't happen overnight. You don't go from beating yourself up every day to having this optimistic, wonderful self esteem. It takes time and it takes practice. Check in with yourself, evaluate periodically and see how your self esteem is improving and accept your fears and work with and through them. If you're afraid of rejection, figure out all the reasons you're afraid of rejection and identify it and work through it. If you're afraid of failure, figure out how you're going to deal with that. Because we all fail. If we try things, then occasionally we're going to fail. So how are you going to work through that? Evaluate whether you hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold everyone else. Do you think you're that much better than everyone else or do you just need a reason to beat yourself up? A lot of my clients will beat themselves up, hold themselves to this high standard, and I say, would you hold your best friend or your child to that same standard? They look at me like I've got three heads and they say no. And so I look at them like they've got three heads and I'm like, so why do you hold yourself that high? And obviously this is done with respect in the environment. But it's important for people to really look at whether they're creating a situation in which they're going to be miserable. Manage your inner critic. Whether it's things that you're telling yourself or things that somebody told you 10 years ago, hush that inner critic up unless it is challenging you in a positive way. Focus on what goes well for you and it can be simple things. You made it all the way to work and didn't get caught in a traffic jam. That's something positive. Keep a list, if you need to, of five things that happen each day that go well. You may have in the beginning. You may have to really struggle and look and go, okay, well, I didn't get caught in traffic, I got paid. And you see where I'm going with this. It may take a little while, but eventually you'll start focusing on all the good things instead of highlighting the negatives. Caring about what people think about you is good, but worrying about what they think about you, pointless. So yes, you want to present yourself in a way that you can be proud of. You want to present yourself with integrity, that's great. But be who you are, because what other people think about you is more about their stuff than about you. So be who you are, be proud, be confident, and if they like you, great. If they don't like you, then tough potato chips view mistakes as learning opportunities. We all make mistakes. But mistakes are opportunities to figure out how to do it differently the next time, whether this means a relapse or a mistake at work. I remember one of the first times that I was a supervisor, I did something and it was a pretty big boo boo. And I walked into my boss's office and I said, richard, I screwed up. And he just kind of looked at me and he said, what did you do? And I told him, and he's like, yeah, you screwed up all right. But we worked out. How do we fix it? And we went on. It wasn't something he was going to hold against me. It was an opportunity for me to learn. Remind yourself that everyone excels at different things and stop comparing other people's strengths to your weaknesses. There may be somebody at the gym who can lift more than you. There may be Olympic runners that run faster than you. There may be people you know, heck, my son does math better than I do. I admit that I don't have certain strengths, but comparing myself to other people is going to do nothing but put additional stress on me. That's not necessary. So compare yourself to yourself. Compare yourself to who you want to be, and that's all you need to worry about. Use your insecurities to your advantage. Figure out why you're insecure and address it. Recognize what you can change and what you can't. There are some things about you that you're never going to be able to change. And, you know, how are you going to deal with that and how are you going to accept it? And what does that bring to the world and to your relationships? Take pride in your opinions and ideas. You have opinions, not everybody's going to agree. You have ideas, not everybody's gonna like them, but they're yours and they're creative. So take pride in them and go, I thought of that. Yeah, that was a good idea. So now that we've talked about what self esteem is and several different ways that you can work on improving it, it's important to think about three ways you personally could have used this information in the past week. What was the situation that was either helping or hurting your self esteem? What did you do? How effective was that for you in the short and long term with this new information? How could you have handled the situation differently in a way that might have bolstered your self esteem? And how can you start integrating some of these tips and tools into your routine? And why am I saying you? Because as a coach, we need to know what to do, but we also need to have at least tried it, at least practiced it. I don't ask my clients to do anything that I haven't tried, with the exception of obviously some medication assisted therapy, which would make no sense. But any cognitive stuff, any activities, any changes, I try those first. I see how it works. And just because it works for me doesn't mean it'll work for them. And likewise, just because it doesn't work for me doesn't mean it won't work for them. But it's important that you model healthy self esteem and self esteem building activities to your clients. As you start to like yourself and recognize your worth, your demeanor will likely change. Positive begets positive. You'll realize you don't need people to tell you that you're okay because you already know that. You find yourself surrounded by people who don't need to tell who you don't need to tell that they're okay either. So you're not constantly trying to validate other people. You won't be as afraid to create distance between yourself and those who bring negativity in your life. You're willing to say, you know, I'm okay with me and if you're going to be negative, then I don't need you around right now. When you're ready to be positive, come on back in and you'll have freed up energy to make positive changes in your life because you're no longer worried about getting other people's approval.