Not believing in yourself, not thinking you are capable of doing things that are important to you, doubting every step you take, all of these things could result from low self-esteem.
When you have low self-esteem, everything seems harder and more challenging than reality. This sucks! We don’t need things to be harder than they have to be, right?
Everyone deserves to believe in themselves, everyone deserves to feel good about themselves and everyone should be kind to themselves.
That’s why you need to do something about your low self-esteem! Please set up a plan, follow these 8 powerful tips, and start building some good self-esteem, you deserve it!
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8 Powerful Tips to Raise Your Low Self-Esteem
1. Discover your strengths
Every person on earth has some good qualities, strengths, or talents and if you feel like you have none, it’s time to explore. You can do some research on your own, or ask friends or family for help with this.
It is possible that you don’t use your talents or special skills often (which is very unfortunate) or that you don’t know what they are because you think that everyone must be great at these things. After all, they don’t cost you much effort so everyone must be capable of doing these things. Wrong!
If you are naturally good at something, this might mean that it is one of your talents. Your strengths go way past the courses you’ve got in high school, but these can also help you figure them out.
Maybe you excelled in math but are now doing social work and miss those numbers and the way that they are more predictable than human beings. Or the opposite way, if you were always good at communicating with others, a very good listener that everybody comes to with their issues for advice and now work as a programmer because you thought it would bring in a lot of money and you miss people to talk to. You should be aware of the things you are good at to improve your low self-esteem.
You could also ask your family or friends what they think your talents are. Sometimes, it’s easier to see from an outside perspective. Or take a look back to your childhood, which things were you good at back then when you didn’t have to perform like you do now?
The third option is to ask Google to help you by giving some ideas of what kind of talents exist. This website, for example, gives you 47 talents to take a look at and see which ones you can see in yourself.
There are so many talents out there, and we need diversity in our society so go find out what you do best!
2. Develop your talents
When you find out what your talents and strengths are, it is time to let them grow even more. Low self-esteem doesn’t go away by knowing you have talents and skills (although it will help to be self-aware of this fact!).
It is important to focus on the things you are already good at and to keep developing and using your talents to get better at what already can do. If you focus on growing your skills, it will feel good and you will feel more accomplished when you have a strong skillset to use.
Some people say that you should focus on improving your flaws and bad qualities to be able to grow, and I believe that you can try to do that to an extent. But for people with low self-esteem, I think it is better to focus on your strengths first and build those even more than to try to learn skills that will never suit you as a person.
I will give you an example from my life. I hate public speaking, I really do, I feel like my heart is beating out of my body when I have to go on stage to talk to a large crowd. I dread the idea of having to do this weeks in advance (or maybe even months) and it stresses me out. This is not healthy for me, and therefore, I try to eliminate public speaking from my life as much as I can.
Instead, I focus on things I am good at, like doing research, working on my computer, and learning new skills on the computer, etc. and if I can do this, I feel so much better about myself and when I complete a project, it is a boost for my self-esteem.
Nobody is good at everything. Pick the things you want to become an expert in and develop those, your low self-esteem will improve by doing this for sure.
3. Use your skills
So in the past few steps, you figured out what you are good at and how to grow your skills and strengths even more. This step is where you can see major progress in the improvement of your low self-esteem.
USE YOUR SKILLS!
I do not mean to sound aggressive with the caps lock, but this is crucial for improving your low self-esteem! When you can do the things you are great at daily, you will feel better about yourself en definitely more confident than before.
Confident people with high self-esteem do the things they are good at often, not sometimes, but frequently and you should too. They might also have a different mindset than you but that’s for another tip (point 5).
Look for a job that lets you use your talents every day, if you already have a job that doesn’t do this, ask your manager if it is possible to make some changes to do more of what you are good at. Would anyone say no to you being more productive and happier? If the job is totally out of your talent zone, maybe you should consider a career switch or another position in the company you work for.
If you don’t use your skills enough on your job, try fitting your skills into other areas of your life so you can feel accomplished and confident in those parts.
4. Surround yourself with positive people
The first three tips spoke about getting to know your talents, developing your strengths, and using them often. In an ideal world, you could focus only on those and forget about the things you’re not that good at, but in the real world, you will probably have to use less-developed skills as well. This is when the other tips will come in handy!
You can tolerate so much more when you are surrounded by positive and supportive people. When you have low self-esteem, it is so important to surround yourself with true friends and family members, and maybe even supportive colleagues who want to support you no matter what.
When you are learning new skills, studying a difficult course, doing internships, starting a new job for example, everything where you have to start at the bottom and feeling uncomfortable at first, that’s when you need good emotional support around you.
When you start something new and you have low self-esteem, it will be so much harder for you when you don’t have a support network in place. If you’ve always had people who have had your back, your self-esteem has more chance of growing and becoming solid.
Being surrounded by positive people is what everybody wants and needs, but there will most likely be negative people forcing their opinions on you when you didn’t ask for them. That’s why the next steps are crucial to improving low self-esteem as well.
5. Speak positively to yourself
Mindset is everything.
If you speak nicely to yourself your self-esteem will rise!
People with low self-esteem are probably their own worst critics. You can get mad at yourself for every little thing that you do wrong (according to your standards that is), but it doesn’t have to be like this. Speak to yourself as you would speak to your best friend when he or she makes a mistake. You would probably tell them that everything will be okay and that as long as they are doing their best, they shouldn’t blame themselves.
Negative opinions can come from the outside as well, your boss not being satisfied with your performance, disappointed parents, a sibling who is rude to you, etc. If you can’t avoid those critics altogether, try to let the negative comments glide off when they don’t have a good reason to tell you those things.
Look at those comments from a rational perspective and see if they are true. If they are true, you can maybe do something about them and change for the better and if they were just toxic comments that were not constructive or helpful at all, let them go as quickly as you can.
Practice speaking positively to yourself by saying positive affirmations every morning or every evening, if your brain keeps hearing them over and over, it can change the way your brain thinks! You could also keep a gratitude journal to spend even more time focusing on positive thinking.
The science behind it is that when you think certain things, your brain creates connections, and the more you repeat the same negative thoughts, the harder it will be to break those hard-wired connections and retrain your brain. However, it is possible if you bombard your brain with positive thoughts over and over and try to notice when you think negatively and stop yourself as soon as you notice it. This will help you shift your mindset in the long term.
6. Accept failure
People with low self-esteem often don’t allow themselves to make mistakes. They see it as a big failure whenever something minor goes wrong and get embarrassed pretty quickly.
If you are so scared of making mistakes, you probably won’t do much so you can not make mistakes… this is not a good way of living. You only grow by trying new things and it will help if you have high self-esteem to try more things because you feel confident that you either grow or learn from them.
When you have low self-esteem, you should try to think about failure like confident people do. Accept failure as part of life, and see it as a learning opportunity instead of a big mistake. To increase your self-esteem, it is very important to have a support network in place that speaks to you positively when you are struggling with that at first.
Most mistakes aren’t that bad and are fixable, if you can fix your mistakes, you shouldn’t even think twice about them and focus on finding a solution instead. If your mistake or failure leads to irreparable damage, learn to accept it and move on. If you can learn something from it, please do so, it will help you in the future but don’t keep dwelling on it, nobody gets better from doing this.
Please repeat these things: I am capable of so many things, Everyone makes mistakes and that’s okay, I am doing my best and that is good enough, It is better to fail than to never try.
7. Take care of yourself
If you take care of yourself, you tell your brain that you are worthwhile and this can only be good to raise your low self-esteem.
You will notice that your self-esteem will grow when you take good care of yourself. You can do this by feeding your body with nutritious food, drinking plenty of water, exercising regularly, taking time to rest when you need it, having enjoyable social connections, and finding moments to have fun and learn new things.
All of the things mentioned above are basic human needs, if you find yourself slacking in one or more areas, this could impact your self-esteem.
If you suffer from depression next to low self-esteem, you should check out my blog post about self-care when you are depressed.
8. Go to therapy
When you tried all of the things I mentioned previously and nothing seems to work for you, try seeing a therapist, please.
A therapist can do a wonderful job if there is a connection between you and the therapist. This is very important for the therapy to be effective as well as your comfort levels around them. A connection alone isn’t enough, they have to be good at what they do as well obviously.
Going to therapy can help you see things more clearly. A therapist can look at situations in your life from a non-biased point of view. They can provide you with facts, where feelings block your rational thinking.
They can help you conquer your low self-esteem by giving you exercises and tips on how to make a change in your mind for the long term. If you can’t seem to sort it out by yourself, please contact a (preferably licensed) therapist to help you and guide you along the way.
Everyone could benefit from going to therapy, I truly believe this and went there myself.
Conclusion
There is no quick way to change your low self-esteem to high self-esteem unfortunately, it takes time. But the time you invest in changing your self-esteem for the better is never lost.
Keep trying to change your mindset by actively doing exercises and focusing on growth instead of perfection. You can do this, you just need to believe in yourself!
Become your cheerleader, throwing positive vibes to yourself when needed. I hope that your low self-esteem will disappear after following these tips and if you have some to share with other readers, please share them in the comment section! 🙂
