How Can I Boost My Self-Esteem?

Self-esteem is about the opinion we have of ourselves, a subjective appreciation of our worth. Therefore, we understand self-esteem as the concept we have of our own value, based on our feelings, thoughts, sensations, and experiences concerning ourselves. The four pillars and components that make up self-esteem are self-concept, self-image, self-reinforcement and self-efficacy. Let’s see how we can improve our self-esteem.

 

How Does Self-Esteem Influence Everyday Life?

Our self-esteem influences us in practically everything. It influences us in: how we feel, how we think, how we learn and believe, how we value ourselves, how we relate to others, how we behave … If as a person you do not feel valuable enough, you can experience difficulties in your life, in your work, in your relationship with your partner, in the way you raise your children, in social interaction and even body image problems.

 

Why Is It Essential To Have Adequate Self-Esteem?

How many times before leaving home have you looked in the mirror and said to yourself: “If I were a little thinner”, “If I had longer legs” “If my hair was smoother” … and thus feeling disgusted with yourself, you have gone out into the streets surrounded by a halo of insecurities and negativity. If you feel identified with what we have said above, you will wonder what you can do to improve it, but to answer this question, you first have to know what self-esteem is. This word means to esteem you, love you and love yourself, that is, to love you, take you into account, and have self-love.

 

If you have low self-esteem, you do not respect yourself, you hardly esteem yourself or love yourself, and you can consider yourself inferior to others, constantly comparing yourself. This low self-esteem makes you feel incompetent to perform any task presented to you with a particular challenge and unable to achieve any goal or objective that you set for yourself. On the contrary, if you present adequate self-esteem, you will not be afraid of new challenges; you will try to solve any problem or challenge that may arise by increasing your confidence in yourself and feeling capable of doing and achieving almost anything you set your mind to

 

How Do You Feel If You Have Good Self-Esteem?

A person with adequate self-esteem has the following characteristics:

• Enjoy a positive and realistic view of yourself and your capabilities.
• They require the approval of others.
• They don’t assume they’re better or worse than anyone else.
• Express their feelings and emotions freely
• Face new challenges with optimism, trying to overcome fear and accepting responsibilities
• Relate easily and is satisfied with social interactions, values ​​friendship, and talks to people.
• They know how to handle their frustrations, learn from failures, are creative and innovative, develop projects, and persevere in their goals.

 

How Does A Person With Low Self-Esteem Feel?

Low self-esteem is related to a distortion of thought. People with low self-esteem have a very distorted view of who they really are. At the same time, these people maintain extraordinarily perfectionistic demands on what they should be or achieve. The person with low self-esteem maintains a dialogue with himself that includes thoughts such as:

• Overgeneralization: From an isolated event, a universal, general rule is created for any situation and moment: It has failed once (in something concrete): Think: I will always fail!
• Global designation: They use pejorative terms to describe oneself, instead of telling the error specifying the time in which it happened: Think and verbalize: How clumsy I am! I am useless!
• Polarized thinking: All or nothing thinking – they take things to extremes. There are absolute categories – it is black or white. It is not accepted, nor is it known to give relative evaluations: They think: Everything is going to go wrong! You are with me or against me – I do it right or wrong.
• Self-accusation: One is found guilty of everything. They think: I am to blame! I should have realized it before!
• Personalization: It assumes that everything has to do with them and compares negatively with everyone else. They think: They have a terrible face, what have I done to them?
• Thought reading: You assume that others are not interested, that they do not like you, you think they think badly of them… without having tangible evidence of it. They are assumptions that are based on strange and unverifiable things: They think: Surely, they think I’m stupid …
• Control fallacies: You feel that you have total responsibility for everything and everyone, or you think that you have no control over anything, that you are a helpless victim: They believe: “They should do things as I say” or on the contrary “,I should do what they tell me”.
• Emotional reasoning: If I feel it like that, it’s true. We feel alone, without friends, and we believe that this feeling reflects reality without stopping to contrast it with other moments and experiences. They think: “If I am really useless”; because it “feels” that it is really like that.

 

In its most scientific expression, it is a fact that the work of self-esteem is one of the keys to emotional, economic and affective stability. It is one of the most ignored and most needed topics.