Self esteem is how you see your value. Your background, including the people and situations you’ve encountered, play a part in whether you have low or high self esteem. If it’s low, then you usually lack confidence making decisions.
If you’re someone who struggles with low self esteem, it’s important that you make changes to cultivate a higher level of self esteem because the way you value yourself impacts your life in many ways.
Your self esteem affects choices you make that direct your life. For example, people with a higher self esteem are more likely to set higher goals and go after what they want.
Higher self esteem helps you make choices that lead to greater achievements – both personally and professionally.
1 – Catch Yourself in the Act of Using Negative Self Talk
Everyone engages in self talk and everyone has experienced the negative side of it. Self talk is your mind at work speaking to you. It’s your thoughts or inner voice saying things about yourself, about a situation or about your future.
It’s important to defeat negative self talk because what’s going on inside your head relates the kind of emotions that you’ll experience about yourself. When you think negatively about yourself, then you feel negatively about yourself.
Your mood is determined by what you speak to yourself in your inner thoughts. For example, negative self talk can be something like, “I’m not smart enough to run my own business” or, “I’m too fat or stupid, or ugly or worthless” and the list goes on.
It’s the unkind things we think and say. The reason negative self talk is so bad for you is because it does have the power to determine how you live your life. If you’re constantly thinking that you’ll never be able to do something, then you won’t.
Engaging in negative self talk forms the world you live in. It can create failures, missed opportunities and generally make you feel pretty low. Your mood follows the negative self talk.
For example, if you’re planning to find a better job and negative self talk kicks in with, “you’re too old, too inexperienced, too stupid for that position” then you’ll talk yourself into staying exactly where you are.
Negative self talk never stays in your head. It always translates into action or inaction. You can stop negative self talk by paying attention to what you’re telling yourself. Sometimes, we have thoughts, but it’s like background noise and we kind of tune it out.
Instead of tuning out, take some time to pick up what you’re telling yourself. Once you become aware that you’re allowing negative self talk to have that freedom, lock it down. Fight back. Challenge those negative thoughts.
For example, if you think you won’t get that new job because of your age, ask yourself where the proof is in that. More often than not, the negative self talk we allow ourselves to have, has no truth behind it.
We tend to believe what we think rather than what actually is. When you have a negative self talk thought, stop it immediately and replace it with one that builds your self esteem rather than tears it down.
2 – Try Using Affirmations to Retrain Your Subconscious Mind
If you’re someone who has practiced negative self talk, you can change that track into a positive one by using affirmations. Affirmations are words, phrases or statements that are positive in nature and used to help you reach what you want to have in life.
Examples of positive affirmations can be something such as, “I am intelligent,” “I am beautiful,” “I am healthy,” “I am wealthy.” It’s okay if you don’t consciously believe these things at first – the retraining takes place in your subconscious mind.
You can create your own affirmation and center it around the goals that you want to achieve in life – whether that’s health, money, weight loss, relationships or something that’s important to you.
When you create an affirmation or use one that’s already available, make sure you repeat the words to yourself as if it’s already a done deal. In other words, you wouldn’t say, “I hope to become wealthy” – and the reason for that is because you want the power of the positive thought to sink into your subconscious mind.
As the affirmations do sink into your subconscious mind, you act on them. The way that you think, the decisions that you make and the actions you take will all focus on achieving the goal or dream that you want to have.
Remember: if you can think it, you can achieve it. What you’re doing with affirmations is retraining your subconscious mind to work with you instead of preventing you from reaching your goals.
Your outlook will change and so will how you feel about what it is that you want. Affirmations open your mind to the positive possibilities and allows you to see opportunities for reaching success rather than expecting failure.
Now it’s important that you say your affirmations as many times as necessary to retrain your mind. You have to block the negative by not letting your mind go there. As soon as that negative self talk rears up, you stop it by replacing it with an affirmation.
When you choose an affirmation, shorter ones are easier at sinking into your subconscious. As you speak them, mean what you say. Using your affirmations will retrain your subconscious mind and boost your self esteem.
Use them at certain times of the day, such as right when you wake up and before bed, anytime you steal a moment during the day for quiet reflection or meditation, and the second a negative thought pops up in your head.
3 – Master Many Small Things to Help You See Yourself as a Success
There’s a myth about success that causes many people to fail. They think in terms of an all or another achievement without realizing that it was mastering the small things that led to success.
When you don’t reach what you consider success, it can make you feel bad about yourself and if you struggle with self esteem, you’ll find yourself lacking the confidence to make the right moves.
So you stay stuck in an unfortunate cycle of never quite reaching your goals. The key to defining yourself as a success is found in looking at all that you’ve already accomplished and focusing on the positives.
With that mindset, you then set about to master smaller things, which are actually stepping stones toward achieving bigger goals. What you want to do is look for smaller action steps that feed into your overall life goals.
The reason that you want to do this is because when you look at the big picture, that can have a tendency to feel overwhelming. When you feel overwhelmed, then it’s easier to get discouraged and give room to that negative self talk that picks at your self esteem.
Set achievable goals. Then break those goals down into the separate actions steps that you have to take to feel successful. For example, if you want to launch an online business, you won’t suddenly know everything you need to know.
You won’t automatically be good at everything if you’ve never started an online business. What you can do is start by mastering how to set up a domain and get your site created.
Then you move on to the next step of creating content that builds your audience. You focus on one small action step at a time. With each achievement, you’ll view yourself as a success and that helps your subconscious mind to motivate you to keep striving.
You can become an expert and be the best at whatever you set your mind to by mastering everything that lets you feel successful. If you want to lose a significant amount of weight, then it’s a mistake to focus on the amount you have to lose or even the final number you want to reach.
When we focus on the end result, it’s easy to slip into the negative mindset of looking how long it’ll take to get there. Instead, you master the smaller steps that lead to weight loss.
First, you would focus on making sure you’re eating healthy foods that contribute to slimming down. Second, you would add exercise to help you get toned and burn fat. Third, you would create a supportive environment to help you reach your goal.
If your goal is to have a successful relationship, then you would focus on the action steps you would need to take to reach that goal. You would make sure that you mingled with like minded people.
You would create social outlets and put yourself out there. If you are in a relationship that doesn’t help you be the best version of you, then you would either take actions steps to make changes or cut that relationship out of your life.
When you take smaller action steps working toward your success, it causes you to feel empowered and that confidence is a self sustaining fuel. You’ll be able to celebrate many things, rather than feel disappointed about one major thing.
4 – Don’t Look to Others to Make You Feel Good About Yourself
Feeling good about yourself can lead you to make decisions in life that lead you to success. However, how you end up feeling good about yourself matters. If it comes from within, that’s a good thing.
But if you’re looking to others to make you feel good about yourself, then that’s not a good thing. When you’re looking at others to help you determine how you see yourself, then what you’re doing is allowing them to influence you.
When you look to others that way and they influence you, you’re giving them the power to affect your self esteem. You’re giving them a blank check to withdraw from your confidence.
You might not even realize you’ve been looking to others in order to feel good about yourself. But what happens is when you’re looking for validation and a sense of self worth and others don’t give it to you, you feel terrible.
You feel terrible about your goals, about your dreams, and about who you are. Others can’t make you happy. They can’t make you feel fulfilled and they can’t make you feel or be successful.
In fact, looking to others can actually derail where you want to be in life. If you’re always looking at others to determine how you feel about yourself, what you’re doing is inhibiting your growth.
You’re waiting for others to tell you that you’re ready – waiting on others to tell you that you’re smart enough, talented enough and have your act together. This holds many people back from reaching for a dream.
It prevents them from launching a business or from changing a college major or from leaving one career path to choose another. When you allow others to determine how you feel about yourself, that influence steals your confidence in a way that prevents who you really are from fully emerging.
It short changes your potential. Looking to others can cause you to change your thoughts and decisions and can impact and control your life. You don’t want to hand over that kind of power to anyone.
5 – Read Dozens of Books About Increasing Your Confidence
You’ve probably witnessed how some people seem to have it all and they don’t appear to struggle with doubts about themselves. It seems like everything they attempt is a success and you’re sure they were born under a lucky star.
Luck has nothing to do with it, but confidence does. Confident people are more successful in all areas of their lives. If you’re someone who doesn’t have a lot of confidence in yourself, you can change that.
There are countless self help books available that can show you how to increase your confidence. Stockpile your reading library with these books and use them to propel you forward in life.
Reading and learning how to increase your confidence can boost your growth. You’ll be able to discover what’s holding you back and evaluate why so that you can eliminate whatever’s hindering you.
When most people discover they have a lack of confidence, they’re not sure what caused it – so the root cause never gets eradicated. By learning what’s stealing your confidence, you learn how to fix it.
Increasing your confidence can change the direction of your life. It can show you how you can better plan and be able to achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself. There are books that can walk you step by step through a confidence plan.
When you learn how to increase your confidence, it makes you feel stronger and more powerful when you set out to accomplish something. Your mindset changes from, “I can’t do this” to, “There’s no reason I can’t do this.”
When you read books about increasing your confidence, you discover how you can stop the self doubt that imprisons you and keeps you stuck in a rut. The power of confidence can help you become an influencer for good in your own life.
The more you read about confidence, the more you’ll learn how you can have the life you envision. You’ll feel better about yourself and be able to silence the naysayers – including the naysayer that you are to yourself.
Books on increasing your confidence can help you take steps that will turn into successful changes because you’ll learn how to stop self defeating behaviors that erode your confidence.
You’ll learn how to focus on your strengths and become more effective in getting the life that you want and deserve.
6 – Create a Positive Journal Where You Focus on What’s Right with You
When you get stuck in negative self talk, it can derail your confidence and do a number on your self esteem. You can become so focused on the negative that you completely fail to see the positives.
The only way to overcome that is to change the mindset and focus on what’s right with you. When you do that, you take control and harness the power to change your life. If you’re struggling with confidence in any are of your life, creating a positive journal can help.
Keeping one can teach you to pay attention to the good going on around you and within you. This kind of positive focus can change how you view your circumstances and your life as a whole.
Create a positive journal by using a notebook or a decorative journal where the only thing that you write about is positive and what’s right with you. Now, you have to remember that you’re not always going to feel positive about yourself when you start to journal.
But your feelings aren’t an indication of the truth of what actually is. Just because you feel bad about yourself doesn’t make it the truth. You may have conditioned yourself for years with negative self talk that has led to negative feelings about who you are.
Write something positive in your journal even if what you’re thinking is negative. You have to deliberately choose to only see the good. You must choose to be kind about yourself. Be your biggest advocate.
Pick a time every day where you have to write down something positive about yourself. This can be something you noticed about your actions, your behavior, your attitude or whatever.
You can write down something you were able to get done that meant a lot to you. Write about big things, little things – whatever you want as long as the focus is positive concerning yourself.
By focusing on what’s right about you, you’re building yourself up instead of tearing yourself down. You’re changing your story to one that has a better outcome. You might find that it’s hard at first to stick with writing in a way that’s positive – especially if, when you sit down to write, the negative thoughts immediately start running through your mind.
By focusing on what’s right with you, you’re changing a thought pattern that affects not only how you feel about yourself, but how you act based on those feelings. Here’s the key to why it’s so important to keep a positive journal: you will become the you that you allow yourself to think about.
The more positives you focus on, the more positive you’ll think and become. You’ll feel stronger and more confident and you’ll act that way in everything you do. If you’re used to thinking more negative about yourself than focusing on what’s right, you might struggle at first, but don’t give up.
Write down each success you encounter for that day, regardless of whether or not you feel like it’s a big success. When you read over these, you’ll discover that success inspires success just as being positivity does.
The journal will help you feel uplifted, appreciative, good about yourself and with a mindset that looks forward to what you can accomplish simply because you are who you are. You’ll come to believe in yourself.
7 – Envision Your Future the Way You Want It to Be
When you visualize what it is you want your future to be, you can make it a reality. People who use visualization to achieve what they want do it because the practice helps them stay motivated toward future goals.
By envisioning your future on a regular basis, it helps keep you on track so that you’re constantly making choices, decisions and taking action steps. When you visualize what you want your future to be, visualize it as a whole.
For example, if you want to get a particular job, visualize yourself in an office at the company. Picture the furniture in your office and the emotions you’ll have when you’re working the job you want.
Visualizing something not only keeps you motivated toward accomplishing that goal, but it also keeps the feelings associated with that goal revved up. Create mental images filled with future you and the life that you have at that time.
For some people, that is the new job, for others it’s a home or a relationship. Make sure you use visualization every single day. Get alone and spend a few minutes imagining you’ve reached every dream you’ve had concerning your future.
The reason visualization works is because seeing is believing. Your subconscious mind accepts visualization as something that can happen. Your brain then sets about seeing every step you need to take in order to make the visualization turn into reality.
Some people write down what they want their future to look like as part of their visualization plan. By writing down what you visualize, you’re making it into a concrete statement.
When you write it down, write down your visualization as if it’s taking place at the moment. You wouldn’t put down, “I want to have a salary earning $8,000 a month” but instead, you’d write, “I am making a salary of $8,000 a month.”
You can also use visualization boards to envision the future that you want. Some people call these dream boards or motivation boards, but the concept is the same regardless of however they’re labeled.
For this, you can use poster board or you can use a corkboard. You’ll want to get the poster board or corkboard in a large size because as you grow, what you’ll visualize for your future will expand.
A visualization board is simply a visual reminder of what it is you’re visualizing in your mind’s eye for your life. If you’re someone whose goal it is to drive an expensive car, then you would find an image of that car and you would tack it up on your visualization board.
You would do the same thing for each material possession that you wanted to have – or the experience you want to have, if it’s something like a wedding or even swimming with dolphins.
You can divide the visualization board into sections for health, wealth, relationships and career. In each of these categories, you would place the images that related to them. But you’ll want to be sure that you put only positive things on your board.
If it’s your dream of being on the New York Times best-seller list as an author, then you would print out a copy of the current list and insert the title of your novel and your name, and place it on your board.
You can print off images from online or you can cut images from magazines that reflect what you want to have in life. Having the visualization board is a tool and you should spend a few minutes each day looking at your board and picturing yourself achieving each of your dreams.
8 – Weed Out the Negativity from Your Life
Negativity comes in many forms. You can have negativity in your thoughts, in your relationships, and even in your actions. Negativity in your thoughts are pretty easy to identify.
These are the things that you think that are without anything good to focus on. Most negative thoughts are caused by an established pattern of allowing yourself to think that way.
These negative thoughts can stunt your growth as a person, can prevent you from finding success in reaching your dreams and can make you pretty miserable. Examples of negativity in your thought life is when you think, “I’m so stupid” because you can’t figure out how to do something.
Many people tell themselves that exact phrase without realizing how it erodes their confidence. It makes them unsure of themselves and their ability to accomplish even small tasks well.
Negativity is like an acid that slowly destroys what could have been. It erases the powerful, positive future you can have and replaces it with one that’s less than. One that you’ve conditioned yourself into believing is all you’re capable of having.
You have to weed out negativity from the way that you think. It’s like pulling weeds in a garden. You have to get to the root of the problem. For example, if you tell yourself that you’re stupid, ask yourself why you’re thinking that way.
Is it because it’s something you’ve heard before from someone else? Is because you’re just frustrated that things aren’t working well at the moment. If that’s the case, don’t accept someone else’s unfair and derogatory words as truth.
Immediately tell yourself, “That person is wrong. I’m intelligent and capable” or some other positive affirming statement. Negative thinking steals your energy and leaves you feeling exhausted and down.
We often assume the best of others, but we rarely give ourselves that same mercy. Don’t allow yourself to be your own worst enemy. Replace every negative thought as soon as you think it with one that’s positive in a way that contradicts the negative.
Relationships can heap negativity on you if you have people in your life that suck the positivity from you. When you’re around someone who doesn’t have a positive thing to say, it drains you and affects the way that you think.
Negativity always begets negativity. If you’re dealing with people in your life who are constantly negative, you may want to make some changes to limit the time you spend with them or move on from that person.
You can tell if you need to let go of a relationship by asking yourself how you feel after having spent time talking to or around that other person. If your response isn’t a positive one, then you have your answer.
Negative thoughts and negative relationships manifest themselves by causing you to act in ways that are negative. For example, if you allow yourself to think negative thoughts about yourself without stopping those thoughts, you’ll act on the feelings they produce within you.
If you belittle your weight or your appearance, you might find yourself turning to food for comfort or not bothering to spend the time or money on yourself like you deserve. When you weed out negativity, you see more good in the world.
It allows you to see what’s positive in your life instead of what’s wrong. You also accomplish more because you stop the self defeating thoughts that are based in negativity and your confidence blossoms.
9 – Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
The comparison game is one in which no one ever really wins. When you compare yourself to someone else, you either feel superior or inferior – both of which aren’t desired traits for someone who wants to cultivate confidence.
Superiority is a fake confidence based on believing that you’re better than someone else because of what you see. Inferiority is the same thing. It gives you a lack of confidence based on what you see and falsely believe to be a truth.
When you compare yourself to someone else, you’re only getting a brief glimpse of that person as a whole. On the outside, someone can look as if they have their life together. They can appear to have it all – health, wealth, success and loving relationships.
But you don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. You only see a chapter and not the whole story. Comparing yourself to others tears down your confidence and shreds your self esteem.
When we compare ourselves to someone else, we’re usually picking out what we think is bad about our lives and trying to line it up with what we see as great in someone else’s life.
Lives can’t ever be truly measured fairly because we are not all at the same place in life. You may have had more trials to get where you are that the other person didn’t have. So in reality, you would have accomplished more given what you’d been through.
But when you compare your life to someone who didn’t have the same struggles, it looks like they’re doing great and you’re not. Always focus on your successes and what you’ve achieved rather than what you wish you had compared to someone else’s life.
Comparing yourself to others wrecks your focus and drains your motivation. It can make you feel miserable. Not only can it make you feel miserable, but you can begin to resent what others have or what they’ve accomplished.
When you do that, you open the door to allow negative thoughts to take hold instead of the positive. What comparison does then is cause you to create excuses in your mind as to why you can’t reach a certain dream.
Because you’re not like so-and-so. You didn’t have their money or their opportunities and the cycle will go on and on. When you hop on the comparison train, you’re paying attention to others and not yourself.
You’re failing to see the value in your own life and in what you’ve done. You’re devaluing yourself which in turn lowers your self esteem. Remember that you’ll never be like anyone else.
But that person will never get to be the unique person that you are, either. Appreciate your individuality and success. Be grateful for you and recognize that comparisons only hold you back.
When it comes to confidence, there is no magic button or pill. There’s no specific course that can force you to see things in a different light. It all depends on your own willingness to make a permanent change – to see yourself and other things differently.
It’s not always easy. Sometimes you’ll fight the process. You’ll be going along wonderfully and suddenly slip back into old, bad habits degrading yourself and letting self doubt creep in.
The key is to commit to awareness. Being aware of what you’re thinking, doing and saying helps you combat the forces (internal or external) that try to break you down and impede your success.
Once you master awareness, you’ll never be a victim again of anything that attacks your confidence – because it will be fortified against intrusive behavior that works against you.
