For many of us, coming to terms with our self-esteem is often a determining factor in how we go about our daily lives.
Whether it’s your self-confidence, your image, financial status, or social media following, the way you look at yourself is the most important perception there is. Below are five of our favourite tips for boosting self-confidence and promoting mindfulness.
If you think you’re struggling with this aspect and you feel you’re low on self-esteem, head to BetterHelp to learn how to embrace your flaws and failures and be on a path to a better you.
1. Embrace Your Emotions
Instead of trying to push out negative or scary feelings, embracing and accepting them as a part of who you are is the first step in rebuilding your self-esteem after a bad event.
First, you must identify your emotions. Learning to identify them will then help understand why you reacted the way you did and will eventually help change your overall emotional response to the same subject.
While doing this exercise individually can be a great eye-opener, having someone you trust right there with you will provide the much-needed emotional support and push, if required, to commit to embracing and accepting how a situation makes you feel.
The next step to this is checking and understanding your emotional filter. For many people, a negative outlook is always the first scenario to come to mind.
The problem with this is that it results in a distorted perception of reality; things may seem exaggerated to you because you’re looking for that response or not thinking straight.
Having control of your emotional filter will let you have a realistic perception of reality and will help you acknowledge and portray your emotions effectively.
2. Identify Troubling Situations
Perhaps one of the easiest but most dreaded steps in acknowledging failure is identifying what caused this situation to occur in the first place.
It could be a simple situation or place, such as work, school, or other circumstances in life. But, it could also be more serious with underlying emotions unsolved.
All these emotions and events result in a drastic drop or lack of self-esteem and self-worth. People tend to avoid thinking about and/or narrating situations that make them uncomfortable, resulting in underlying issues unable to come out into the open.
Identifying situations that tend to be problematic for you in terms of self-esteem can help you better prepare for them in the future on your journey toward consistent confidence.
3. Practice Healthy Coping Skills
There are many instances in life where things don’t go as planned — you lose a football match, or maybe you don’t get in the internship you want — and these situations sometimes cause our self-esteem to drop drastically.
The instinctive human response is to get back to “old habits,” even if they’re unhealthy l – i.e. binge eating, smoking, drinking, etc. These coping mechanisms only provide short-term relief.
Learning, adapting, and practising healthy coping mechanisms is the best way to get back your self-esteem up permanently and make you feel like the best version of yourself.
Some examples of healthy coping mechanisms are practising writing in a journal, going for a run, calling an old friend, and trying yoga or other forms of meditation.
Cooking has proved to be one of the healthiest coping mechanisms there is. It activates all five senses and is a calming, relaxing, and informative activity to perform. It does a great job of taking your mind off things temporarily by helping you focus on the task at hand.
4. Acknowledge Irrational Beliefs About Failure
Negative self-talk and reacting irrationally toward a particular situation are not uncommon, especially when you don’t get the results that you wanted.
There are a plethora of irrational beliefs about failure, mainly because the concept of “failure” is one created by society and it asks people to fit into that box of societal expectations and therefore, not “fail.”
The truth is, not everyone can fit into that box, no matter how much they try. Even better, some don’t even want to. The concept of failure is and must be tailored to one’s personality, goals, and specific needs.
What one person would consider a failure certainly does not mean the next person would too. Failure at that point in time may seem like the biggest thing, but it certainly isn’t in the long run.
One must always be in a position to adapt; to their environment, people or expectations. The meaning of failure can and does change through different stages of life.
Acknowledging, analyzing, and then re-interpreting your beliefs of failure is an important and excellent step in rebuilding your self-esteem.
5. Adjust And Challenge Your Thoughts And Beliefs
Although easier said than done, challenging and questioning your own thoughts and beliefs will result in a permanent change in your self-esteem.
Many times, one is conditioned to believe certain things and think in certain ways, which makes it difficult to challenge these thoughts as they are a big part of who we are. But one must always adapt to new situations, especially after something unexpected occurs.
Low self-esteem is oftentimes due to underlying issues. Addressing these concerns and trying to look at the situation from a different perspective is one way to try to boost self-esteem.
Conclusion
The path to improving self-esteem, whether after an unexpected situation or otherwise is a long one that requires tremendous patience, effort, and practice.
Self-esteem is directly linked with how one views themself; if one suffers, the other does too. Poor self-esteem has a number of serious side effects, like dropping out of school, avoiding public places, or displaying antisocial behaviour.
People managing poor self-esteem should be handled with love, care, and lots of support. Although a long journey, the trip toward good self-esteem is definitely one of self-love and discovery.
Marie Miguel Biography
Marie Miguel has been a writing and research expert for nearly a decade, covering a variety of health-related topics. Currently, she is contributing to the expansion and growth of a free online mental health resource with BetterHelp.com. With an interest and dedication to addressing stigmas associated with mental health, she continues to specifically target subjects related to anxiety and depression.
