Increasing Your Self-Esteem
In This Chapter
- Learning to accept yourself as you are
- Why self-acceptance can be difficult
- How to creating a positive self-image
- How to overcome guilt and shame
Do you like yourself? Are you happy with who you are? Your self-esteem reflects what you think about yourself. If you are like many people, you may not like yourself all the time. But it is possible to choose to like yourself. In this chapter, you will learn what self-esteem is, identify some of the obstacles to creating a healthy self-image, and discover ways to improve your self-esteem and learn self-acceptance.
What Do We Mean by Self-Esteem?
Self-esteem refers to your opinion of your overall value and self-worth. If you use negative words, such as failure, loser, idiot, stupid, or lazy when you think about yourself, you probably have low self-esteem. You may use external factors to measure your self-worth, such as your looks, your job, or your relationships, but self-worth is not just about what you offer to others; you have your own value as a person.
DEFINITION
Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. It is your opinion of your value and self-worth.
If you think of low self-esteem as something to improve, you might believe that you need to develop high self-esteem. After all, high is the opposite of low. But both low and high self-esteem are the product of self-judgment. The opposite of low self-esteem is self-acceptance—to accept who you are and understand that while you are fallible, you are a complex human being with both strengths and weaknesses.
Self-Acceptance
Self-acceptance is unconditional. It is recognizing your weaknesses, your faults, and your limitations, and accepting that these do not define who you are or your self-worth. Self-acceptance means liking yourself, your whole self. It is accepting faults as areas to improve rather than judging them as failures.
Your level of self-acceptance often determines how happy you are in life. In his book, Happiness Now, author Robert Holden explains that you allow yourself to experience happiness only to the degree that you believe you are worthy of it. If you don’t accept yourself, you don’t believe you deserve to be happy; when you do accept yourself, you open yourself up to enjoying life.
Your level of self-acceptance might vary in different areas of your life. For example, you may feel confident at work, having mastered the duties of your job. When you make a mistake or miss a detail, you quickly move into problem-solving mode because your overall belief is that you are capable and competent. At the same time, you might feel inadequate in your relationships. You could feel guilty for not spending enough time with your wife and children or for not being considerate enough. You might think you are not a good husband. Your confidence level is high when at work but drops significantly the moment you walk into your home.
CBTIDBIT
Self-acceptance allows you to take responsibility without becoming defensive. You see negative feedback as a critique, not a criticism, and you are open to growth and learning for a lifetime.
Negative views of yourself are limiting. If you believe “I am a failure. I will never be a good parent. I am not worthy of my children’s love,” you may give up trying. After all, no matter how hard you try, you believe you won’t be successful. These types of negative views take away your motivation to change and improve. With self-acceptance, you look at yourself more objectively and take responsibility for your limits. For example, you make a choice to miss your child’s dance recital in order to finish an important project at work. Your child is not happy. You might think, “I am doing the best I can. I thought I made a good choice based on my family’s financial needs. I realize that this recital was more important than I thought. I can apologize and learn to communicate better with my child to prevent an ongoing pattern.”
Obstacles to Self-Acceptance
There are two main components to developing self-acceptance:
- Recognizing your strengths and successes.
- Recognizing and being comfortable with your shortcomings and mistakes.
Recognizing your strengths may be easier, but even this can be difficult. The problematic thinking processes discussed in Chapter 2 interfere with learning to see your positive traits. For example, you focus only on the negative, ignoring or minimizing achievements and accomplishments. Other negative thinking patterns also become obstacles to self-acceptance.
Equating Acceptance with Giving Up
One of the myths about self-acceptance is that once you accept a fault, you must resign yourself to it. You think you must just give up and accept that it is part of you. But self-acceptance doesn’t mean giving up or giving in, it means accepting your limitations and mistakes and working to improve them. Suppose you freeze up when taking a test. You want to go back to school but are concerned that your test anxiety will cause you to fail. You can accept that you aren’t good at taking tests and allow it to limit you by not going back to school, or you can accept that you aren’t good at taking tests and find strategies to help you better cope with the anxiety.
Measuring Your Worth on External Factors
You might equate your worth with external factors, such as your job, achievements, financial holdings, social status, attractiveness, or love life. But these situations are often temporary. You might go through several jobs in your lifetime, some better than others, some lasting longer than others. You might spend some time being unemployed. Your financial worth might not be where you want it to be. You might go through several relationships or you might be in a long-term relationship that has its ups and downs. The problem with linking your self-esteem to these situations is that when the situation ends or changes, your self-esteem suffers.
Another common thinking process that contributes to low self-esteem is overgeneralizing. When you make one mistake, you believe you are a failure. You overgeneralize specific situations and rather than seeing them as temporary or one-time situations, you globalize them, making them about your entire life. For example, you make a mistake at work and miss an important deadline. Your boss is angry. You believe you are a failure, you can’t do the job, and you are pathetic and incompetent. You fail to recognize that this as one single incident and not representative of your job performance as a whole.
Maintaining an Outdated Self-Image
Life is ever-changing. What you feel, think, and do today is probably much different than what you felt, thought, and did five or ten years ago. Even so, your opinion of yourself is probably the same as it was in the past. You don’t take into consideration what you have learned and experienced through the years. If you were unpopular in high school, you still see yourself as unlikeable.
Basing Your Self-Worth on One Aspect
Human beings are complex. There are many facets to your personality. You have varied abilities and talents. You might show different sides of your personality and take a different role in different areas of your life. For example, at the office you could be a leader and with your friends you are more passive. You might be great at swimming but not so good at catching a ball. You might be good at cooking but not as competent at housework. You might enjoy some parts of your job but find other parts tedious and boring. Yet, you base your self-worth on limited aspects of yourself. For example, you may have beautiful eyes but hate your nose. You think you are ugly because you only see your nose.
Your Turn: Self-Assessment
For each of the following categories, write down a few short statements that describe you.
- Physical appearance
- Interpersonal skills (how you relate to others)
- Problem solving
- Creativity
- Sexuality
- Productivity at work or school
- Personal productivity
- How others see you
Once you have completed the list, go back and look at each word. Circle each one you see as a positive quality or a strength.
For each negative word or shortcoming, think about which problematic thinking process you are using. Look over the list in Chapter 2.
- Are you overgeneralizing?
- Ignoring the positive?
- Thinking in terms of black and white?
- Using mental filtering?
- Being specific without considering the whole situation?
Change the wording of your negative assumptions about yourself to a more positive thought process.
Rewrite your list to reflect the new language you have used. Read the list aloud at least once every day.
Steps to Improving Self-Esteem
It is impossible to rid yourself of shortcomings. The idea of self-acceptance is not about making yourself perfect. It is about accepting who you are. It is accepting that you are a unique individual. It is knowing that you have something to offer to others. Accepting shortcomings doesn’t make you less of a person or less valuable to yourself and others.
IMAGINE THAT
People who have accepted themselves focus on growth and improvement, while people with low self-esteem focus on not making mistakes.
Monitor and Adjust Your Self-Talk
The self-assessment you completed in the previous exercise identified your negative self-perceptions. Learning about your self-talk and the negative messages you send yourself is the first step to improving your self-esteem. You can now reword your messages so they are more positive and relevant to your life.
Suppose under work performance you wrote down the following:
- I am careless; I make a lot of mistakes.
- I am not talented; I don’t have the natural skills others do.
- I am lazy; I leave at work earlier than many of my co-workers.
As you completed the assessment, you realized that you used mental filtering, overgeneralizing, and black-and-white thinking, as well as personalizing and labeling statements. You focused only what you did wrong, compared yourself to others, and held yourself to an impossible standard without considering what else you have going on in your life.
Revised statements might look like this:
- I am usually conscientious about my work, but sometimes there is so much happening I feel overwhelmed.
- I just started to learn this new task. Just because I don’t know how to do it right now does not mean I cannot learn.
- I try hard. I get in an hour before others do and often work over the weekend.
As you go through your day, pay attention to how often you repeat one of your negative self-assessments. Immediately change your thought to your revised statement.
STOP AND THINK
When revising negative self-talk, be sure to use accurate and logical language. Your mind will fight your thoughts if you come up with statements that are illogical or positive hype. For example, if you are new at your job, don’t combat a negative thought with, “I am the smartest person at the office.” Instead, create a positive but accurate thought, such as, “I am competent and with training I will do this job well.”
When you set a goal or create expectations for a situation and you fall short or the reality of the situation is much different than what you expected, your self-esteem takes a hit. You feel you have failed. It could be that your expectations are unrealistic. Suppose you have just started a new job. You set an expectation that you will learn the job within one week. At the end of the week, you feel disappointed in yourself because you haven’t learned all the aspects of the job yet. You think, “I will never learn this job; I am stupid and unqualified.” Your expectations were unrealistic and set you up for feeling bad about yourself.
CBTIDBIT
Look at situations with self-efficacy. This is the belief that you can handle a situation. It doesn’t necessarily mean you know what you are going to do but that you have the resources and capabilities to figure things out.
Don’t Compare Yourself to Others
Your self-esteem suffers if you are constantly comparing yourself to others. You can always find someone who is better at something than you are, someone who has a nicer car, a bigger house. When you compare yourself to someone else, you unconsciously put yourself down; you state that what you have or can do is not good enough.
Focus instead on your own goals. Reward yourself each time you reach a goal. Be proud of your accomplishments. Think “in the grey” instead of putting yourself and others in categories of either successful or failure. Think of each person, including yourself, as an individual with positive and negatives. Remember, you don’t know someone else’s story or what is behind their success. You could believe someone is “talented at work” without realizing that their health or family life is suffering as a result. When you compare yourself to others, you assume you want to be like them without considering the consequences.
Adjust Your Self-Image to Fit the Present Moment
We often turn to an old, outdated image of ourselves. We focus on what we used to be and create our self-image based on that. Suppose you struggled during school and never thought of yourself as being one of the “smart kids.” Although you now have a successful career, you still think of yourself as less intelligent than others. Instead of carrying around your old belief, you need to make adjustments to fit today’s reality. Make a list of all the ways you have changed. If you did not have many friends in high school, start thinking about all of the people in your life who matter to you now. If your list does not have enough to change your view, add some activities you can do to increase the list and reach your goal.
Your beliefs about yourself might stop you from trying new things or participating in activities that would improve your self-esteem. Suppose you believe that you have no friends, and that you are too shy to take part in social gatherings.
You consider signing up with a local hiking group to meet new people, or at least be around other people, but then you think, “I’m no good at small talk; I’ll just act shy, be unlikeable, and won’t gain any friends.” This is the self-esteem loop that keeps you trapped. Instead, adjust your expectations. Limit your exposure by committing to a short hike rather than an entire weekend, and commit to doing an action at least two times.
Your goal might be:
I will go on two hiking events. I will go for the shortest hikes so I don’t feel trapped. I will say “hi” to people and ask them one question. I don’t expect that I will share personal information like a phone number by the end of the hike. This is just for me.
Your Turn: Create Mini Action Plans
Keep track of your thoughts about yourself and create small actions to help counter negative thoughts or images about yourself. Remember to be specific, flexible, and positive in your thoughts about yourself and the behavior actions you plan.
GIVE IT A TRY
Get out a piece of paper and set a timer for five minutes. Write down five positive things about you in the following categories:
- Strengths
- Achievements
- Activities you enjoy
- What you admire about yourself
- What makes you feel good about yourself
Don’t worry about grammar or spelling. Simply focus on the positives in your life.
Learning to change your thought process, while never easy, may seem impossible if you feel guilt and shame over a large error you have made. Suppose you…
- Stole money or items at your job.
- Had an affair.
- Lost your temper and physically hurt someone.
You might believe you are a horrible person and think that changing that belief is impossible and wrong. How can you have any self-esteem when you have treated people so terribly? Your guilt overrides any positive statements you try to make.
Self-acceptance means accepting yourself, flaws and all. It means you accept that you are fallible and imperfect. You make mistakes. It means you accept that these mistakes do not define who you are. At the same time, you must accept your mistake, take responsibility for it, and learn from it.
When you accept your mistake, you accept that this mistake does not make you worthless. It does not make you a terrible person. It makes you a person who has made a mistake. And everyone makes mistakes. Remember that you have many good qualities that define who you are.
Suppose you had an affair and you lied to your partner. When your partner found out about the affair, she was hurt. You feel guilty and believe only a bad person would do such a horrible thing. You can’t get past the guilt and shame you feel at causing your wife such pain. Even though it is hard, you must accept that your behavior was wrong. Your actions caused someone pain. However, you also have many good qualities. This mistake is not who you are.
CBTIDBIT
It isn’t possible to change the past, but it is possible to change how you perceive it and how you respond to it going forward. Look objectively at what happened to make you feel guilty, and reframe the memory to include what you learned and how you changed.
Think about what you can learn from this mistake. Why did it happen? What negative thoughts and feelings brought about this behavior? What can you do to make sure this type of mistake doesn’t happen again?
You must also take responsibility for your mistake. Acknowledge the pain the other person feels. Apologize and accept the consequences of your actions. Avoiding facing the mistake only increases your feelings of inadequacy and shame. If you have hurt someone, you need to apologize. If you have taken something, you need to make amends. However, this only works if you are sincere in asking forgiveness. Remember, you cannot control whether someone forgives you; you can only control whether you forgive yourself.
It is difficult to come to terms with a major mistake, especially when it hurts other people, but it is possible. Continue to focus on your self-talk and monitor it for negative thought patterns. Continue to work on adopting a more helpful way of thinking.
The Least You Need to Know
- Self-acceptance means liking yourself despite your faults and limitations.
- Your self-image may be outdated or based on previous situations.
- Unrealistic expectations can lead to low self-esteem.
- Making mistakes does not make you a bad person; it makes you a person who has made a mistake.