Self-esteem is your confidence in your inner self that you show to the outside world. In short, self-esteem is the belief, faith, and confidence that you have in your approach to work. You are the best person to decide how emotionally balanced you are, how you fit into handling a given situation.
The word ‘esteem’ is of Latin origin and implies ‘to estimate.’ Therefore, self-esteem is all about how you estimate yourself and how you feel inside, not the fake you that you portray to the world.
If you have good levels of confidence in yourself, it means you feel positive about life. You are ready to face almost any kind of challenge coming your way.
On the other hand, if you have lower levels of self-confidence, it means that you take a considerable amount of time to get back to normal from a challenging setback or difficulty.
However, you can run through some of the tips stated hereunder to boost your self-esteem, irrespective of whichever boat you are sailing in, in terms of confidence levels in yourself.
1. Kill the inferiority complex in you.
Understand that not every person in this world is an expert at everything. Everybody, including you, has a bunch of areas in which you may just be a scapegoat. When in a situation where you are cornered to a grey area of knowledge as this, do not feel shy or hesitant.
Immediately arrest the inferiority feeling you have about yourself in this matter. To do this, you should gain confidence. To gain confidence, do all the necessary groundwork, study more about the subject matter, and then face the world.
2. Feel at ease.
Observe the ambiance and the ground around you. Get accustomed to your physical surroundings. Join a team of known persons with whom you maintain robust relationships. Set aside the negativity from your mind. Make yourself feel better. Gulp a glass of warm water.
Now jump into the center stage to showcase your performance. You will feel far better with increased levels of beliefs, driving home success.
3. Learn to say a polite ‘No.’
If you lack self-confidence and behave like an introvert, you will fail to convey the pressure you are carrying. You have to learn how to say a ‘no’ to the other person when the situation demands.
Do not accept every task that comes your way. You are overburdening yourself by doing so. You are increasing the amount of stress and strain upon yourself, so much so that you end up without even delivering timely or quality results. This, in turn, upsets you to a greater extent, even for the next set of activities that you have to carry on.
Better to say ‘no’ and express gratitude and apology and make things transparent to the other person.
4. Don’t wait for opportunities, create opportunities.
When you experience low self-esteem levels, the first thing you have to do is to open out yourself beyond your horizons. Grab challenging situations and try to work them out. Erase the shy factor from your mind. If you feel that you are actually not being called upon for a challenge because of your lower self-esteem, then don’t just wait for it to come your way.
Just create an opportunity and try something new and something difficult for you to achieve. You will be surprised to realize that all that pain area has been a history in your life in no time.
5. Stop comparing. Start felicitating.
Comparing with each other is a general human tendency. But, if you compare your results and your performance to those of others, it means you already half-killed your esteem. The comparison doesn’t give you comparative figures. Comparison only fuels up negative self-talk. This will, in turn, impact your mental health, your stress, and your confidence levels.
Rather, list out all the awards and appreciations you were felicitated with in the past. Recollect all moments that made you feel proud of yourself. Generate ideas out of those. Review your list every now and then when you are traveling in a painful situation. Pat yourself of your ability to rock things on the floor when that wasn’t something actually expected, but you still did it, and you did it too well.
Now, understand the ground reality and talk to yourself about how you were able to spin the wheel in difficult situations. Accordingly, make necessary changes to self and surroundings now. Change and self-motivate in such a way as to align yourself to your inner one, who actually has tons of self-confidence and self-esteem. You will continue to rock.
Maria Bonita
Enhance your skills
How to improve our self-esteem
Self-esteem is one of the most important characteristics that a person needs to have. Self-esteem is the pure form of self-confidence. So you cannot find the proper difference. You need to know that whenever you start to feel confident, your self-esteem will grow automatically.
In brief, we can consider that self-esteem is directly connected with self-value also. When you are confident and giving enough value to yourself, then your self-confidence will start to grow gradually.
7 strategies to boost self-esteem
Here is the answer. Yes, anyone can do that. Anyone can know as to how a person can regain his confidence. Here are some tips to regain your self-confidence and also the things by which you can improve your self-esteem.
Believe in yourself
Firstly you have to believe in yourself. I am not saying to hide your faults every day. But I am saying just give less focus on them. We all have some faults physically or mentally. As we know, no one is perfect in this world. But you have believed in your qualities. A short man cannot increase his height, but that man can gain knowledge much more than before.
So you have to focus on your powers and qualities. You should focus on improving them. In this, you can gain your lost self-esteem again.
You can never gain this by just believing. You have to do something in your life; you have to improve yourself. Yes, self-esteem indeed comes with the achievements and productivity of life.
See yourself in the mirror:
Stand in front of a mirror and ask, “Do you respect yourself?”
If you respect yourself, if you are confident, then you can see the mirror, and you will feel good. Just stand and try to talk with yourself. You are the best teacher of yourself. If you want to improve yourself, you have to face yourself.
To gain confidence again, you have to work on yourself.
Work on your communication skills:
If you want to be more confident, and want to feel good in your life, then you should try to be more communicative with others. Working on your communication skills is the key to building self-esteem every day. But just changing the thinking is never enough. You have to do and maintain many things to be confident and to gain your self-esteem back.
After being communicative, you have to work on your body language because body language will establish you in front of others, as a confident person. That establishment is crucial because it will provide you more self-value. You have to make your posture straight with your body. You have to move your hands decently while talking. It will make you more understandable to others.
Presence of mind:
The presence of mind is one of the essential criteria for self-esteem. The present and attentive mind of the human can ensure the correct and fast recovery of the words that other humans speak to you. It is quite important for the person to know and completely understand the need and thinking of others.
We always have to remember that we are a social creature and we have to improvise on our social skills to improve our self-confidence. It also helps in deriving our self-estimation.
The presence of the mind can allow us to understand ourselves also. It can be used to know and as well as understand the good and wrong sides of ourselves by which we can better understand our daily lives, which finally helps in self-improvisation and self-esteem as well.
The present-minded person is a good listener, and a good listener is an excellent speaker. Good speaking skills are critical criteria for self-estimation as you can provide others with your own needs and share your feelings very easily. So, we need to know how to make our brains attentive.
4 Ways to make our brains attentive:
> Listen to others very carefully; more importantly, listen to yourself carefully.
> Try to know the pros and cons of yourself.
> On yourself – By yourself – For yourself.
This means you have to put every word others speak on yourself – you have to do your job by yourself – you have to do it for yourself, we need to understand that this is for our good and self-improvement.
> We have to give time to what we speak to others because, as I already said that we are social creatures. So, we have to make sure that our words don’t hurt anyone who is listening to us.
Dressing sense:
Dressing sense is another crucial criterion for self-esteem. One can say the original beauty is inner beauty, and it is true indeed. But we have to know that our first impression is our last impression and what is a better way to impress than a good dress-up at first glance. So we need to know that we should dress not just in a well and suitable manner but properly as well.
So what are the hot points for the improved dress-up?
We have to know our body structure because it is the most important criterion. If we need to understand our particular dressing sense, we need to keep in mind that dress-ups vary upon our bodies. For example, if a person has a skinny body structure, you should wear neither too tight nor too baggy dresses.
We need to know our body posture to improve our dressing sense, as one posture in one person can suit one dress. But it does not always mean that the same dress will suit another person in the same manner as another body posture.
Colour and skin tone are also essential for understanding our dress-up sense as a particular dress always suits a specific skin tone. For example, usually, fair-skinned people always wear suits in dark-colored shirts or T-shirts. But a person with a dark complexion will suit more in a light dress.
We should know the difference between formal and casual wear. We would not want to go to an office presentation in a casual T-shirt. We allow making fun of ourselves by others, or at the same time, we have to wear casual or party wear at parties.
We have to know which kind of dress suits us the most and which clothing is most comfortable on our body because comfort is the best style in the whole world. If we are comfortable with what we wear, then there is an automatic self-esteem growth in our minds.
Last but not least, we need to remember who we are because we wear a dress, but a piece of cloth can define anyone and their lifestyle.
Self-hygiene:
Self-hygiene is one of the most important things, if not the most important, for self-estimation.
We all should be aware of our hygiene as it does not just improve self-confidence, but it can also help in maintaining proper body fitness. They say a nasty person is never a happy person, and we need to be clean every time and maintain hygiene for our good.
Being clean can make you feel confident, and this is one of the most significant points to gain a good reputation, and to be completely honest, who does not love a good reputation?
So for keeping good hygiene, we should notice the following points:
1) We need to clean our bodies daily and use proper and necessary things to clean up, such as soap, shampoo, etc.
2) We need to clean our face at least twice a day because the face is the first thing to come in notice at first glance, and to be brutally honest, the quality or beauty of a look does not even matter for self-estimation. But a clear face is quite important for our very subject matter.
3) We have to brush our teeth twice a day to maintain proper hygiene in the oral cavity as you would not want to talk to someone with a bad odor in the mouth.
So if we have to make a good impression on others, we need to check on the clarity status of the whole body of ours.
Self-Motivation:
To ensure the quality of self-estimation, we need to keep in mind that no one can motivate you better than yourself. So we need to understand how to motivate ourselves. Because there are a bunch of people who are always there on your side. They will demoralize you and break you in every step that you take. But you have to make yourself the top-self priority to keep going in life. This is the most valuable point for the improvisation of our self-esteem.
We need to keep in mind that we are our first and foremost priority, so we have to stay motivated all the time.
Given below are a few points which can help us with self-motivation.
I) We have to know our place in the world, and by knowing that if anyone tries to demotivate you, then you can easily deny the fact that you have to listen to them which can readily increase your self-esteem
II) We have to know that we are our best companion throughout our lives and no one can support us better than ourselves
III) If anyone tries to cut your points down, you can make a stand for your own by motivating yourself continuously
IV) But you definitely should keep in mind that this is not a one-time job. You need better self-esteem in you to help you keep motivating yourself daily and continuously.
2 main reasons behind low self-esteem
There are so many strategies, which can grow your self-esteem.
But before that, we should know about the reasons behind low self-esteem.
1) You decrease your self-esteem:
Yes, that is true; actually, we are responsible for our low self-esteem. In our stressful and struggling life, we face so many things which are enough to make our self-esteem lower; sometimes they even break it.
Any accident, any fault which was done by ourselves, or any bad memory of failure, can decrease your self-esteem. But you have to realize that maybe that was an accident which was certain or perhaps that was your fault. But in both cases, actually, you can do nothing. You can improve yourself to take precautions against the next one, and that is the key to the different thinking processes.
It is all about our thinking. If you start to feel guilty and begin to blame yourself, then you are responsible because instead of doing that, you should think about how you can make yourself better. This not only improves you but also it will grow your self-esteem.
2) Think different to gain self-confidence:
Now, it is not so easy to change your thinking process and make yourself better to grow your self-esteem. There are so many strategies to improve it. There are more than 30 tips to improve yourself as well as your self-esteem. But before working on that, you have to find out first why do you have low self-esteem?
So, what are the characteristics of a person with low self-esteem?
There are so many things that can prove that a person is suffering from low self-esteem. Like when a person is always blaming himself in every matter of life. He is being depressed for every little thing of life; then, the man has low self-esteem. When someone’s self-confidence is being damaged, every single day, then that individual has low self-esteem. If you are depressed about every single problem in your life, then you are in big danger.
So, if you face these things, then you are facing this problem of low self-esteem. Then at first, you should ask yourself, “How can I build myself again?”
Conclusion:
We can say that self-esteem is not a thing that you can build suddenly. Self-esteem needs a very long time to improvise, and it is not as easy as it may seem. But if you follow the above rules and regulations, I can assure you that you will slowly and steadily increase your self-esteem. But you need to know that I’m just an advisor who is giving you the advice to improve your self-esteem, but you are your owner, and you have to improvise yourself in your ways.