Posts Tagged: self confidence

Improve Your Self Confidence: Key Ingredients to Healthy Self Esteem

Do you ever wish you could be more confident, more self assured? Do you with that you didn’t doubt yourself, your abilities, your value, or your place in the world? We all know that healthy self-esteem is important to healthy relationships and happiness, but if you struggle with self-confidence, you may not know how to improve it.

This, and the next two posts will address:

  1. How Healthy Self Esteem is encouraged in children, and the key ingredeints we all need for healthy psychological development.
  2. How to Improve an injuered sense of self through routine psychological exercises.
  3. How to Recover your self-confidence after a toxic relationship.

Let’s start by asking yourself these questions:

Do you…

  • Feel less talented, attractive, intelligent, successful than most people?
  • Compare yourself to others often, wondering how you rank?
  • Beat yourself up after simple mistakes, oversites, or embarrassing moments?
  • Talk to yourself like you’re the worst person on earth?
  • Struggle with toxic shame and guilt?
  • Feel responsible for other people’s happiness?
  • Rehearse to ad nauseam self-criticisms?

If you answered yes to these questions, you may have a wounded sense of self, or in other words, a poor self-esteem. 

Understanding Self Esteem

Self Esteem is developed in children over a period of time by way of three factors: 1) Positive regard and affirmation from family of origin, 2) Attainment of Skills and Competencies, and 3) Acceptance by Peers. That’s the short answer, but there is actually a lot that goes in to building one’s self-esteem. Here’s the deets.

1)     Positive Regard and Family Affirmation: Esteem deposits drop into a child’s core self through consistent affirmation, guidance, love and discipline from parents. Parents and care-givers don’t have to be perfect, they just need to be good enough- guiding, loving, listening, correcting and encouraging their children. However, if the environment is over bearing, coddling, overly critical, emotionally unsafe or unpredictable, the child could develop some serious ego wounds. If, for example, a mother rarely lets her son do hard things for himself, he will likely grow up believing he is incapable of overcoming challenges. On the other hand, if a father is overly critical of a child who works hard, the child will grow to feel like her best is never good enough. One caveat here: there are some adults who grew up in a loving and supportive home and who developed a positive self-esteem, however during adulthood, encountered something so negative, traumatic or abusive, that over time, their self esteem was injured. People in toxic work, marriage or cult environments who start out confident and self-assured, can be so afflicted by persistent, deliberate psychological abuse that the self-esteem injury can take years to heal. 

2)     Attainment of Skills and Competencies: Just as important to building self-esteem, is consistent mastery of developmental tasks. As the child grows in emotional self-regulation, physical maturation, and attainment of new skills, he/she will be confident to try new things. As the child experiments with music, sports, building things, drama, art, animals, etc, the child will discover natural talents and gain in proficiencies. When a child feels he is good at something, his self-esteem rises. If a child is not encouraged or allowed to become competent in his interests, or is steered toward something he is not good at or interested in, his self-esteem will struggle.

3)     Acceptance by Peers: By ages 10, 11, and 12 the voice of the peer group begins to speak louder than the parents. Children who are generally accepted by their peers will glean self-esteem through the adolescent years from the feedback they are getting from their peers. If they feel excluded, like they don’t fit in, or in the worst case, bullied, then their self esteem can take a big hit. Many teens who didn’t succeed socially, will do so in young adulthood, thereby repairing the damage to their self-esteem. If not, a child could grow up feeling socially inadequate, anxious in social situations, and generally undesirable.

If you are well past your 20s you may think the Self Esteem Ship has sailed, and that if you didn’t develop a healthy self-esteem when you were younger, it’s too late for you. The great news, is that it’s not too late. You can work on your self-esteem at any stage in life and achieve the confidence you need to set boundaries, to resolve conflict, to achieve deeper intimacy, and pursue big goals.

With the right people, practice and positivity, you can change that pesky sense of self-doubt once and for all. Now that we’ve talked about what goes into the development of healthy self- confidence, we are ready to learn the basics of IMPROVING self-confidence. Next week, I will be offering 6 Simple Ways to Improve Self Confidence. Talk to you next week!

 

 

 

How to Build Self Esteem Part I: Get Out of Your Own Way

How to Build Self-Esteem Part I: Get Out of Your Own Way  

Face it, if you don’t have it, you can’t give it away. The way you feel and think about yourself, profoundly affects your relationships.  I talk to married men who are broken hearted because their wives lack self confidence. I talk to parents who are completely distressed because their daughter’s esteem is bordering on self-hatred. I talk to women who have been crushed by cruel words and actions from people they trusted.  Our self esteem determines how we relate to God, and how we relate to other people. How can we get over low self esteem and become happy, healthy, fulfilled people God has made us to be? 

            Psychologists know that children’s self esteem is not only built through parental praise and unconditional love, but it is primarily built through accomplishing developmental tasks through life. Each task that is accomplished from walking to potty training to learning to read, builds a child’s sense of self-control, competencies and confidence. The same is true for us adults.

If you missed some of those ingredients growing up and feel at a disadvantage when it comes to self-esteem and self-confidence, you are not alone. Many adults struggle with this- whether it is taking a new position at work, or putting yourself out there in the dating scene, or just trying Zumba for the first time. Low self-esteem affects our happiness, our relationships and our ability to accomplish great things.

I will show you in this three part series how to build your self esteem. I’m going to be talking about 1) how to get out of your own way, 2) How to dream big by identifying what you want and why you want it, and 3) How to make and accomplish SMART Goals. When you pair up love and discipline, anything is impossible. Love- means that when you love God, yourself and others enough to break through your fears and do all you were made to do. Discipline means doing the hard work of planning, investing, plodding, and enduring until the goal is finished. When you have the combination of these two things working in tandem together, you will become confident and competent. Your self esteem will blossom.

Goal accomplishment has a lot more to do with self-esteem than you may initially think. Setting a goal, making the sacrifices and investments that are required to meet that goal, and then accomplishing the thing we desired adds to my sense of ability, competency, ego strength and maturity. However, if we rarely set new goals, or give a half hearted effort in achieving those we set, our self esteem lacks proper exercise for increased strength. When we half heartedly set goals, we never see our goals realized and that lack of success reinforces our low self esteem.

What keeps us from making and keeping personal goals? Well, fear of course! Fear of accountability. Fear of failure. Fear of taking risks and being wrong. If I write it down and say it out loud, I am making myself vulnerable to failure. But if I don’t write it down and say it out loud, then I will never achieve it. I stand in the way of myself ever accomplishing my dream.

Wishful thinking is also something that keeps us from realizing our goals. Wishful thinking is believing that somehow my goal will happen to me- that I’ll get discovered, or someone will hear of me and my idea and they will want to be my angel investor- is a sign of immaturity. Proverbs says, “How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest— and poverty will come on you like a thief.”

Common reasons why people lack the motivation to see a goal all the way through.

  • Black and White Thinking- also known as  Right/Wrong thinking. Too afraid to do something wrong because of all the bad consequences that can befall you. 

  • Perfectionism = Procrastination: Because you believe that your product must be perfect before launching, you become overwhelmed and procrastinate, thereby putting out a product doomed for failure.

  • Fear of Failure- this is rooted in our own shame. Shame is the feeling that something is innately wrong with you. It’s power is so great that when tapped into or triggered, we either implode or explode. If we experience something as a failure, or we look like a failure to others, then our shame is triggered and we internalize that failure as being a part of us- as actually having the power to define us.
  • Self Fulfilling Prophecy- or negative predictions. The thing that you are most afraid of happening actually happens. The fear you have actually produces the energy to make that thing come about. We can be so self protective, trying to prevent or avoid our greatest fear, that we actually create space for the thing to actually happen.

 

My “Relationship Savvy” blog gives you tips, advice, and flippin’ fantastic feel-goods to help with your most difficult relationship challenges.

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