How To Building Positive Self-esteem || Through Healthy Habits And Relationships In 2024
In today's post, we will learn about self-esteem, how you get it, how it ebbs and flows throughout your life, and what you can do to make it better. Self-esteem is how you value your self-worth.
It falls on a spectrum from low to healthy to overinflated. With low self-esteem, you can feel worthless,
inadequate, and nondeserving of happiness. With a healthy level of self-esteem, you can feel confident and feel like you deserve the things that come to you. With an overinflated level of self-esteem, you can feel entitled to happiness, even at the expense of others, and you can be overly self-promotional and very defensive when you don't get the things that you feel you deserve. "Positive experiences create healthy self-esteem and negative experiences create low self-esteem." It's still unclear exactly how you develop self-esteem, and what is self-esteem but we do know it's influenced by a combination of factors like your temperament, which is your hard wiring, your family environment, relationships, and life experiences.
It falls on a spectrum from low to healthy to overinflated. With low self-esteem, you can feel worthless,
inadequate, and nondeserving of happiness. With a healthy level of self-esteem, you can feel confident and feel like you deserve the things that come to you. With an overinflated level of self-esteem, you can feel entitled to happiness, even at the expense of others, and you can be overly self-promotional and very defensive when you don't get the things that you feel you deserve. "Positive experiences create healthy self-esteem and negative experiences create low self-esteem." It's still unclear exactly how you develop self-esteem, and what is self-esteem but we do know it's influenced by a combination of factors like your temperament, which is your hard wiring, your family environment, relationships, and life experiences.
You can think of self-esteem as a trait that you possess. That's part of your makeup and it's influenced by your external environment and can change over time. The normal pattern of change Here's the normal pattern of change in self-esteem across your lifespan. As a child, you start out with a very high level of self-esteem, essentially because you don't know any better and everything's positive and fun. However, as a child matures, self-esteem declines, as you're better able to evaluate yourself against your environment and internalize feedback, these experiences shape your self-appraisal. And at this stage, your self-esteem is relatively unstable. Meaning, it's easily shaped by positive and negative experiences. Negative experiences can be from your parents, teachers, or other students. Traumatic experiences at this age have a much more significant and long-lasting effect on your self-esteem than similar events happening at a later age.
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In adolescence, your self-esteem continues to decline and researchers believe that this is related to issues with body image and changes that come with puberty. Around this time, you're transitioning from the nurturing elementary school environment to a more challenging middle and high school experience. Although the level of your self-esteem drops in adolescence, it becomes more stable, meaning that it's less changeable during this period. Another way of putting it is that your view of yourself is very fluid during childhood, but becomes more solidified in adolescence. So if you develop an abnormally low self-esteem beyond the usual dip that you have at this age, it's harder for you to recover from that to increase your self-esteem in the adolescence stage. It's possible, but it takes more work.
Self-esteem in adulthood increases gradually over time peaking in the late 60s. This is thought to be because of changes, like establishing a career, developing mastery over something, having clarity of purpose, and creating a legacy through your family. And these are just some examples of achievements you experienced throughout your adulthood, that promote feelings of self-worth. The stability of your self-esteem rises through young adulthood and then starts to decline as you reach midlife and older age. So this just means that how you feel about yourself is pretty stable and consistent in early adulthood. But once you reach midlife, the midlife crisis, your self-esteem is more influenced by changes in your life circumstances.
One of the things about understanding this normal trajectory of self-esteem going up and down is that it shows us that adolescence is a key time to jump in and rally around youths and do things to bolster their self-esteem. Similarly, if you have an elderly relative who recently retired and seems to have lost their way, know that it's a good time to offer extra support to help them feel good about themselves. If you struggle with low self-esteem, here are two things you can do to increase your self-esteem or help someone increase it.
Here's another example, being a good swimmer is not a strength, but the physical agility and discipline, it takes to be good at swimming are strengths. Another way to identify your strengths is to look at a list of strengths and check them off. Once you have a list of your strengths, the next thing you want to do is develop a plan to use at least one of your strengths every day. So for example, let's say your strength is flexibility. You think of yourself as someone who can adapt to change very well. A simple plan could be, that could use your strength, could be to leave your Saturday schedule open and allow other people to decide how you will spend your day, or let's say your strength is patience. Your plan could be to listen to your loved ones and tell a story for the fifth time without interrupting them. And you'll even ask follow-up questions to show your interest, even though, you know already know the answers to the questions, and you're not going to let them know. Recognize others' strengths that you've already heard. Another way to recognize your strengths is to recognize the strengths in others. You may think that focusing on other people's strengths may make you feel bad about what you don't have, but actually, focusing on other people's strengths keeps you in the mindset of thinking in terms of strengths, instead of being focused on weaknesses. Focusing on other people's weaknesses does not improve your self-esteem because critical thinking is critical thinking, whether you're being judgmental of others or yourself. So if you're stuck in a mindset of being critical, you will ultimately be more critical of yourself than you are of other people. But if you set your sights on recognizing the strengths in other people, it helps you see your strengths. "So here's an example". You notice that May is very good at multitasking. She always seems to be able to finish her work and have extra time left over. Learn to accept compliments You say, "I wish I were better at multitasking seeing Mary do it so well, just makes me feel bad about myself." And that can make you feel bad if you only focus on Mary. But if you pull back and get a broader view, you'll notice that James is not good at multitasking but he's very good at making people feel welcome. And Deborah has a good eye for detail. You start to see that no one is good at everything. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. And as such, we all have ways that we can use our strengths to contribute to the collective good. And the better you get at noticing strengths, the more sensitive you become to noticing your own strengths, and recognizing your strengths and positive qualities helps you bolster the value that you give yourself.
Selfesteem In Adolescence
Self-esteem In Adulthood
Selfesteem In The 70s
Once you get to the 70s and beyond, your self-esteem starts to decline again, and this is probably due to changing life roles like retirement, grandchildren, or the lack of children or grandchildren. This is a time when people will reflect on their lives and can have a lot of regrets about the choices that they made. Health problems and the loss of a spouse are all things that can negatively affect your self-esteem at this age, but not all people in their 70s and beyond have low self-esteem. Some older individuals can still maintain a high level or sense of self-worth and just accept their limitations at this stage of their life.Selfesteem In The 80s/90s
Building Positive Self-esteem Through Healthy Habits And Relationships In 2024
Step one: Recognize and utilize your strengths. People who recognize their strengths and use them tend to feel better about themselves. If your inner dialogue is saying things like you're unlovable, you're inconsistent, and or you don't measure up, then you're going to have a hard time recognizing your strengths. In fact, often that kind of negative thinking takes over your thoughts and can convince you that you have no strengths or that the strengths Identify your strengths that you have are not very meaningful. It's important that you not only recognize your strengths, but you put them into action. To recognize your strengths, you can ask yourself questions like,
- What are you good at?
- What do you enjoy doing?
- What have you done that's been the most successful for you?
Here's another example, being a good swimmer is not a strength, but the physical agility and discipline, it takes to be good at swimming are strengths. Another way to identify your strengths is to look at a list of strengths and check them off. Once you have a list of your strengths, the next thing you want to do is develop a plan to use at least one of your strengths every day. So for example, let's say your strength is flexibility. You think of yourself as someone who can adapt to change very well. A simple plan could be, that could use your strength, could be to leave your Saturday schedule open and allow other people to decide how you will spend your day, or let's say your strength is patience. Your plan could be to listen to your loved ones and tell a story for the fifth time without interrupting them. And you'll even ask follow-up questions to show your interest, even though, you know already know the answers to the questions, and you're not going to let them know. Recognize others' strengths that you've already heard. Another way to recognize your strengths is to recognize the strengths in others. You may think that focusing on other people's strengths may make you feel bad about what you don't have, but actually, focusing on other people's strengths keeps you in the mindset of thinking in terms of strengths, instead of being focused on weaknesses. Focusing on other people's weaknesses does not improve your self-esteem because critical thinking is critical thinking, whether you're being judgmental of others or yourself. So if you're stuck in a mindset of being critical, you will ultimately be more critical of yourself than you are of other people. But if you set your sights on recognizing the strengths in other people, it helps you see your strengths. "So here's an example". You notice that May is very good at multitasking. She always seems to be able to finish her work and have extra time left over. Learn to accept compliments You say, "I wish I were better at multitasking seeing Mary do it so well, just makes me feel bad about myself." And that can make you feel bad if you only focus on Mary. But if you pull back and get a broader view, you'll notice that James is not good at multitasking but he's very good at making people feel welcome. And Deborah has a good eye for detail. You start to see that no one is good at everything. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. And as such, we all have ways that we can use our strengths to contribute to the collective good. And the better you get at noticing strengths, the more sensitive you become to noticing your own strengths, and recognizing your strengths and positive qualities helps you bolster the value that you give yourself.
Step two: Learn to accept compliments. People with low self-esteem have trouble accepting compliments. They usually make you feel uncomfortable. You tend to downplay them or say things to shut down the compliments. So what you need to do is learn to hear the compliments and appreciate them. An easy way to do this is to prepare statements ahead of time that you would say in response to the compliments, it could be as simple as, "Thank you, that's kind of you, I appreciate you saying that." Tolerating compliments does two things. It helps you get used to hearing positive feedback, and it also helps the person giving you the compliment to feel good about extending kindness to you. It's a gift for someone to compliment you. And it takes a certain level of security on the complementary part to feel good enough about themselves to give you the spotlight. Therefore, you want to allow this other person to show you this kind of generosity.
Conclusion
Your self-assessment is at the heart of your self-esteem. And even if someone took it away from you because of the way they treated you, you can take it back. It's not easy, it's a series of small steps that add up over time, like compounding interest. I hope this helps you with self-esteem issues.
