Do you struggle with self-esteem? Want to take steps to change how you view yourself? Unleash your potential and elevate your self-esteem with this guide!
by Atomic Mommy Editors
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Improving your confidence is something you can’t do overnight. For those with low self-esteem, the years of punishment pushed onto the psyche from not being good enough or constantly pointing out flaws and failures can be a lot to overcome. And though changing your mindset and how you view yourself can be a long hard journey, it is a must-take step if you plan to positively impact how you view yourself.
Low self-esteem in the U.S. is a massive problem. Around 85% of Americans are thought to suffer from this issue, and it can have an enormous effect on a person’s quality of life and ability to live their lives how they wish.
Low self-esteem can often be mistaken for other mental health concerns or wrongly attached to a person who is an introvert, for example, but these are two very different traits. Someone with low self-esteem won’t always be the person who wants to spend all their time in their own company and vice versa. Not every introvert is an introvert due to low self-esteem.
So, how can this extremely prevalent issue be tackled? Moreover, how can improvement be made on your self-esteem to help you become more confident and self-assured? In today’s guide, we’re going to share with you top tips to journey to seeing yourself more positively. Let’s get started!
Why Changing Mindset is Important?
Shifting your mindset is a critical step in boosting self-esteem and confidence. Cultivating a mindset focused on positivity will lay the foundation for all personal growth and transformation. Our mindset, the set of beliefs and attitudes we hold about ourselves and the world around us, greatly influences how we perceive ourselves, our abilities, and our potential.
When we use the power of the mind to embrace the beauty of being ourselves, we are actively building and manifesting resilience and self-love. These are key factors that enhance self-esteem. As we continue to shift our mindset about the self, this new perspective will provide the room we need to see opportunities in failures, persist in the face of adversity, thereby fortifying our confidence.
With this said, it’s crucial to understand that changing one’s mindset to benefit self-esteem and confidence, requires taking necessary steps. After all, if you don’t have a guide to follow, you can get lost in the journey of self-growth, and though it’s perfectly normal to fall off the path during a time of growth, it’s still discouraging when it happens.
So, here are a few steps to help guide you on your self-esteem journey.
Steps to Grow Self-Esteem
1. Recognize Positives
The main issue with low self-esteem is that people see themselves in a negative light. Often feeling they aren’t good enough, or this part of their body doesn’t look right, or you did this wrong, and so on. The key to stopping this is to avoid thinking of the negatives about yourself and what you can do or do wrong and look at the positives instead.
Do you like the way your hair looks that day? Tell yourself this. Are you looking forward to something? Share this with yourself. Any tiny positive feeling you have about yourself, it can literally be anything, big or small, you must say it to yourself, silently and out loud. This will help replace those negative thoughts with positive ones to get you on the right track. You can even write this down on post-its and place them around the house in all the places you often look at yourself in the mirror. This nifty hack helps you visualize the positivity in your life.
2. Unfollow Negativity
This applies both online and in person. If someone is always putting you down or making you feel bad about yourself, remove them from your life. Chances are they don’t have your best interests at heart, and you will feel better about it. And while sometimes you can’t fully do this with family members who are negative towards you, you can certainly limit and reduce the amount of time you spend with those people.
You should also do this with any accounts online, too. Are you following accounts that reinforce your negative connotations about your body or personality? Unfollow them. Do certain accounts make you indirectly feel inferior or not good enough or push a toxic positivity message? Click that button and unfollow. You need accounts that support your new journey and will be positive and light, not make you feel bad about yourself.
3. Make Changes
Make a list of all the things you feel are affecting your self-confidence, and plan how you will tackle them. This will list will be different for everyone. Doesn’t matter how long your list is or how short, there is no judgement. The list is simply for you to have a physical count of what is disturbing your self-esteem.
Things on the list can include how you weigh slightly heavier than you want to be, so joining a gym and eating better is going to help you make this change. It could be a physical part of your body that is affecting your self-image and therefore impacting your self-esteem. Talking to a medical professional about any physical changes you need to make can help you put a plan in place for a procedure if this is the right option; if so, you will need to follow Dr. Swartout’s recovery instructions so you get the best results following a rhinoplasty procedure, for example. Or perhaps you list something as simple as doing wanting to experience more joy on a daily basis, and you tackle this by one thing every day that sparks that joy, regardless of how busy you are.
Whatever your changes are, get them written down and make a plan for how you are going to implement them in your life. A written plan will help you manifest the version of yourself you want to be.
4. Don’t Give Up
Growing your self-esteem is not going to be quick or easy. And it likely won’t be a linear process, either. What it will be is a journey, so you should see it as such. In other words, focus less on the final destination and more on how you’re getting there. Doing this will help you see the small growths and the big ones, as recognizing both are essential in celebrating your growth.
Furthermore, this method will also allow you to to be more forgiving of yourself if you happen to fall off the path. Which, we should mention, may happen, and that’s okay. As long as you forgive yourself for falling off the path, not judge yourself too harshly for doing so, and be patient in restarting, then you’ll continue to grow and head for that new you that you long for.
In Conclusion
Improving your self-esteem and confidence will have a massive impact on your life and what you are able to achieve. Remember to take it slow, put small steps in place, and identify the areas you struggle with the most to start you on your journey. More importantly, be patient and forgiving with yourself, understand that long-lasting growth takes time and the journey is just as important as the destination.